Question

I have a Windows service application.
Currently all admin tasks are done through config editing.

I want to add some sort of command line interfaces – and i want it to do through powershell.

And i don’t know where should i start – how can i create application interface in this case. How powershell should communicate with service? remote feature also required in this case.

(In the feature there are maybe other admin tools – with GUI or through browser.)

Answer 1

Expanding a little on L.B’s short-ish remark: having a privileged service interact with the user’s desktop is not the best of ideas, because doing so may open a route for privilege elevation. Shatter attacks for instance worked that way.

A better way to handle interaction with the user would be to have an unprivileged listener on localhost (e.g. 127.0.0.1:5555) that will display messages submitted via that port, and have the privileged service connect to the listener to send messages to the user.

The code snippet below – while leaving a lot room for improvement – should give you a general idea of how such a listener could look like:

$addr = "127.0.0.1"
$port = 5555

[byte[]]$byte = @(0)
$enc = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms")

$socket = New-Object System.Net.Sockets.TcpListener([System.Net.IPAddress]::Parse($addr), $port)
$socket.Start()
while ( $true ) {
  $client = $socket.AcceptTcpClient()
  $stream = $client.GetStream()
  [byte[]]$input = @()
  while ( ($i = $stream.Read($byte, 0, 1)) -ne 0 ) { $input += $byte }
  $client.Close()
  [System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox]::Show($enc.GetString($input), "Title")
}