Set a Registry Value Using PowerShell Containing a Forward Slash

A co-worker came to me today asking for help with some PowerShell code for a script he is writing. The script is to apply some registry settings to machines for a piece of security hardening work which includes disabling some of the less secure SSL and TLS cipher suites. All is going well until he gets to the line of the script that tries to disable the DES 56/56 cipher suite and PowerShell throws it back at him. The reason for it is because PowerShell is treating that forward slash character as a separator for a multi-value string.

I don’t normally blog about PowerShell as it’s just a day-to-day thing that we all do and use (you do all use PowerShell right) but I came across a problem today that I thought I would share as I had to run the net to find the solution for myself.

A co-worker came to me today asking for help with some PowerShell code for a script he is writing. The script is to apply some registry settings to machines for a piece of security hardening work which includes disabling some of the less secure SSL and TLS cipher suites. All is going well until he gets to the line of the script that tries to disable the DES 56/56 cipher suite and PowerShell throws it back at him. The reason for it is because PowerShell is treating that forward slash character as a separator for a multi-value string.

Here is the line of code that you would run normally to create the registry key for DES 56/56:

New-Item -Path “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Ciphers\DES 56/56"

When this runs, PowerShell creates a registry key for DES 56 but then it creates a sub-key for the second 56 as it’s seen as a separator which obviously isn’t what we want. I tried all sorts to get around it such as changing the double quotes for single quotes and first placing the path into a variable and calling in the variable but it just would not have it.

I managed to eventually find a way around this but it means that we can’t use the PowerShell Cmdlet New-Item but instead, we have to use the .NET way of things. Here’s the code sample to make it work:

$Writable = $True
$Key = (Get-Item HKLM:\).OpenSubKey(“SYSTEM”, $Writable).CreateSubKey(“CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Ciphers\DES 56/56”)
$Key.SetValue(“Enabled”, “0”, [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryValueKind]::DWORD)

 

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