Is there any Azure policy can be in place which will restict users so that they Can NOT delete any of the Security groups in Azure? even if they can PIM up below roles:
User Admin
Privileged auth admin
Application admin
Conditional access admin
Privillaged role admin
Identity Governance admin
Security Admin
Thanks.
• For now, no such policy can be applied that prevents security group deletion in Azure. But there is a way through which you can prevent security group deletion through assigned Azure AD roles in Azure. For this purpose, you will have to ensure that you don’t assign Azure AD built-in roles like ‘User Administrator, Privileged authentication administrator, etc.’ directly with the default assigned permissions to these roles to any of the user or a group of users in your Azure AD tenant.
Then, create custom Azure AD roles according to your specific requirement with the required permissions only as described in the documentation link as below: -
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/role-based-access-control/custom-roles
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/roles/custom-create
• Once the custom required Azure PIM specific roles are created, then assign these PIM roles to the required users or a group of users as you deem correct. But do ensure that ‘microsoft.directory/groups/delete’ and ‘microsoft.directory/accessReviews/definitions.groups/delete’ permissions are not assigned to any of these custom PIM roles created and also bar from assigning the built-in Azure AD roles under Privileged Identity Management to any of the users, as these permissions only give the assigned role/user the rights to delete a security group.
In this way, you can restrict the users of PIM and other custom roles or default roles, maybe for that matter, to prevent deleting any security groups in Azure.
Short answer is no, there is no such built-in policy. You would have to rely on custom RBAC roles instead of the built-in roles.
For example, you want to use the NotAction and add this action to it microsoft.directory/groups/delete.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/roles/permissions-reference
You can try to use Azure Resources Lock which will protect your resources from accidental deletion, no matter the user permissions. Check this link for more details about Azure resource locks:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/management/lock-resources?tabs=json
Related
I'm relatively new to Azure Active Directory & trying to understand some best practices or guidelines for administering custom roles & permissions for application use.
For instance, I might want to create a Role of "Technician" & they have permissions such as "firmware.upgrade" or "product.view" to be enforced within application & endpoints.
Would "Technician" actually be an Azure AD Group then & I could assign custom roles "firmware.upgrade" & "product.view" to that group? Can it even work that way?
Also, I could consider Application Roles, but "Technician" (and others) would be a role used across several applications. So I wasn't sure if an Application Role makes sense to use.
You're on the right track.
You will start by creating app roles like "firmware.upgrade" and "product.view" in your Azure AD application. Please note that these roles are specific to your Azure AD application only and the logic for what a user with these roles can do will be defined in your application code.
Next you would create an Azure AD groups (e.g. "Technicians", "Users" etc.) and start assigning other users in your Azure AD in these groups.
Then you would assign these groups app roles. For example, you can choose to assign "firmware.upgrade" and "product.view" roles to "Technicians" group while "product.view" role to "Users" group.
When a user authenticates/authorizes against Azure AD for your application, the claims will include all the app roles assigned to them either directly or through group membership. Based on the app roles in the claim, you would then grant access to certain parts of your application to these users.
Please do note that while groups are for entire Azure AD, your application roles are specific to an application only. For each application in your Azure AD, you will need to create new application roles.
I can see the other answer is not but an automated answer.. Anyways Azure Active Directory B2C (Business-to-Consumer) does not have the concept of groups and thus group-based assignments of enterprise applications is not possible.
Instead of using groups, you can use custom attributes to assign roles and permissions to B2C users. Custom attributes are user-specific properties that you can define and store on a user's identity. You can use these attributes to store information such as the user's role or permissions.
You can then use these custom attributes to control access to your applications. For example, you can configure your application to check the value of a custom attribute, such as "role", to determine whether a user has the necessary permissions to access a specific feature or resource.
But you also, you need to handle the management and assignment of these attributes yourself, whereas with groups, Azure AD handles that for you.
I have a Web API that is protected by Azure AD. I have created an app registration for the Web API that only allows users from that Azure AD to access the API (i.e. single tenant). This process also created a Service Principal in that tenant.
What I am wondering is if this Service Principal can self-assign itself RBAC role (any RBAC role for that matter) in an Azure Subscription that trusts this Azure AD? Or will this be a user-initiated action where a user with appropriate permission (like Owner or User Access Administrator) has to assign appropriate role to this Service Principal?
From whatever my understanding is, I believe it is latter (i.e. another user has to perform this operation). However it looks like it should be possible though.
The reason I say this is when I create a new Azure Subscription, I am automatically assigned an Owner role in that Azure Subscription (I am a Global Administrator in my Azure AD). I am wondering how that is accomplished.
If it is indeed possible, then what Azure AD role should be assigned to the Service Principal?
Any insights into this will be highly appreciated.
Of course it can, but the service principal also needs the Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments/write permission e.g. Owner or User Access Administrator to assign another RBAC role to itself.
If you mean the service principal has no RBAC role currently, then it can't, even if it is a Global admin in the tenant, it could not assign the RBAC role to itself directly.
Besides, the user account is different from a service principal, if a user is a global admin in the tenant, he can simply Elevate access to manage all Azure subscriptions and management groups for himself(this just works for the user, not service principal), then he will get the User Access Administrator role at the root scope, then he can assign any RBAC role to himself.
If your service principal is a global admin and wants to assign RBAC role to itself, you may need to assign the global admin role to another user account first, then elevate access to manage all Azure subscriptions, then use the user account to assign the RBAC role to the service principal.
You are correct that a principal can only grant itself permissions when it already has rights to do so. It would follow that a brand new MSI principal would not be a member of any groups or assigned any RBAC roles and therefore could not grant itself additional rights.
In the case of an Azure Subscription, the principal which creates the subscription either has permission to do so in an existing tenant or is creating a new tenant and subscription, and rights are granted by the system to the user as the creator/owner.
A possible approach to automate granting rights to new MSIs would be to use an Azure Function, calling the Microsoft Graph to query for new MSIs matching a search criteria, then grant the MSI principal the required permissions. The Function would have to have an MSI assigned which would need permission to grant the required rights to the new MSI at the desired scope.
I have an application that needs to create AD groups and update their memberships via Graph API. I'll be using a service principal to do so.
I'm trying to understand the difference between:
assigning the service principal to an Azure AD role (for example, "User Administrator": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/roles/delegate-by-task#groups)
adding API permissions to the service principal (for example, Microsoft Graph API's "Group.ReadWrite.All": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/roles/delegate-by-task#groups)
What are the differences here? Do they both effectively give the same permissions?
A built-in role is just a collection of permissions so your answer can be yes. If you grant the same permissions in as a built-in role then you will get the same effective permissions. The "User Administrator" role has the following permissions:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/roles/permissions-reference#user-administrator
We created built-in roles to make it easier for users to quickly get role based access control in place. If built-in roles don't meet your needs, you can always create a custom role.
I'm mulling over the same question - which approach is better, MS Graph permissions or built-in roles. I'm leaning towards the built in roles for easier visibility and the potential to assign the permissions to groups.
Unless things have changed very recently you can only create AAD custom roles for a subset of "Application Administrator" permissions - not for any permissions.
Are Azure's RBAC tools and capabilities appropriate for delineating and enforcing app-specific user permissions?
What I've been seeing is that Azure's RBAC capabilities seem to involve managing Azure resources: BLOB services, storage accounts, app services, etc.
But what I don't see are examples of Azure RBAC being used to manage app- (or domain-) specific permissions, like "Allow the user to approve purchasing this widget" or "Allow user to categorize these items as Foo, Bar, or Baz", or "Allow the user to view financial data only from these company divisions".
Am I fundamentally misunderstanding how Azure RBAC works, or what it's used to manage? Can anyone point out examples of Azure role definitions that include permissions like the ones above, or point to documentation of how I might set those up?
I believe you are looking for application specific permissions which can be achieved, by configuring API permissions in apps, registered in AD. Please correct me if my understanding is wrong.
So the difference between API Permissions and Role Assignments is as below:
API Permissions: 2 types.
Delegated permissions are appropriate for client apps that access a web API as the signed-in user, and whose access should be restricted to the permissions you select in the next step.
Delegated permissions are used when authentication is done under user's context and are returned in scope claim of the token.
Application permissions are for service or daemon-type applications that need to access a web API as themselves, without user interaction for sign-in or consent. Unless you've defined application roles for your web API, this option is disabled.
App permissions are used when authentication is done under application (service principal) context and are returned in roles claim. For example, if you have a web application, you can configure it to allow access to the user, if the scope claim contains read, otherwise deny access. Or grant write access to application only when roles claim contains write.
You should configure API Permissions when you would like to return the permissions in the Access token. When application consumes the token, it makes authorization decision on the basis of permissions present in the token.
Role Assignments:
RBAC is the authorization system you use to manage access to Azure resources. When using RBAC, an administrator grants permissions to roles, and not to individual users or groups. The administrator can then assign roles to different users and groups to control who has access to what content and functionality.
Role assignments are used to assign permission to users/service principals on Azure Resources. In this case authorization is done by Azure and not by the end application which happens in case of API permissions.
Please ref the below articles for detailed explanation with examples.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/howto-add-app-roles-in-azure-ad-apps
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/active-directory-how-applications-are-added
i was reading about AAD privilege escalation in one of the article where the author states that "if you compromise an Application Administrator account or the on-premise Sync Account you can read and modify directory settings, group memberships, user accounts, SharePoint sites and OneDrive files. This is done by assigning credentials to an existing service principal with these permissions and then impersonating these applications"
my questions are?
1.how can i find what privilege my app admin account has and how it is different from the permissions
that "application " has.
2. what does assigning credentials to a service principal means?
As mentioned in Carl's link,
The Application Administrator role allows users to create and manage all aspects of enterprise applications, application registrations, and application proxy settings. This role also grants the ability to consent to delegated permissions and application permissions, with the exception of permissions on the Microsoft Graph API.
Applications can have different privileges added to them, and a user in the Application Administrator role can add extra permissions to an application and theoretically use those credentials to impersonate the app's identity and have more privileges than originally intended.
An Azure service principal is a security identity used by user-created apps, services, and automation tools to access specific Azure resources. Just as a user is represented by a security principal called a user principal, an app is represented by a service principal. The service principal provides an identity for your app, allowing you to delegate only the necessary permissions to the app. It improves security if you only grant it the minimum permissions level needed to perform its management tasks. So if you assign credentials to a service principal you can grant or restrict the app's access to certain resources.