Powershell – Security in your profile

If you have done much with Invoke-webrequest, and if your endpoints have an inkling of security minded people watching them, then chances are you have run into a small issue:

Invoke-WebRequest : The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel.

What’s happening here? Well, chances are that the end-point you are attempting to access has turned off TLS1.0 and 1.1, and for good reason! There is an easy fix, however. Just simply place a single line of code in your script above the invoke-webrequest:

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12

Great! Post done, walk away.

But…..I have about 10000 scripts…..

That one line works great if you have just a handful of scripts that you run, but what if you need to do this for a large company – maybe a large enterprise? Well, it turns out that your profile can help.

First off – there are multiple PowerShell profiles on a system, but for this instance, let’s focus on the All-Users/All-Hosts profile (also sometimes referred to as the System profile). Depending on the flavor of PowerShell you are running – Microsoft vs Windows – the System profile will be in different locations. Not to fear, however, cause $PSHome will show you where the profile is located. Create your profile (if you haven’t already) in the $PSHome directory. The name of the file should be “profile.ps1”.

Now – place the Net.ServicePointManager line you would normally place in a single script into your System profile and save it. Whenever an invoke-webrequest is run from this system, it will automatically use the TLS1.2 protocol. Updating a few systems that run your scripts is a lot easier than updating thousands of scripts, and this will save you a ton of time.

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