It’s been a while since my last post on this blog, but this is a quick one that might make your scripts run a bit faster if you want to fetch the UserAccountControl flags for multiple users (especially if you have thousands of users in AD).

For those of you who don’t know: UserAccountControl is a 32bit (4 byte) AD attribute that defines a bunch of options for a user account in AD depending on what bits that are set. A few examples are DONT_EXPIRE_PASSWORD, PASSWD_CANT_CHANGE.

Each property is tied to one of the bits in the 32bit value. So if bit #5 (counting from zero) is set to true then the user don’t need a password to log in, if bit #16 is set to true then the users password never expires and so on.

The ActiveDirectory module from RSAT abstracts this and makes it easier for us but it adds compute time if you want to run things fast. And since I avoid using the ActiveDirectory module since I want to use this in a REST API later on.

The function below runs on avg in 0.3ms for me, thats 1ms faster than the other methods I’ve tried so far.

That saves me around 25-30 seconds for an AD check and will come in handy when I convert it to a C# version for the REST API that my Graylog Lookup Tables use.

# If Bit -eq <int> then UAC has the corresponding value # Set the hash outside of the function to save time $UserAccountControlHash = @{ # Bit Description 0 = 'SCRIPT' 1 = 'ACCOUNTDISABLE' 3 = 'HOMEDIR_REQUIRED' 4 = 'LOCKOUT' 5 = 'PASSWD_NOTREQD' 6 = 'PASSWD_CANT_CHANGE' 7 = 'ENCRYPTED_TEXT_PWD_ALLOWED' 8 = 'TEMP_DUPLICATE_ACCOUNT' 9 = 'NORMAL_ACCOUNT' 11 = 'INTERDOMAIN_TRUST_ACCOUNT' 12 = 'WORKSTATION_TRUST_ACCOUNT' 13 = 'SERVER_TRUST_ACCOUNT' 16 = 'DONT_EXPIRE_PASSWORD' 17 = 'MNS_LOGON_ACCOUNT' 18 = 'SMARTCARD_REQUIRED' 19 = 'TRUSTED_FOR_DELEGATION' 20 = 'NOT_DELEGATED' 21 = 'USE_DES_KEY_ONLY' 22 = 'DONT_REQ_PREAUTH' 23 = 'PASSWORD_EXPIRED' 24 = 'TRUSTED_TO_AUTH_FOR_DELEGATION' 26 = 'PARTIAL_SECRETS_ACCOUNT' } Function Get-UACProperties { param ( [ parameter ( mandatory )] [ uint32 ] $UACValue ) # Create a BitArray from the bytes $BitArray = [ System.Collections. BitArray ]:: new ([ System. BitConverter ]:: GetBytes ( $UACValue )) # Get the value from the hash where BitArray -eq $True $UserAccountControlHash . GetEnumerator () . Where ({ $BitArray [ $_ . Name ] }) . Value }

Example on how to use it:

$User = Get-ADUser -Identity johndoe -Properties UserAccountControl Get-UACProperties $User . UserAccountControl

And to get average the execution time: