Windows User

Rotating Windows User Accounts on Local Network

Overview

In this guide, you'll learn how to rotate Windows user accounts within your local network using Keeper Rotation. For a high-level overview on the rotation process in the local network, visit this page.

Prerequisites

This guide assumes the following tasks have already taken place:

• Keeper Secrets Manager is enabled for your role
• Keeper Rotation is enabled for your role
• A Keeper Secrets Manager application has been created
• A Keeper Rotation gateway is already installed and showing online
• The Keeper Gateway can communicate over WinRM or SSH to the target machine:

  • WinRM: Enabled and running on port 5986. Verification: Run winrm get winrm/config to verify that WinRM is running. See WinRM setup page for installation help. OR...
  • SSH: Enabled and running on port 22. Verification: Run ssh [your-user]@[your-machine] -p 22 to verify that SSH is running.

1. Set up a PAM Machine Record

Keeper Rotation will use an admin credential to rotate credentials of other accounts in your local environment. These admin credentials need to have the sufficient permissions in order to successfully change the credentials of other accounts.

In this guide, we will store the admin credentials in a PAM Machine Record.

The following table lists all the required fields that needs to be filled on the PAM Machine Record with your information:

Field	Description
Title	Name of the Record ex: "Local Windows Admin"
Hostname or IP Address	Machine hostname or IP as accessed by the Gateway (internal) or "localhost"
Port	22 for SSH, 5985 (HTTP) or 5986 (HTTPS) for WinRM
Administrative Credentials	Linked PAM User record that contains the username and password (or SSH Key) of the Admin account which will perform the rotation.

The linked PAM User record with the admin credential needs to be in a shared folder that is accessible to the Keeper Gateway.

2. Set up a PAM Configuration

Note: You can skip this step if you already have a PAM Configuration set up for this environment.

If you are creating a new PAM Configuration, login to the Keeper Vault and select "Secrets Manager", then select the "PAM Configurations" tab, and click on "New Configuration". The following table lists all the required fields on the PAM Configuration Record:

Field	Description
Title	Configuration name, example: Windows LAN Configuration
Environment	Select: Local Network
Gateway	Select the Gateway that is configured on the Keeper Secrets Manager application and has SSH access to your Windows devices
Application Folder	Select the Shared folder where the PAM Configuration will be stored. We recommend placing this in a shared folder with the PAM User records, not the machine resources.

3. Set up one or more PAM User records

Keeper Rotation will use the credentials in the PAM Machine record to rotate the PAM User records on your Local environment. The PAM User credential needs to be in a shared folder that is shared to the KSM application created in the prerequisites.

The following table lists all the required fields on the PAM User record:

Field	Description
Record Type	PAM User
Title	Keeper record title
Login	Case sensitive username of the account being rotated. Example: msmith
Password	Account password is optional, rotation will set one if blank

4. Configure Rotation on the PAM User records

Select the PAM User record(s) from Step 3, edit the record and open the "Password Rotation Settings".

• Select the desired schedule and password complexity.

• The "Rotation Settings" should use the PAM Configuration setup previously.

• The "Resource Credential" field should select the PAM Machine credential setup from Step 1.

• Upon saving, the rotation button will be enabled and available to rotate on demand, or via the selected schedule.

Any user with edit rights to a PAM User record has the ability to setup rotation for that record.

Service Management

Keeper can automatically update the Windows service account "log on as" credentials for any Windows services running as the PAM User, and restart the service. Keeper will also update the credential of any scheduled task running as that user on the target machine.

To learn more and set up this capability, see the Service Management page.