Book Image

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp

By : Brenton J.W. Blawat
Book Image

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp

By: Brenton J.W. Blawat

Overview of this book

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp explains how to create your own repeatable PowerShell scripting framework. This framework contains script logging methodologies, answer file interactions, and string encryption and decryption strategies. This book focuses on evaluating individual components to identify the system’s function, role, and unique characteristics. To do this, you will leverage built-in CMDlets and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to explore Windows services, Windows processes, Windows features, scheduled tasks, and disk statistics. You will also create custom functions to perform a deep search for specific strings in files and evaluate installed software through executable properties. We will then discuss different scripting techniques to improve the efficiency of scripts. By leveraging several small changes to your code, you can increase the execution performance by over 130%. By the end of this book, you will be able to tie all of the concepts together in a PowerShell-based Windows server scanning script. This discovery script will be able to scan a Windows server to identify a multitude of components.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
3
Working with Answer Files
Index

Chapter 4. String Encryption and Decryption

Large enterprises often have very strict security standards that are required by industry-specific regulations. When you are creating your Windows server scanning script, you will need to approach the script carefully with certain security concepts in mind. One of the most common situations you may encounter is the need to leverage sensitive data, such as credentials, in your script. While you could prompt for sensitive data during runtime, most enterprises want to automate the full script using zero-touch automation.

Zero-touch automation requires that the scripts are self-contained and have all of the required credentials and components to successfully run. The problem with incorporating sensitive data in the script, however, is that data can be obtained in clear text. The usage of clear text passwords in scripts is a bad practice, and violates many regulatory and security standards.

As a result, PowerShell scripters need a method to securely store...