Security
Security features of PowerShell Universal.
Last updated
Security features of PowerShell Universal.
Last updated
Local accounts are created and stored in the PowerShell Universal database. By default, credentials are stored in the local database vault.
To create a local account, you can navigate to Security \ Identities and create a new identity. Ensure that the Local Account switch is enabled and set a password.
If you have a licensed instance of PowerShell Universal, you can use a different credential vault.
The forms authentication script is only called when users login through the login page. If you use any other authentication method, this script is not called. Role policy scripts are called for all authentication types.
By default, the forms authentication script is configured to accept the user Admin and any password. You can configure this authentication policy to interact with whatever system you like. The script will receive a PSCredential object that contains the user name and password entered by the user at the login page.
Authentication settings are also stored with authentication.ps1
To update forms authentication, you can click Settings Security and then click the Settings button for the forms authentication.
You can update the PowerShell script found in settings to configure how the user is authenticated. You'll need to return a New-PSUAuthenticationResult from the script to indicate whether the user was successfully authenticated.
You can check the password of the credential by using the GetNetworkCredential() method of PSCredential.
During forms authentication, you can set claims that will be available within role policies. This can provide a performance benefit when interacting with remote systems since you can perform a single claim lookup and then evaluate the claims locally rather than having to make additional calls to the remote system.
This example uses Active Directory to look up group membership and assign the as claims that will be available within the roles scripts.
Within your roles.ps1 file, you will be able to use these claims to validate group membership.
This example checks to see if the user is part of the SOC_Admins group.
These are the variables defined within the security scripts.
| Name | Description | Type |
|---|---|---|
$Cookies | Cookies provided in the client's HTTP request. | hashtable |
$Headers | Headers provided in the client's HTTP request. | hashtable |
$LocalIpAddress | The local IP address of the request. | string |
$LocalPort | The local port of the request. | string |
$RemoteIpAddress | The remote IP address of the request. | string |
$RemotePort | The remote port of the request. | string |
When calling API endpoints or the PowerShell Management API, you can use Basic authentication to pass in a user name and password. This will invoke the forms authentication and authorization scripts to valid the login. The username and password should be encoded as Base64 in the username:password format and sent in the Authorization header with a Basic prefix.
You can also use the built-in -Credential parameter on Invoke-RestMethod to avoid having to encode the basic credentials yourself. The $AdminCredential below needs to be a PSCredential.
You can use the live log view on the authentication page to view information about the script execution. The live log view will display PowerShell streams.
You can configure OpenID authentication and authorization by adjusting the settings within the OpenID section of the appsettings.json file. Authorization policies that you configure within Universal will be run on the user's identity after authentication is successful.
Windows Authentication provides single-sign on support for browsers and environments that support it. To enable Windows Authentication, set the WindowsAuthentication enabled setting to true in appsettings.json.
You can enable Windows authentication by adding a new authentication provider in Security \ Authentication. Select Windows and enable the authentication.
Once Windows set to authenticated, Windows authentication can now be used against Universal. You will have to log out in order to use Windows authentication.
To enable Windows Authentication in IIS, ensure that you enable Windows Authentication and disable anonymous authentication.
In the web.config file that is included with PowerShell Universal, ensure that you have set the forwardWindowsAuthToken to true.
Windows Authentication is supported outside of IIS but requires configuration of the account running the Universal service.
On Windows, you should install PowerShell Universal as a Windows Service. Once the service is installed, you will need to create a service account user and set the service to run with that user's account. The Windows authentication setting needs to be set to true.
The service account needs to have a Service Principal Name (spn) configured for the computer account. You can do this using the setspn command. The computer name needs to be the full qualified name of the machine running Universal.
For more information, you can follow the Microsoft documentation for configuring ASP.NET Core Windows Authentication: Configuring a Windows machine for Windows Authentication
Configuring a Linux or Mac OS machine for Windows Authentication
PowerShell Universal will cache group membership claims when using Windows Authentication. Claims are cached for the configured session timeout value (default is 25 minutes).
To clear the cache manually, navigate to Security \ Roles and click the Clear Cached Claims button.
Depending on your local environment, you may need to configure your browser to properly pass credentials to PowerShell Universal.
User authorization is accomplished with roles. Roles can either be assigned through claims mapping, a policy script or by assigning the role directly to the identity.
By default, users will receive all roles when logging in. Multiple role assignments are valid in PowerShell Universal. While you configure roles, you can choose to disable roles you are not yet or do not plan to use.
Disabling the Administrators role will prevent you from making changes to roles within the Admin Console.
You can map roles to a claim (such as a group membership) by using the -ClaimType and -ClaimValue parameters of New-PSURole. Settings are also available in the role properties dialog within Security \ Roles.
For example, with Windows authentication, if you wanted to map a group to a role, you could configure it such that the group SID maps to the administrator role.
Mapping roles to claims in this manner is faster than Policy scripts because it does not require PowerShell to be run when the user is logging in.
To help develop policy scripts or assign roles to claims, you can view claim information by clicking View Claim Information in Security \ Roles.
You can map an Azure Active Directory group to a role by looking up the group Object ID in Azure. For example, within the Ironman Software domain, we have a group called Dashboard Administrators. This group has an object ID of 61849bf2-e44b-4057-b589-6cd1812d7545.
Within PowerShell Universal, I can assign users of this group to the Administrator group by setting up the claim mapping. The Claim Type will be groups and the Claim Value will be 61849bf2-e44b-4057-b589-6cd1812d7545. Once I have mapped the claim, users of the Dashboard Administrators group will be part of the PowerShell Universal Administrators group. The resulting roles.ps1 will look like this.
All other roles are disabled.
By default, roles are assigned by policies. Policies are run when the user logs in. You can change the policy scripts by visiting the Security / Roles page. Click the Edit Policy button to configure the Policy script.
Policy scripts will receive a ClaimsPrincipal object as a parameter and need to return true or false. Policies that throw errors will be assumed to be false. The ClaimsPrincipal object contains the user's identity and the claims that the user has received. These may include group assignments or other features of a user's account.
You can expect an object with this structure.
To assign a role to a user, you can create their identity within Universal and then select the role in the drop down on the Identities page.
By default, identities receive a role through claim mapping or policy.
Full access to the entire PowerShell Universal platform and settings.
Operators have access to add and remove resources such as APIs, Scripts and Dashboards. Operators cannot change settings like environments, roles, or general settings.
The Execute role grants the ability to run scripts and read access for everything else.
The Reader role provides read-only access to PowerShell Universal.
You can change which page the user sees when logging in by setting the Default Route property for the role. For example, you may want HR users to go to the Human Resources dashboard while you want IT users to go to the IT Dashboard.
If your users are members of more than about 40 groups you may experience problems logging in. This is due to size limits of the HTTP headers in IIS and Kestrel. The more groups a user is a member of, the more authorization claims they have and the large the header.
You can increase the header limit for Kestrel by using the limits configuration in appsettings.json file. You will need to increase the header size. It is a value in bytes and defaults to 32kb.
Authorization in IIS works as with any other method but you need to be aware of the request header size limit. You may receive errors when you enable claims that include many groups. They can exceed the header size limit and IIS will return errors. We have found that about 40 Azure Active Directory groups will cause this issue on a default IIS installation.
The error you will receive will either be a 400 error with the request is too long.
If you have HTTPS enabled, you will receive an error about a HTTP2 protocol error.
You can increase the IIS request size by setting the following registry keys. You will need to restart you machine in order for them to take affect.
More information can be found on Microsoft's documentation.
As an alternative to increasing the request size, you can also reduce the number of groups sent. In Azure Active Directory, you can set to just the groups assigned to the application to prevent all groups from being sent.
Now go to Enterprise Application > (Select the app) > Users and groups. Assign the group(s) you are interested in including in the claims. (Note: this can also be used as a security boundary if you set “User Assignment Required” to Yes in the ‘Properties’ section of the app)
App Tokens can be assigned to services that cannot login interactively. You can grant a new app token to your account by clicking the Grant App Token button within the Security / App Tokens tab.
The token will have a expiration of one year and have the valid roles for your account. To copy the App Token to your account, click the Copy action. To revoke an App Token, click the Revoke action.
You can use App Tokens with the Universal cmdlets or by using web requests directly using Bearer authorization.
By default, the forms authentication and policy assignment scripts run within the PowerShell Universal process. You can optionally configure an external Environment to run your authentication and authorization scripts. When you configure a security environment, an external PowerShell process will be started and configured use your Environment's settings.
To adjust the environment used by the security process, set the -SecurityEnvironment in settings.ps1.
The following example shows performing a simple "LDAP BIND" in order to validate a users Active Directory Credentials. If a user attempting to access PowerShell Universal is not the Default Admin User they will have to successfully authenticate their credentials with Active Directory via a simple LDAP bind. This can be combined with a AD Group Member check in the Admin, Operator, and Reader role policies to effectively use Active Directory Authentication AND Active Directory Group membership to provide Role Based Access to PowerShell Universal.
This example requires an authentication method that will provide group information during the authentication process. Methods like Windows authentication and WS-Federation can provide this information. Forms authentication will not work with this type of policy.
This example takes advantage of the claims that are provided during authentication. You can check to see if the user has a groupsid (group membership) by using claim mappings. Map the groupid claim type to the value you want to assign the role to.
In this example we will configure out Administrator Policy Script to use LDAP to retrieve the membership of an Active Directory Group. Here we have created a group called "PowerShell Universal Admins" where members of the group should be granted Administrator Access in PowerShell Universal. Here we are doing a simple samaccountname check for the user to ensure they are a member of the group. For more robust environments a SID/DN/ObjectGUID check would be more appropriate.
This example takes advantage of OpenID Connect and Azure Active Directory.
Once you have configured PowerShell Universal and Azure Active Directory, you can configure role scripts to verify whether users are members of groups found in Azure AD. You can take advantage of claims mappings to map from the Azure AD Group ID to a PowerShell Universal role.
First, ensure that you have group membership claims enabled in the manifest for your application registration. This will include all group membership, so it is accessible in PowerShell Universal.
Once configured, you can update your role script to check for a group membership. First make note of the object ID of the group you are looking to check within Azure AD.
Next, within your roles.ps1 script, you can validate a user has a particular role by using claims mapping.
As users login, their group membership will be validated against their claims and a role will be assigned.
In Azure go to App registrations > (Select the app) > Token Configuration, and specify Groups assigned to the application.
