title: Install Root Certificate (T1553.004)
id: df00tech-t1553-004
status: experimental
description: "Adversaries may install a root certificate on a compromised system to undermine TLS/SSL trust validation, enabling Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM) attacks against encrypted communications. By adding a malicious CA certificate to the system or user trust store, the adversary can intercept HTTPS traffic, sign malicious executables to bypass code signing checks, or spoof legitimate websites to harvest credentials without triggering browser security warnings. This technique has been observed in banking trojans (RTM, Hikit), macOS malware (Dok, Ay MaMi), and supply chain attacks (Superfish). On Windows, certutil.exe is the primary living-off-the-land tool for adding certificates to named stores (ROOT, CA, TrustedPublisher). On macOS, the security binary can add trusted root certificates to the System or login keychain. On Linux, certificates can be dropped into /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/ followed by update-ca-certificates."
references:
  - https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1553/004/
  - https://df00tech.com/detections/T1553.004
author: df00tech
date: 2026/04/13
tags:
  - attack.t1553.004
# NOTE: logsource is auto-derived and may need adjustment for your environment
logsource:
  category: process_creation
  product: windows
detection:
  # This detection logic could not be auto-translated; see the KQL/SPL query on df00tech.
  selection:
    EventID: '*'
  condition: selection
falsepositives:
  - "Enterprise software deployment (SCCM, Intune, Group Policy) pushing internal CA certificates to trusted stores — typically initiated by svchost.exe or a management agent with a known certificate path under Program Files"
  - Developers installing self-signed certificates for local HTTPS development environments (certutil -addstore ROOT localhost.cer from a known dev machine)
  - "SSL inspection proxies (Zscaler, Netskope, Blue Coat) requiring client-side root certificate installation as part of authorized security tooling rollout"
  - "Software installers (antivirus, VPN clients, enterprise applications) that embed certificate installation steps during setup — initiating process will be a signed installer from a known vendor path"
  - "Browser certificate management (Chrome, Edge, Firefox enterprise policies) making registry-level cert store changes as part of normal operation"
level: high