- Get plain text from securestring powershell code#
- Get plain text from securestring powershell password#
- Get plain text from securestring powershell windows#
And today, I think I was crazy for not killing it off sooner. At first I rejected the notion, but over time I came to embrace it. This prompted another user to link me to this discussion. There was a post in the /r/PowerShell (sadly, I can’t find it in my history) where I was “correcting” someone for not using Write-Output. In fact, my journey towards murdering Write-Output began around that time. What is this craziness I’m speaking? Well, if I went back in time to 10 months ago and told myself not to use Write-Output, I would think my future self had gone mad. You should definitely not be using Write-Host outside of functions beginning with the Show- verb in console driven PowerShell apps, but I’m not here to kill off Write-Host. That’s right, Write-Output and not Write-Host. I think it is time we put down our old friend Write-Output for good. This post will likely be a stretch for those new to PowerShell and is not intended as an introductory how-to. In this post I will go in-depth with when and where objects give up their plain text secrets and how we can add some security around that process. I wanted to see what can be done about this and to get a deeper understanding of the problem myself. It becomes necessary to convert back and forth quite a bit. Also, sometimes we are accepting secrets from APIs, such as OAuth access tokens, and we don’t want these sitting around as plain text. This makes it necessary to convert the to plaintext and either submit it as plain text or encode it in some way.
Get plain text from securestring powershell windows#
Many of these APIs are not Windows native or local and therefore don’t accept objects. It is being used to glue together various APIs. “Mark, objects should never be converted to plain text the first place!” Let me remind you PowerShell is glue. When the lack of usage is pointed out that “inefficient complexity” argument invariably rears its head. The overwhelming majority of them are not using objects.
Get plain text from securestring powershell password#
I have reviewed no less than 40 PowerShell based password manager wrapper modules and scripts in the past 2 years. This is especially true with password manager wrappers.
Get plain text from securestring powershell code#
While the blame rests with the person who uses your insecure code in their sensitive environment, I don’t think we are totally without fault if we didn’t make an effort to be secure in the first place. The idea is that we never know where our code will end up and we do not want our code to be the weak link in the chain. I’m a huge proponent of layered security and believe that security should be baked into every level of the stack every with chance possible. This argument makes my eye twitch every time I see it. The argument against using objects that will be converted to and from plain text is that it adds a level of complexity to the code for no effective gain. Effectively, once you convert a to a normal string, the plain text secret can reside in memory until the program/script exits. If you know anything about how the CLR garbage collector works, you will know that the string may even hang around in memory long after the variable that housed it has been destroyed or overwritten in the code. The problem is that when you do convert a to a normal string, that string object now exists in memory as plain text. My stock answer has had some pushback in the past. This question gets asked often and my stock answer is to always use objects to house secrets in memory regardless of how frequently the secret is converted from or to a plain text string. The poster was making a wrapper for LastPass’s CLI and wanted to know if they should be using objects. A question about using plain text strings for passwords was recently asked on /r/PowerShell.
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