Store and Retrieve Secrets from the Windows Credential Manager
Windows Credential Manager is a native Windows utility that stores sensitive information, such as passwords and secrets, and allows applications to securely access it.
Keeper provides a utility, the Windows Credential Utility, that interacts with native windows APIs to store and retrieve secrets from the Windows Credential Manager. It can be used by any integration, plugin, or code base to store and retrieve credentials, secrets, and passwords in the Windows Credential Manager simply and natively.
The code base for the Windows Credential Utility can be found here:
The binary needed to use the above utility can be found here:
To use the Windows Credential Utility, you can either
deploy the pre-built binary from the releases page
or import it into your code base.
Both use cases are covered below.
Download the latest version executable from the releases page and optionally add it to PATH to get started.
The executable supports two commands:
set
get
Both commands require an application name
(i.e. the name of the credential in / to be stored in the Windows Credential Manager) as the first argument.
set
set
requires a second argument of the secret to be stored. This can be either a:
BASE64 string
JSON string
Path to an existing JSON file
When the secret is saved to Windows Credential Manager it is first encoded into a BASE64 format (if not already a BASE64 string). This standardizes the format for both consistent storage and to make it easier to consume by Keeper integrations and products.
get
get
returns the stored BASE64 encoded config to stdout
and exits with a 0
exit code. The requesting integration can capture the output for consumption. Any errors encountered retrieving the config will return an non-zero
exit code and write to stderr
.
You can install this utility into your code base via Nuget:
You can now import this into your code base with:
set
To write to the Windows Credential Manager you can use the provided WriteCredential
method on the CredentialManager
object. This will write / overwrite the secret in the current user's Credential Manager.
You need to provide the three arguments to successfully add the secret to the Credential Manager.
First, the application name (used for reference of the secret), the string represntation of the username of the user, and the secret itself. This should be either:
A BASE64 string
A JSON string
A path to an existing JSON file
When the secret is saved to the Credential Manager it is first encoded into a BASE64 format (if not already a BASE64 string). This standardizes the format for both consistent storage and to make it easier to consume by Keeper integrations and products.
get
To retrieve a secret from the Credential Manager, you can pass the application name to the ReadCredential
method. This returns the stored BASE64 encoded secret.