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Active Directory Publisher - Windows

The script is designed to automate the publishing of a user’s S/MIME certificate to an on-premise Active Directory (AD). This is commonly required for enabling secure email (S/MIME) encryption scenarios in enterprise environments.

The script provides the following features:

  • Identifies and publishes the newly issued user’s certificate (from the personal certificate store) to the userCertificate attribute in Active Directory.

  • Automatically determines the current user's Distinguished Name (DN) and domain context for publishing.

Supported operating system and application

Operating system

Application

Windows (for specific version, refer to Prerequisites)

Active Directory (AD) on Windows Server 2022, 2025

Parameters

The script does not require any parameters.

Prerequisite checks

Before proceeding with the certificate publishing, the script performs several checks to ensure the environment is ready:

  • Confirms that the user’s Windows machine is domain-joined to an Active Directory domain.

  • The user account must have the necessary permissions to write to the userCertificate attribute in Active Directory. By default, the AD user object typically has this permission. However, if you encounter any issues while executing the script, contact your administrator to verify that the required permissions are set appropriately. For more information, refer to How to check permission for userCertificate.

  • Verifies a stable LDAP connection to Active Directory over port 389 (non-TLS).

How it works

The script executes the following steps:

  1. Ensures that all the prerequisite checks are met.

  2. Retrieves the certificate from the user's personal certificate store for publishing.

  3. Establishes an LDAP connection to the user's domain controller using the current user's domain.

  4. Retrieves the current user's Distinguished Name (DN) from the Windows registry using the user's SID.

  5. Publishes the certificate to the userCertificate attribute of the user's AD object using an LDAP modify operation.

How to verify a user’s userCertificate attribute in Active Directory

As an Administrator, you can check the userCertificate attribute of the user’s AD object by performing the following steps on the Domain Controller:

  1. Open Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) (dsa.msc).

  2. Enable Advanced Features (available from View > Advanced Features). This action reveals the Published Certificates tab.

  3. Navigate to the user object.

  4. Right-click the object and select Properties.

  5. Go to the Published Certificates tab. Select and click View Certificate… to display details of the certificate.

How to check permission for userCertificate

On your organization’s Domain Controller, sign in as a Domain Administrator and follow the steps below to verify whether the user has the appropriate permissions for the userCertificate attribute:

  1. Open Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) (dsa.msc).

  2. Enable Advanced Features (available from View > Advanced Features). This action reveals the Security tab.

  3. Go to the object (User, Group, OU, etc.).

  4. Right-click the object and select Properties.

  5. Go to the Security tab.

  6. Select Advanced to open the Advanced Security Settings window.

  7. Go to the Effective Access tab, and click Select a user.

  8. In the Enter the object name to select field, enter SELF and click OK.

  9. Select View effective access, and scroll down to Read userCertificate and Write userCertificate permissions. If both permissions display a green checkmark, the user can update their own userCertificate attribute.

By default, you must have the read/write permissions for this attribute. If the necessary permission is not available, contact your organization’s domain administrator who has applied the denial policy so that they can be reapplied based on your organization’s policy. Refer to Microsoft documentation on how to properly apply this permission based on groups, Organizational Unit (OU), etc.

Note

When applying these permissions, make sure the permission’s principal is set to SELF. Otherwise, users may unintentionally gain permission to modify the userCertificate attribute of other user accounts.

Troubleshooting

Refer to Common issues for more details to help you troubleshoot issues related to system post-processing scripts.

Refer to Active Directory Publisher - Windows for more details to help you troubleshoot issues related to Active Directory Publisher - Windows.

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