What are the minimum permissions required to search or query Active Directory for Users, Groups and Group Membership?

Question

I have been able to enumerate Users, Groups and Group Members in Active Directory when I am logged in Administrator or Domain User in C#.

I would like to know which type of Users can read/query/search Active Directory objects. Do we need to make the user a member of a particular Group or Assign permissions to the user ?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You should not need administrator or any permission to query/search/read AD group membership. unless you have altered the default security. A normal user account should work fine, and user at least have the same group memberships. you can query your AD with no problems with a user account, you can run CMD or Powershell with the credentials of the user account and test some LDAP queries.

You can Follow this Document for LDAP query example.

Note: One of the advantages of Microsoft's Active Directory is that it allows users to search objects in the database by performing Lightweight Directory Access Protocol queries. LDAP is an industry standard used by several directory services to access information within the directory database. Microsoft's Active Directory supports both LDAP versions 2 and 3

Referennce :https://mcpmag.com/articles/2006/09/18/searching-active-directory-objects.aspx.