Exploiting AD CS with Certipy

Legal Notice: This skill is for authorized security testing and educational purposes only. Active Directory Certificate Services attacks can result in full domain compromise. Run these techniques only against systems you own or have explicit written authorization to test. Unauthorized use is illegal under computer fraud statutes.

Overview

Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) is Microsoft's public-key infrastructure role used to issue certificates for authentication, encryption, and signing inside a Windows domain. SpecterOps researchers Will Schroeder and Lee Christensen documented a family of privilege-escalation primitives in their 2021 whitepaper Certified Pre-Owned, naming them ESC1 through ESC8. The community has since extended the catalog through ESC16. Because a certificate that maps to a privileged principal can be used for PKINIT Kerberos authentication, an attacker who obtains such a certificate can authenticate as a Domain Admin or Domain Controller without ever knowing the password — and the certificate remains valid even after a password reset.

Certipy (package certipy-ad, maintained by Oliver Lyak / ly4k) is the de-facto offensive toolkit for AD CS. It is a pure-Python tool that enumerates certificate authorities and templates over LDAP/RPC, requests and forges certificates, performs PKINIT/Schannel authentication, runs Shadow Credentials attacks, and relays coerced NTLM authentication into AD CS HTTP and RPC enrollment endpoints. Certipy supports detection and exploitation across the full ESC1-ESC16 range, making it the primary tool for AD CS assessment. Source: ly4k/Certipy and SpecterOps "Certified Pre-Owned".

When to Use

• During internal penetration tests and red-team engagements where AD CS is in scope
• When a low-privileged domain foothold needs a path to Domain Admin / Domain Controller
• To validate that certificate template ACLs and CA configuration are hardened
• When testing detection coverage for certificate-based privilege escalation
• During purple-team exercises to generate ESC1/ESC8 telemetry for blue-team tuning

Prerequisites

• Authorized engagement scope that explicitly includes AD CS exploitation
• A foothold: valid domain credentials (password, NT hash, or Kerberos ticket) for any low-privileged user
• Network reachability to a Domain Controller (LDAP/389, LDAPS/636) and the CA host
• Python 3.10+ (Certipy 5.x requires Python 3.12+) and a Linux attack host
• Install Certipy:

  # Recommended isolated install
  pipx install certipy-ad
  # Or with pip
  pip install certipy-ad
  # Verify
  certipy --version
  

• For ESC8 relay you also need a coercion tool (Coercer/PetitPotam) and reachable victim machine accounts

Objectives

• Enumerate every CA, template, and enrollment endpoint in the forest
• Identify which ESC1-ESC16 misconfigurations are exploitable from the current principal
• Request a certificate impersonating a privileged target (ESC1 SAN abuse)
• Relay coerced authentication into AD CS web enrollment to obtain a DC certificate (ESC8)
• Authenticate with a forged/issued certificate to recover a TGT and NT hash
• Document each finding with evidence and remediation guidance

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

Workflow

Step 1: Enumerate AD CS with certipy find

Collect CA and template configuration and flag vulnerable templates. find runs LDAP and RPC queries and produces JSON, a BloodHound-compatible ZIP, and a human-readable text report.

# Full enumeration, only enabled templates, hide built-in admin ACEs
certipy find \
    -u 'attacker@corp.local' -p 'Passw0rd!' \
    -dc-ip 10.0.0.100 -text -enabled -hide-admins

# Output only templates Certipy considers vulnerable
certipy find \
    -u 'attacker@corp.local' -p 'Passw0rd!' \
    -dc-ip 10.0.0.100 -vulnerable -stdout

# Authenticate with an NT hash instead of a password
certipy find -u 'attacker@corp.local' -hashes ':fc525c9683e8fe067095ba2ddc971889' \
    -dc-ip 10.0.0.100 -vulnerable -stdout

…