I’ve demonstrated in a couple of blogs like the OneDrive Sync Monitoring and the OneDrive File Monitoring that it’s possible to impersonate the current user when a script is actually started by the NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM account.

My friends asked me if it would not be possible for other scripts to use the same approach. In the previous blogs I’ve shown that by loading the component by MurrayJu we got the ability to impersonate. I converted this into a module which you can find on https://github.com/KelvinTegelaar/RunAsUser.

This module allows you to run any script that is initiated by SYSTEM and execute it as the currently logged on user. This gives us a lot of freedom. Most RMM systems(and intune!) don’t allow monitoring under the currently logged on user. This often means that you have to work around accessing resources directly in their profile.

Some examples would be accessing installers that run in the users AppData folder, or registry items created under HKCU. Another could be scripts that require accessing shared drives or printers that are only mapped in user-space.

This is also super useful for intune scripts, because you just need to present things to the user or install things using their credentials directly.

Using the module

So, using the module is very straight forward. To install the module execute the following command:

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install-module RunAsUser

After you’ve installed the module you can jump straight into scripting. There are some things to account for; The script requires SYSTEM credentials or the SeDelegateSessionUserImpersonatePrivilege privilege.

The second thing is that the output can’t be directly captured. If you want to get output from the script you’ll have to write it to a file and pick that up again in the SYSTEM session. This might sound a little confusing so I have an example below.

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$scriptblock = {
$IniFiles = Get-ChildItem "$ENV:LOCALAPPDATA\Microsoft\OneDrive\settings\Business1" -Filter 'ClientPolicy*' -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

if (!$IniFiles) {
write-host 'No Onedrive configuration files found. Stopping script.'
exit 1
}

$SyncedLibraries = foreach ($inifile in $IniFiles) {
    $IniContent = get-content $inifile.fullname -Encoding Unicode
    [PSCustomObject]@{
        'Item Count' = ($IniContent | Where-Object { $_ -like 'ItemCount*' }) -split '= ' | Select-Object -last 1
        'Site Name'  = ($IniContent | Where-Object { $_ -like 'SiteTitle*' }) -split '= ' | Select-Object -last 1
        'Site URL'   = ($IniContent | Where-Object { $_ -like 'DavUrlNamespace*' }) -split '= ' | Select-Object -last 1
    }
}
$SyncedLibraries | ConvertTo-Json | Out-File 'C:\programdata\Microsoft OneDrive\OneDriveLibraries.txt'
}
try{
Invoke-AsCurrentUser -scriptblock $scriptblock
} catch{
write-error "Something went wrong"
}
start-sleep 2 #Sleeping 2 seconds to allow script to write to disk.
$SyncedLibraries = (get-content "C:\programdata\Microsoft OneDrive\OneDriveLibraries.txt" | convertfrom-json)
if (($SyncedLibraries.'Item count' | Measure-Object -Sum).sum -gt '280000') {
write-host "Unhealthy - Currently syncing more than 280k files. Please investigate."
$SyncedLibraries
}
else {
write-host "Healthy - Syncing less than 280k files."
}

In the script, we’re executing the Script Block using Invoke-AsCurrentUser command. This runs that entire block of code as the currently logged on user. We then sleep for 2 seconds allowing the script block to finish writing to disk. After this finishes, we pick up the file again under the system account and process the results.

So in short; using this module opens up a lot of user-based monitoring for systems that normally only allow executing under the SYSTEM account. Hopefully this helps people solve some challenges.

As a closing remark I’d like to thank Ben Reader (@Powers_hell) for his help on the module. He assisted in cleaning up the code right after release, making it all look and feel a lot smoother and he assisted in better error handling. Thanks Buddy! 🙂

As always, Happy PowerShelling.