Posts

We all have probably been there and developed a PowerShell script that took some fair amount of time until the execution completed, weren’t we? Of course one could argue and say that as long a script ‘works’ it is good enough but depending on the use case and environment a PowerShell script that runs 30 to 60 minutes exceeds the patience of most (IT) people and can also lead to increased costs. But what makes those kinds of scripts that awfully slow and can’t we just tweak them to run faster? ...

The Microsoft Store for Business will be discontinued mid 2023 and Intune recently introduced the new Windows Store experience backed by winget to distribute apps to your Intune managed endpoints. To simplify the migration to the new Windows Store experience I created a PowerShell Script that migrates all currently assigned Windows Store for Business apps to the new Windows Store experience. Kudos to Sander Rozemuller for providing detailed instructions about creating winget apps as PowerShell code samples. ...

Workload Identity Federation (let’s just call this WIF) allows app principals not residing within Azure to request short lived access tokens. This removes the need of storing client secrets or certificates within GitHub as Action secrets. One drawback ist that currently only the Azure modules support the usage of WIF. How it works WIF relies on trust. This trust is directly configured on the Azure AD app registration and scoped to an individual GitHub repository and optionally fine grained by limiting the usage to single git refs, specifically branches and tags. By trusting GitHub as external identity provider (IdP), a GitHub Action can request an identity token from the GitHub IdP and exchange this one against an access token within Azure AD. ...

Windows Package Manager (winget) provides exciting features to install and upgrade apps on Windows devices. But how does winget actually work and how are new packages integrated? Within this post I want to elaborate on some questions I had when having a closer look into winget. How does winget find sources? By default, winget has the following sources configured: msstore: Microsoft Store (public) winget: Winget Content Delivery Network (CDN) ...

A common pitfall in environments where Windows server is used for radius authentication is that Microsoft network policy server (NPS) does currently not support device based authentication for Azure AD joined devices. NPS always checks for the existence of a corresponding computer object in AD. For my home setup and lab I wanted to build a radius solution to enable 802.1x authentication on my Wi-Fi network. Disclaimer This post describes my setup and does not cover prerequisites like certification authority, certificate revocation and client certificate deployment via SCEP. Furthermore you should be familiar with docker, network topics, dns and Intune. ...

Android enterprise dedicated devices with the Microsoft Managed Homescreen app are a conenient way to provide devices with restricted functionality and customized look and feel to end users. Because the Managed Homescreen app acts as an overlay to the underlying Android certain prompts and features are not enabled by default unless you allow-list them by deploying the corresponding Android System App and add the app to the kiosk device restrictions. ...

When you are new to RESTful APIs and want to start with Microsoft Graph to automate tasks in your Endpoint Manager tenant all the stuff about app registrations, access tokens, pagination and request headers can be quite confusing. In this post I want to show you a quick tip to kickstart your Microsoft Graph API experience. Requirements Cloud admin account with Intune Administrator role assigned Ability to install Modules from the PowerShell gallery JWT Just because you can’t see it… doesn’t mean it isn’t there: Due to the naturality of OAuth 2.0 and OpenID connect (these are the protocols involved for authorization and authentication in a cloud environment) we can capture short lived access tokens, also called Json Web Tokens (JWTs) directly from a browser. Tokens are usually valid between 50 and 60 minutes - just what we need to get some hands on with Microsoft Graph API and MEM automation. ...

App protection (also called MAM) policies have been around for a couple of years within MEM and I already used them in various projects to protect company data on unmanaged iOS and Android devices. One of the drawbacks with this approach is that we do not have full visibility about the usage and I tried to shed some light about this with a PowerShel reporting script that pulls data from the Microsoft Graph API. ...

Device and user-based certificates are commonly used for secure authentication for services like: MECM in HTTPS mode, Always On VPN, 802.1x for (wireless) LAN and so on. Mostly these certificates are deployed from an internal PKI and the certificate templates are somewhat outdated because everybody is afraid of touching these settings. As with any type of credentials - credential theft is also applicable for certificates and the corresponding private keys. So let’s dive in and learn the risk and how to reduce the attack surface. ...

Based on one of my older posts about PowerShell script signing with Azure DevOps I recently implemented a PowerShell script signing workflow with GitHub actions I wanted to share with the community. Prerequisites For this post the following prerequisites are required: Code signing certificate in PFX format GitHub account Add variables to GitHub actions Because GitHub variables can only be of string content we need to get the contents of the pfx file as base64 encoded string: ...