I followed the instructions in this tutorial (option #1 auto-configure): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/quickstart-v2-windows-desktop
The generated WPF desktop app works fine and I am able to get it to authenticate to my Azure AD account.
Does this mean that the desktop app is using Azure Managed Identity?
If not, what else do I have to do to accomplish this?
My ultimate goal is to be able to modify the desktop application and access secrets in Azure Key Vault, without having to hardcode credentials or use environment variables.
Does this mean that the desktop app is using Azure Managed Identity?
No, it does not mean that, the desktop app from this doc just uses an AAD App for you to login, nothing related to the managed identity(MSI).
If not, what else do I have to do to accomplish this?
If you want to use MSI to access secrets in azure keyvault, you need to run your code in azure services that supported MSI e.g. azure app service, azure VM, etc, MSI is not available anywhere else.
For the code, just use the Azure Key Vault secret client library for .NET, it uses DefaultAzureCredential to auth, it will try several auth ways automatically, one of them is ManagedIdentityCredential i.e. MSI.
var client = new SecretClient(vaultUri: new Uri(keyVaultUrl), credential: new DefaultAzureCredential());
Also you should note, when you use MSI to access azure keyvault secret, it is a non-interactive way and no user will be asked to login(i.e. no user involved), because MSI is essentially a service principal in AAD, when using it to auth, it just makes an API call to the azure instance metadata endpoint to get the token, then use the token to auth.
Related
I am using DefaultAzureCredential library to authenticate against azure to use key vault and my app is deployed in on prem. So right now I am using client id/secrete stored in environment variable of server. I don't want to store any kind of secret in environment variable. Is there any other approach by which I can access key vault in my on prem app without storing client id/secret in environment variable. If some one has access to server they can see that environment variable so I want to avoid that. I know if app is deployed in azure then I can enable managed identity but in my case it is on prem app and i registered that app in azure.
I dont want to store clientid/secret in environment variable. I would like to know any other approach by which this should get clientid.secret in memory and use that. I also dont want to store encrypted version of secret in environment variable
I think this section can help you to check if you can or can't do it.
I think using Powershell to Connect-AzAccount a user in your on prem server can be an option, but this means your app are trying to access the Azure key vault on behalf of the user, so you also need to add the access policy for this user in Azure key vault page.
We are using custom c# library to connect to Azure Key vault & to do some custom processing on the secrets available on the library. In turn this c# library is been consumed by .net core web API application which is deployed on Azure service Fabric.
Till this time, our c# library (used to connect to Azure Key vault) using secure certificate and AAD application to connect to key vault but want to upgrade the library to use Azure VMSS's(where VMSS is managed by Azure Service Fabric) system assigned managed identity to access the key vault. Will this work?
Will the VMSS's system assigned managed identity be available for class library which is in turn consumed by the web api hosted on Azure VMSS? the reason to ask this question is, the VMSS's managed identity is not used by web api hosted on VMSS but the VMSS's managed identity should be consumed by the c# class library which is used in my web api project. Please confirm.
It should work, the MSI can be available anywhere within the VMSS. As long as your code is running in the VMSS, it can use the MSI.
To confirm this, you can also try to make an http request to the Azure Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) endpoint in your custom code as the comment mentioned, if you can get the token successfully, it means you can access the MSI.
I am not sure what library you use, but if the library encapsulates the authentication against AAD then it depends on the functionallity exposed by it.
Anyway, there's a library published by Microsoft to authenticate against AAD and acquire tokens to KeyVault (among other resources) using system assigned identity / managed identity / any kind of authentication method.
See here https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-net/tree/master/sdk/identity/Azure.Identity
I am using Identity server to handle logins in my app hosted in MS Azure. I am using Azure key vault to store my certificates. When I am trying to obtain certificates from Azure Key Vault on local machine, everything works fine, but after deploying to the server, I am getting the error described bellow.
I have followed this tutorial: https://damienbod.com/2020/04/09/using-certificates-from-azure-key-vault-in-asp-net-core/
I have created Azure AD and registered my app into it. Also I have created Azure Key Vault, added my app into Key Vault access principles and inside my app service I have allowed identity assigned by the system.
When I deployed this app on the server I am getting this error
In the key vault I allowed all permissions for this app
Is there some more setting, which needs to be done before deploying?
Thanks.
After you enable the system-assigned identity for your app service, you also need to add it to the Access policies of the keyvault with the correct certificate permission(just navigate to the Access policies, search for the web app name and add it).
The sample you provided use the AzureServiceTokenProvider, when you deploy your code to app service, it should use the system-assigned identity to access the keyvault in your case.
To let this work, you also need to specify the AzureServicesAuthConnectionString environment variable in your app service with RunAs=App, see this link.
Could anyone provide some instruction on how you would go about assigning a Managed Service Identity to a Remotely-hosted Web app?
My application is registered in AAD to enable the use of authentication. I want to remove the appSecret from appsettings and store that in the KeyVault and access the KeyVault using the MSI.
I have looked at the MS docs and followed a few guides, but have not, as of yet, managed to successfully retrieve my secret.
In the first instance, I just wanted to store a secret and get that back, and once that was working, get the client secret using the same approach.
Managed identity only works when you host your app in Azure.
This is because it works as a local endpoint inside the Azure instances.
Let me give some details of my setup
I am building an asp.net core API app being hosted on Azure. I store my secret keys and stuff in azure keyvault. However, I have some AzureAddClientId and secret which is now stored in appsettings.json( to access key vault ). I have also committed appsettings.json to my git repo. However I know that is insecure. I use Azure DevOps for releases. So I'm thinking of doing the following. Please let me know your thoughts on this.
add appsettings.json to git ignore and share the file among developers.
add AzureAddClientId and AzureAADClientSecret to azure DevOps build pipeline as variables. ( Will devops automatically take the variables just as if they were in appsettings.json? )
Please have a look at using Managed Identities.
A common challenge when building cloud applications is how to manage the credentials in your code for authenticating to cloud services. Keeping the credentials secure is an important task. Ideally, the credentials never appear on developer workstations and aren't checked into source control. Azure Key Vault provides a way to securely store credentials, secrets, and other keys, but your code has to authenticate to Key Vault to retrieve them.
The managed identities for Azure resources feature in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) solves this problem. The feature provides Azure services with an automatically managed identity in Azure AD. You can use the identity to authenticate to any service that supports Azure AD authentication, including Key Vault, without any credentials in your code.