This blog is plagiarized from the best article I’ve ever found on this subject.  Full credit to Kris Powell for this amazing article found here.

Here are my condensed notes for my use.  If you find it useful, give a shout out to Kris Powell.

We now know how to convert a SecureString to an encrypted standard string. We can take any method we like to get a SecureString, convert it to a standard string and then save it to a file. Here is an example of each:

Exporting SecureString from Plain text

"P@ssword1" | `
ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force | `
ConvertFrom-SecureString | `
Out-File "C:\Temp 2\Password.txt"

Exporting SecureString from Get-Credential

(Get-Credential).Password | `
ConvertFrom-SecureString | `
Out-File "C:\Temp 2\Password.txt"

Exporting SecureString from Read-Host

Read-Host "Enter Password" -AsSecureString |  `
ConvertFrom-SecureString | `
Out-File "C:\Temp 2\Password.txt"

Anyone of these examples should provide you with a Password.txt file that has an encrypted standard string the represents the password.

When you need to use this encrypted password, you simply reverse the process by importing the data from your file and use ConvertTo-SecureString. If all you need is a SecureString, you can stop there. You could even take it a step further and create a PSCredential object.

Creating SecureString object

$pass = Get-Content "C:\Temp 2\Password.txt" | ConvertTo-SecureString

Creating PSCredential object

$User = "MyUserName"
$File = "C:\Temp 2\Password.txt"
$MyCredential=New-Object `
-TypeName System.Management.Automation.PSCredential `
-ArgumentList $User,
(Get-Content $File | ConvertTo-SecureString)