Is there a comprehensive list over which keys and UUIDs provided by Azure are sensitive information?
For context, I am setting up a react app using react-adal. This requires me to provide the tenantID and clientID to the app. It would be trivial for anybody with a little know-how to extract those UUIDs from the application given the way I currently have it setup. It's a static app with no back-end service, so it all runs in the browser. I have the application setup as a App registration (registered app?), in AzureAD to allow users to login with their Office365 account for my organization. Almost all the tutorials online show setting it up the same way I am. However, some tutorials with screenshots almost always have the clientID censored in the screenshots.
Edit: While this question does solve my immediate need, I am in search of documentation from Microsoft concerning security best-practices in regards to Azure keys, UUIDs, etc.
Your tenant ID is public and refers to the entire Azure AD directory. It must be in order to be used for authentication. You can find it here.
Your client app ID is not secret, as it must be used with the client secret in order to obtain a token.
Related
I am going to build a web application that allows users to sign in with their Google or Twitter account. I think OpenID Connect(OAuth2) is the standard today to verify the identity.
I also want to provide several API services that can be only accessed with a valid access token from either Google or Twitter.
For example, all the four API's above are going to be public and so I have to protect from unauthorized users. For NodeJS based API services I can use http://www.passportjs.org/ to protect all APIs.
Assume, in the future the number of API's will be grow for example up to 20 API's and sign in with Facebook account will be also allowed.
Again, all the API's have to be protected and I have to do it 16 times with http://www.passportjs.org/.
In addition add the new provider Facebook, I have to do the changes on all 20 APIs.
The question is, is their a way to keep centralized, which means in the future when I will provide more the providers for example GITHUB for sign in I would like to do changes in one place not in 20 places.
Is the tool https://www.ory.sh/hydra what I need?
These are perhaps the two primary features of OAuth 2.0 and Open ID Connect:
Federated sign in to your UIs via multiple identity providers and the ability to easily add new options such as GitHub in a centralised manner
Full control over claims included in access tokens, so that your APIs can authorize requests however you'd like
FOREIGN ACCESS TOKENS
You should aim to avoid ever using these in your apps. Your UIs and APIs should only use tokens issued by your own Authorization Server (Ory Hydra), which manages the connection to the Identity Provider. Adding a new sign in method will then just involve centralised configuration changes, with zero code changes in either UIs or APIs.
IF YOU DON'T HAVE AN AUTHORIZATION SERVER YET
Maybe have a look at the Curity Identity Server and its free community edition - use sign in with GitHub, which has strong support for both of these areas:
Many Authenticators
Many Options for Issuing Claims
EXTERNAL RESOURCES
One exception to the above is that your APIs may occasionally need to access a user's Google resources after login, by calling Google APIs. This would require the token issued by Google. It can be managed via an embedded token approach - though it doesn't sounds like you need that right now.
I have a pretty standard application written in Java which also runs queries against a DB. The application resides on GCP and the DB on Atlas.
For understandable reasons, I don't want to keep the username and password for the DB in the code.
So option number 1 that I had in mind, is to pass the username and password as environment variables to the application container in GCP.
Option number 2 is using Secret Manager in GCP and store my username and password there, and pass the GCP Credentials as an environment variable to the application container in GCP.
My question is, what is the added value of option number 2 if it has any? It seems that option 2 is even worse from a security aspect since if some hacker gets the google credentials, it has access to all of the secrets stored in the Secret Manager.
I don't know what are the best practices and what is advised to do in such cases. Thank you for your help.
Having credentials in GCP secret manager will help you to keep track of all the secrets and changes in a centralized location and access globally from any of your app.
For a standard application where one JAVA is connecting to a DB, may not add much values.
You may look into kubernetes secret for that reason.
If your application resides in GCP, you don't need a service account key file (which is your security concern, and you are right. I wrote an article on this)
TL;DR use ADC (Application Default Credential) to automatically get the service account credential provided automatically on Google Cloud Component (look at metadata server for more details).
Then grant this component identity (by default or user defined, when supported), i.e. the service account email, to access to your secrets.
And that's all! You haven't secrets in your code and your environment variable, neither the login/password, nor the service account key file.
If you have difficulties to use ADC in Java, don't hesitate to share your code. I will be able to help your to achieve this.
To use Secret Manager on Google Cloud you need to install the Secret Manager Java SDK Libraries. This documentation shows how to get started with the Cloud Client Libraries for the Secret Manager API, you only need to go to the Java section.
This Libraries helps you to access your keys in order that it can be used by your app.
The following link shows how to get details about a secret by viewing its metadata. Keep in mind that viewing a secret's metadata requires the Secret Viewer role (roles/secretmanager.viewer) on the secret, project, folder, or organization.
I recommend you to create a special Service Account to handle the proper permissions for your app, because if you don’t have a SA defined, the default SA is what is going to generate the request, and it is not secure. you can learn more about how to create a service account in this link
On the other hand, you can find an example on how you can use the following guide that contains a good example of finding your credentials automatically, that's more convenient and secure than manually passing credentials.
I am using amazon MWS service but getting throttling because i'm using the same key for entire application. Can we create multiple access and secret key to handle this throttling issue?
Please anyone can help me... what can be the best solution for this?
In principle Yes BUT it's not as simple as that, and I suspect that Amazon's certification process would not authorise your 2nd app if you supply the same developer info (address etc...).
To recap, when you want to write an app that accesses MWS info, you need to submit your app's details for authorisation by Amazon. eg what kind of security do you implement to protect buyer sales order details etc and if granted, you are then able to "attach" your app to a seller's account via Manage Third Party Apps, and, with your Apps credentials, get the auth token - but you knew this already...
And if you're getting throttling issues, then I'd revisit the help page and digest what they say.
We have a multi-instance Saas Application:
Each of our clients is given their own instance and their own subdomain for the site.
Our application (Web app & API) is protected by Azure, currently with the ADAL javascript libraries
We also have a second API for system-level integration that needs to be protected, currently using a second 'native' azure app, but this is likely incorrect and we want to consolidate
Our application reads and writes to the Azure AD both through the AzureAD Graph API and Microsoft Graph API (including password reset calls)
We're looking at Azure AD application configuration options and want to make sure we're building the most sensible and secure Azure AD Application. Here are some of the documentation we've been looking at:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/active-directory-integrating-applications
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/active-directory-v2-protocols-oauth-client-creds
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/multitenant-identity/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/active-directory-v2-compare
We want the application to be multi-tenant to ease configuration, and allow availability in the Gallery; but when looking into doing so we're left with some security questions.
A. Which application version to use
1) v1. Allows access to both Graph API. And as suggested by Microsoft we should use this when we're not concerned with Microsoft Accounts.
2) v2. When looking at the MS Graph API documentation it recommends using v2. Reportedly doesn't work for AzureAD Graph API? Allows the same app to be of multiple types (Web App/API and native), which we may or may not need to protect both our web api and our system api (which we're still trying to model).
B. How to manage the reply URL when our clients have different sub-domains?
I've noted the following options:
1) On the app registry, we add the reply urls for all of our customers. This seems okay because we only need to do it once, but feels odd. Is there a limit to the number of reply urls?
2) Have one reply url, but manage an external tool to route the responses to the correct instance, leveraging the state url parameter. Microsoft seems to be suggesting that in this link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/multitenant-identity/authenticate I'm not sure if ADAL allows us to set the state for a return subdomain url though. Is this approach common?
3) Is it possible for each ServiceProvider instance in our client's directories to configure the reply url to their own subdomain? I feel like this would be the cleanest approach, but I don't see documentation for it. It would be nice if we could set the replyURL programmatically as well.
C. How to manage authorization to the Graph APIs (AzureAD and Microsoft Graph)
I've noted the following options:
1) Use the client credential flow, with a single application key (used for all clients). As clients subscribe they will admin consent with our app to give the application permission to their directory. Of course we'd do our best to keep that key secure. But if for some reason it was compromised this would put all of our clients at risk, not just the one instance that was compromised.
2) Same as 1, but use a certificate instead of a secret key. I understand this could be a little more secure, but I don't see how it wouldn't suffer from the same issue as 1.
3) Instead of using application permissions, use delegated permissions with an admin user. This would be good, in that it inherently prevents one instance of our app from talking to the wrong directory. However changes to the administrator may interrupt service; and I think it is best audit-wise that our application is responsible for the changes it makes. (Also, do delegated permissions allow for password resetting? I know for app permissions you need to run powershell script to upgrade the application's directory role)
4) Is there some way for the service principal to generate a unique key for it's directory on creation? can this be handed back to our app programmatically? Perhaps during admin consent?
Really good questions. I'll try to answer each to the best of my knowledge, but if someone has other ideas, feel free to comment/add your own answer.
A. Which application version to use
v2 should allow you to call Azure AD Graph API. The documentation you linked shows an example of specifying Azure AD Graph scopes:
GET https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/v2.0/authorize?client_id=2d4d11a2-f814-46a7-890a-274a72a7309e&scope=https%3A%2F%2Fgraph.windows.net%2Fdirectory.read%20https%3A%2F2Fgraph.windows.net%2Fdirectory.write
The main decision point if you should use v2 is: Do you need to support Microsoft accounts which are not in an Azure AD? If yes, you need to use v2. Otherwise there is no problem using v1 (well, lack of dynamic permissions).
Since you are using Azure AD Graph to modify things, I'm going to guess pure Microsoft accounts will not work for you. I would recommend sticking with v1.
v2 also has some limits: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/active-directory-v2-limitations
B. How to manage the reply URL when our clients have different sub-domains?
I could not find documentation on a limit for URLs. It could be that you can add however many you want. But I am not sure :)
If your subdomains look like this: https://customer.product.com, you can configure the reply URL as:
https://*.product.com
It will then allow any subdomain to be specified in the redirect_uri.
Though note that at the time of writing this, wildcard reply URLs are not supported in v2.
C. How to manage authorization to the Graph APIs (AzureAD and Microsoft Graph)
Using multiple keys makes no sense as they are all equal anyway :) Any of them could be used to call another tenant.
You can store the secret/certificate in an Azure Key Vault, and then use Azure AD Managed Service Identity to get it on app startup.
I would prefer using delegated permissions, but if the users of the app won't have the rights to do the things your app needs to do then that does not work.
I would just make sure it is not possible for a customer's instance to call to the APIs with another tenant id. And also make sure token caches are separated in such a way that it is not possible to get another tenant's access token (an in-memory cache on the instance would be good).
I'm creating a web app to work with Azure AD.
I'm going through the process of making the REST requests, etc., and I'm a bit confused as to the endpoint URL parameters given by AD versus those given in the help documentation versus what I'm given in the AD console online. On some of the documentation pages, the endpoints are given as "https://login.windows.net/[some domain].onmicrosoft/...", where on the AD console, I'm given a long hash, with no ".onmicrosoft/..." present. I'm having problems with both (something else is obviously wrong), but I can't proceed debugging that until I know which I should proceed with, so I know that this isn't causing the problem.
The "hash" is actually a GUID, and is your tenant ID - the unique identifier for your Azure AD tenant. When constructing the login.windows.net endpoints you can use the tenant ID and the domain name (yourtenant.onmicrosoft.com) interchangeably.
See this post from Vitorrio Bertocci for more details on the subject.
This is indeed confusing and not well hashed out in the documentation.
I've created a web-app that also uses Office 365 authentication with Azure AD, and I am using the hash generated by the Azure AD console for my endpoint URLs, and everything is functioning well. Whatever the AD console gives you online is correct, and will work for your particular app (the hash given is in fact replacing a .onmicrosoft domain, and will work well).