PSCredentials from current user

Question

I've been a member of SO for a year and this is my first ever question!

I am currently developing a WinForms application in C# that invokes PowerShell scripts. It is not designed to be a comprehensive handler for all of PowerShell's capabilities, but merely executes a small selection of scripts with simple, pre-agreed parameter types only.

Some of the scripts require elevated permissions to run successfully. No problem - there seems to be at least 2 ways round this:

1. Impersonation. The application performs the authorisation and invokes powershell under these credentials. I hit a problem early on with this, in that the impersonated/elevated user may not have the permissions to invoke powershell commands on the user's local machine - as the local machine may not have the appropriate ExecutionPolicy, and the elevated user would therefore have to access the Registry to change this. I have no sway in altering permissions. Which leads me towards:

2. Credentials as a Variable. Simple. Scripts have a variable such as:

[PSCredential]$credential

which the application can supply by prompting the user for the user name and password for this account.

My question is this: Is there a way to obtain a PSCredential object from the currently logged-in user, as some kind of default for my app?
I haven't seen anything to suggest this can be done, so if anyone can inundate me as to why this is the case, I would be glad to hear it. It would be feasible to force the application to run as an administrator, if this is of any help.

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

There is indeed no way to get the credential for the current user without prompting a user for their input. For one thing, it is quite simple to obtain the clear text password from the "SecureString" password property of the PSCredential instance.