Learn to securely use Passwords with PowerShell

In this video, you will learn how to manage passwords for PowerShell. We cover the bad ways and the good ways. Plain text, get-credential, store in a secure file, and using Windows Credential Manager. Once you have learned the options, it is up to you to make the right choice.

Link to download the PowerShell from the video

Link to install WMF 5.1 and PSReadLine

Link to install the Office 365 PowerShell

Link to install the Patterns and Practice PowerShell

Link to blog post about storing Azure credentials

Link to PowerShell Credential Manager

Link to Todd Klindt's blog post

Link to intro to PowerShell Videos playlist

Edit notes: None. :)

[michaelzander]

I have been a Mainframe Software Developer for 52+ years. I am now trying to learn PowerShell. (Old dog, ... new tricks) Your PowerShell videos are excellent. Thank you for teaching an old dog new tricks! You make it so easy to learn new 'stuff'...

[NancyRileyNuniverse]

Great lessons, Shane Young! I love your training style and look forward to watching all of your videos!!! Thanks again.

[evenblindern]

Talking about delivering the right stuff on time. 3 x hurrah for Shane!

[vicrao]

Thank you for making this video. This video is an example of how a proper instructional video should look like. I'll check out your other videos when I get a chance.

[ImEddieful]

Hey Shane, thanks for your help. I really appreciate your explanations, and guidance!

[nahassalahudin]

Excellent video, thanks for doing this...

[dinroot]

Wonderful.. just what I looking for thanks a lot Mr Shane!!

[funhurtsmylungs]

Good video! We use the hash way but slightly differently. We use it for calling new PSSessions on older versions of SharePoint, like this:

$pw = Convert-SecureString -force -String "00110000cdsds"
$cred = New-Object -typename system.management.autoamtion.PSCredential("Domain\user", $pw)

Your way is MUCH easier! Totally going to be using a "safe"

[skynyrd]

Good Stuff! Thanks your video gave me some solutions for some of my scripts

[coolname-pfxh]

The second method is very useful. thank you.

[beergood]

Thank you for your videos you are one of a handful of accounts I subscribe to.

[HarwoodGuy]

You are a star, I’m totally new to PS 😀

[sugato]

I just loved the video Thank you very much Sir !! You are awesome !!

[stefanspinu]

amazing content! Please keep up the good work - subscribed + enabled the bell icon, of course

[ijqtlbx]

Hello Shane, this is great stuff i couldnt find anywhere. Thank you very much

[DannyNilsson]

i was wondering myself about this security thing and password storing, and was coming up with the same solutions, but i didn't know about the credentials manager part. but i see this also requires that you login as the user, and creates the creds. The thing is, i guess its not then possible to use MSA Manage Service accounts to run the task scheduler.

i also think for easier creating the encrypted xml, it should be possible to do a invoke-command as a different user, to not need logging out, where it gets easier to manage.

And for the secure folder. NTFS permission also needs to be added as well.

[zzfkbcu]

Just to clear things up. The password is not hashed inside "secretfile.txt" - if it was hashed there would be no way to reverse it (and the software needs a way to reverse it otherwise it couldn't use the password for authentication) - it's encrypted with "the account key" - that means it's very very hard to decrypt it within windows - because the key is inside a file that windows wouldn't let you access. _(With a live system it can be reversed of course)_

[DavidGonzalez-mqmp]

Great video. I am urgently looking for a solution to a problem and I'm wondering if you can tell me if Windows Credentials Manager can be adopted to it. I have an executable that requires the user name and password strings to be passed to it as command-line arguments. For example: MyExecutable.exe /user:{UserNameString or variable} /password:{PasswordString or variable}. How do I retreive the strings from Windows Credentials Manager and pass them as a string or a variable containing the string? Your assistance would be most appreciated.

[razadaza]

I had to run = in my shell first before I could actually connect to the NuGet repository, prior to that the connection was failing.

[GeeRoos]

Hi Shane, love the videos. Tough question: If I wanted to deploy a package to run a PowerShell script silently via SCCM, the script will run as LocalSystem. If I need to pass credentials to the script to access a file share, any good way of obfuscating the password?