How to pass Windows credential in a PowerShell script?

Question

I am writing a PS script to open a URL automatically in a Chrome browser. I created a credential object and pass it to Start-Process as below.

$username = Read-Host 'What is your username?'
$password = Read-Host 'What is your password?' -AsSecureString
$credentials = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList @($username,(ConvertTo-SecureString -String $password -AsPlainText -Force))
Start-Process -FilePath Chrome -ArgumentList $url -Credential $credentials

I expect the Chrome browser to be opened with the URL using the credential object. But it's throwing the error as below.

Start-Process : This command cannot be executed due to the error: Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.

Note: The URL works fine if I pass the Windows security credentials to the URL manually, therefore my credentials are good. Feel something is wrong in passing the Windows security credentials. Not sure what's wrong.

What exactly do you mean by "pass the Windows security credentials to the URL manually"? Are you trying to run the *browser* with different credentials? Or are you trying to authenticate against a web-server? The approach in your question only does the former. — Ansgar Wiechers, Jan 01 '19 at 18:23

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 31 '18 at 11:23

$userName = "Pandiyan"
$secpasswd = ConvertTo-SecureString "mypasswordiscool" -AsPlainText -Force
$mycreds = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential -ArgumentList $username, $secpasswd
$url = "localhost/atomicscope"
Start-Process -FilePath "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" -ArgumentList $url -Credential $mycreds

You should also specify the path to chrome and try this again. Instead of readhost provide the credentials directly and it should fire chrome right away. If there is a user waiting to be typing in the console its fine. Else there's no use of automating this with powershell

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 31 '18 at 11:23

You already read the password as a secure string, so you don't need to do that again when creating the credential object. ConvertTo-SecureString would only be required if $password contained a plaintext password.

This will do what you want:

$credentials = New-Object Management.Automation.PSCredential $username, $password

How to pass Windows credential in a PowerShell script?

2 Answers2