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Not possible to delete personal certificate

  • 2 majibu
  • 3 wana tatizo hili
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by Jesus M.

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I had a personal certificate installed in Firefox and it was working well. It expired, so I got a new one from the same provider. Both appear in Firefox under "Privacy & Security" -> Certificates -> View Certificates... The previous one is not valid any more, and every time I try to access some page with a certificate, it uses the old one. So I tried to delete the old one. Nothing has worked so far. Doing the straightforward way of selecting it in the Certificate Manager and deleting it makes the certificate disappear from the manager menu, but if I enter the certificate manager again, it is there again. I tried to delete both certificates, same issue, both reaper in the manager. I tried to delete them, close firefox, delete cert9.db, cert8.db and key4.db and nothing. Only thing left is delete my current firefox profile and start again... Any other idea or something that I might delete before to solve this?

I had a personal certificate installed in Firefox and it was working well. It expired, so I got a new one from the same provider. Both appear in Firefox under "Privacy & Security" -> Certificates -> View Certificates... The previous one is not valid any more, and every time I try to access some page with a certificate, it uses the old one. So I tried to delete the old one. Nothing has worked so far. Doing the straightforward way of selecting it in the Certificate Manager and deleting it makes the certificate disappear from the manager menu, but if I enter the certificate manager again, it is there again. I tried to delete both certificates, same issue, both reaper in the manager. I tried to delete them, close firefox, delete cert9.db, cert8.db and key4.db and nothing. Only thing left is delete my current firefox profile and start again... Any other idea or something that I might delete before to solve this?

Chosen solution

The certificates are under the "Your certificates" tab. Probably I was misunderstanding the meaning of this tab. I tried creating a new profile and they appeared also there, so I starting to thing that this wasn't related to Firefox and instead was coming from the OS. So looking at the windows certmgr, under Personal -> Certificates I found there the two certificates. Deleting it there and restarting firefox solved the issue.

So definitely its an issue of Firefox, but the name ("Your certificates") and having the option to delete them which doesn't seems feasible because they were installed at system level made it a little bit confusing to me. Perhaps it could be a little bit more clearer also from Firefox but any case it was my mistake to not be correctly aware of where they got installed.

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All Replies (3)

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Under what tab in the Certificate Manager do those certificates appear ? Normally if you remove cert9.db then you should lose installed certificates. Try to remove cert_override.txt in the profile folder as well.

You can use the button on the "Help -> More Troubleshooting Information" (about:support) page to go to the current Firefox profile folder or use the about:profiles page (Root directory).

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Suluhisho teule

The certificates are under the "Your certificates" tab. Probably I was misunderstanding the meaning of this tab. I tried creating a new profile and they appeared also there, so I starting to thing that this wasn't related to Firefox and instead was coming from the OS. So looking at the windows certmgr, under Personal -> Certificates I found there the two certificates. Deleting it there and restarting firefox solved the issue.

So definitely its an issue of Firefox, but the name ("Your certificates") and having the option to delete them which doesn't seems feasible because they were installed at system level made it a little bit confusing to me. Perhaps it could be a little bit more clearer also from Firefox but any case it was my mistake to not be correctly aware of where they got installed.

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The solution that really worked for me was to directly remove the certificate from Windows. The procedure is described in detail here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/792999/how-to-completely-delete-a-certificate-from-a-user

Basicallly is:

"Press Windows Key + R Key together, type certmgr.msc, and hit enter. You will get a new window with the list of Certificates installed on your computer. Locate the certificate you want to delete and then click on the Action button then, click on Delete."

Hope it helps. Cheers, J