who/why were certiticates installed on my pc

Question

I am looking at all the certificates installed on my computer. There must be at least 70 of them. Some of them are even in Spanish.

How can I:

Tell where they came from?
Are they legit?
Are they needed?
What are they used for?

I can see the details through the console, but it does not give me any of the above information.

Should I even be concerned about the who, what, and why of the certs on any of my PC's?

Microsoft Trusted Root Program List of Participants. What does your research show? There should be plenty of information on the net concerning the public key infrastructure. — Daniel B, Mar 01 '20 at 13:02
Please provide the certificate names/issuers, otherwise we can't actually tell anything about them without knowing what they even are... — u1686_grawity, Mar 01 '20 at 13:13

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 01 '20 at 13:24

It’s perfectly normal to have dozens of certificates installed on your PC. Every provider of SSL/TLS certificates has to be able to chain their certificates back to a pre-installed root certificate, and there are agreements in place between the certificate providers and the operating system and browser manufacturers. It’s also perfectly normal for some of them to be foreign-language, since they need worldwide coverage. Having said that, it’s always possible that you have a rogue certificate, but you would need to provide details of all the certificates installed to get any help with that.

who/why were certiticates installed on my pc

1 Answers1