Security of running PowerShell command remotely?

Question

I'm new to PowerShell. I'm looking to run PowerShell command on a remote PC running Windows 7.

On the remote PC, I ran the following PowerShell commands:

Enable-PSRemoting -Force
Set-Item WSMAN:\localhost\client\trustedhosts <host_ip>
Restart-Service WinRM

I performed the last two commands on the host PC (but using <remote_ip>).

I confirmed this worked OK with:

Invoke-Command -ComputerName <name> -Credential <username> -ScriptBlock { Get-ChildItem C:\ }

My question: Is this secure on a public network? Should I be doing something else? Or should I be using SSL? If so, how do I go about this?

Answer 1

If you use the default authentication when using Invoke-Command the user is authenticated on the remote host using either NTLM or Kerberos. So I don't think you need to worry too much about the password being sniffed out on the network. Also, by default, remoting endpoints can only be used by administrators on that machine. Finally, if you need to allow non-admins access, you can configure a remoting endpoint that is restricted. It can be restricted in the cmdlets available and it can be restricted in language capability. This tutorial on remoting covers setting up a restricted session.