CredGetTargetInfoA function (wincred.h)

Article
02/09/2023

The CredGetTargetInfo function retrieves all known target name information for the named target computer. This executed locally and does not need any particular privilege. The information returned is expected to be passed to the CredReadDomainCredentials and CredWriteDomainCredentials functions. The information should not be used for any other purpose.

Authentication packages compute TargetInfo when attempting to authenticate to a TargetName. The authentication packages cache this target information to make it available to CredGetTargetInfo. Therefore, the target information will only be available from a recent attempt to authenticate a TargetName.

Authentication packages not in the LSA process can cache a TargetInfo for later retrieval by CredGetTargetInfo by calling CredReadDomainCredentials with the CRED_CACHE_TARGET_INFORMATION flag.

Syntax

BOOL CredGetTargetInfoA(
  [in]  LPCSTR                          TargetName,
  [in]  DWORD                           Flags,
  [out] PCREDENTIAL_TARGET_INFORMATIONA *TargetInfo
);

Parameters

[in] TargetName

Pointer to a null-terminated string that contains the name of the target computer for which information is to be retrieved.

[in] Flags

Flags controlling the operation of the function. The following flag can be used:

CRED_ALLOW_NAME_RESOLUTION

If no target information can be found for TargetName name resolution is done on TargetName to convert it to other forms. If target information exists for any of those other forms, it is returned. Currently only DNS name resolution is done.

This is useful if the application does not call an authentication package directly. The application can pass the TargetName to another layer of software to authenticate to the server, and that layer of software might resolve the name and pass the resolved name to the authentication package. As such, there will be no target information for the original TargetName.

[out] TargetInfo

Pointer to a single allocated block buffer to contain the target information. At least one of the returned members of TargetInfo will be non-NULL. Any pointers contained within the buffer are pointers to locations within this single allocated block. The single returned buffer must be freed by calling CredFree.

Return value

The function returns TRUE on success and FALSE on failure. The GetLastError function can be called to get a more specific status code. The following status code can be returned:

ERROR_NOT_FOUND
Target information for the named server is not available.

Remarks

Note

The wincred.h header defines CredGetTargetInfo as an alias which automatically selects the ANSI or Unicode version of this function based on the definition of the UNICODE preprocessor constant. Mixing usage of the encoding-neutral alias with code that not encoding-neutral can lead to mismatches that result in compilation or runtime errors. For more information, see Conventions for Function Prototypes.

Requirements

Requirement	Value
Minimum supported client	Windows XP [desktop apps only]
Minimum supported server	Windows Server 2003 [desktop apps only]
Target Platform	Windows
Header	wincred.h
Library	Advapi32.lib
DLL	Advapi32.dll