Powershell script to mask the passwords in config file

February 7, 2024

I have a config text file that contains several passwords.
I wrote a PowerShell script to replace the passwords with xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
But it does not seem to be doing anything.
Can someone please explain to me what I did wrong?
The regex expression works when I use it in notepad++.

TIA

(Get-Content test-config.xml) `
    -replace '"(?-s)<bind-password>(.*?)<//bind-password>"', '<bind-password>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx</bind-password>' `
    -replace '"(?-s)<secret>(.*?)<//secret>"', '<secret>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx</secret>' |
  Out-File test-config-cleaned.xml

a sample config would have this

            <entry name="radius-1">
              <secret>12324zxzczxczxcasd</secret>
              <port>1812</port>
              <ip-address>192.168.100.100</ip-address>
            </entry>

          <bind-password>231231sdfsdfsdfsccc</bind-password>

The output file should have been like this

            <entry name="radius-1">
              <secret>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx</secret>
              <port>1812</port>
              <ip-address>192.168.100.100</ip-address>
            </entry>

          <bind-password>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx</bind-password>

>Solution :

Use XmlDocument instead of regex:

$path = Convert-Path .\test-config.xml
$xml = [xml]::new()
$xml.Load($path)
$xml.GetElementsByTagName('secret') | ForEach-Object {
    $_.InnerText = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
}
$xml.GetElementsByTagName('bind-password') | ForEach-Object {
    $_.InnerText = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
}

$xml.Save('path\to\test-config-cleaned.xml')