I have been struggling to find out what way to best manage access and allowing our techs to access our customers subscriptions and Azure resources, without giving them explicit rights as contributors or the likes on each subscription.
Now I bumped into the Privilege Identity Management feature (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-privileged-identity-management-configure?toc=%2fazure%2factive-directory%2fprivileged-identity-management%2ftoc.json) and it seems like it would do exactly what I want. Just-in-time administrative access for example.
Now with how the CSP access to our customer's subscriptions and Azure tenant is set up providing access via the AdminAgent/TenantAdmin group on the customer's subscription. I can only implicitly see them from our tenant or when I'm not explicitly in the customer's tenant. In other words they never show up in any lookups or dropdowns in our own Azure portal, I always have to state explicitly what tenant I want to access (portal.azure.com/tenant.onmicrosoft.com [I am really fine with this BTW]).
Can anyone tell me how they are doing this? I mean there must be some way of doing this that scales?
These two articles were very helpful in understanding how the CSP model is intended to work. The second one is especially interesting as it provides a way of achieving what I want but I would prefer a way without adding my users to the customer’s Azure AD. Something like the delegate admin access that is provided by the AdminAgent/TenantAdmin groups.
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/hybridcloudbp/2016/06/08/identity-and-rights-management-in-csp-model/
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/hybridcloudbp/2017/06/05/identity-and-rights-management-in-csp-model-part2/
But I feel there is so little info on this and where exactly is one supposed to look for help? I find being a CSP and looking for technical assistance not very comfortable.
Alternately, you could implement an IAM system to make it easier to
create/delete accounts for each customer or partner's users in appropriate
containers in your Azure AD (or any other directory for that matter).
This is a solution designed to do exactly this kind of B2B delegated management:
https://hitachi-id.com/solutions/identity-express-b2b.html
Today you can't really use Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM) through the CSP model, for the reason you've identified: individual users from a CSP partner are not represented in the customer's Azure AD tenant, so you can't assign a PIM policy to them.
My suggestion here would be to reduce to a bare minimum the number of users who have admin access to your customer's tenant, and use them only for inviting the rest of the users needed from your tenant into the customer's tenant as B2B guest users. Once they're in the tenant, they can be given access to the Azure subscription one normally would (and they can use PIM to get that access just-in-time).
Related
I am working on an application, and its registration in Azure AD must allow Accounts in any organizational directory to sign-in. We built this with the thought that we could manage the roles for the app within Azure, so we made a few roles. The roles would also be only assignable and used by employees within our organization.
The whole time we thought that these roles can only be assigned within the Azure AD of the organization that owns the app's registration. We now found that when a user from another tenant signs into our app, they can find the app in their Azure's Enterprise Applications and just assign themselves roles. This means that they'd be able to view data that was never meant to be accessible to them. We don't want any other organization to have access to assigning these roles.
So is there any way to disable other tenants' ability to assign themselves a role in their Azure's Enterprise Application? I just want them to be able to log into the app, not give themselves any roles.
Is this even the appropriate way to achieve what we want? If not, what would be the proper way to do this?
At least I am not aware of any mechanism that will prevent admins from other tenants to assign roles to user (it works by design).
If you want to use the application roles only within your tenant, I would suggest that you use the tenantid that is also part of the claims when you doing authorization within your application...
I'm wondering a few things about azure ad.
I currently have a little software with self users managed, in database, with custom properties, and access token self generation, etc.
In order to develop micro services, azure functions, and handle SSO the right way, i would like to migrate my users management to azure active directory, but i'm a bit lost with its features.
Is there a way to handle custom properties for users in azure ad ?
Users can be affected to one or many 'agencies', with some 'roles' in this affectation, such as 'agency supervisor', 'agency user' etc, which aad feature is the best designed for this ? Groups ? Roles ?
Is it a best practice to store custom business-related user properties in an associated database instead of aad ? (Maybe in order to migrate user management later ?)
I'm sorry for these questions but after a lot a research i'm still there.
Maybe some of you have great feedback or documentation for me.
Thank you !
There are two products, Azure Active Directory (AAD) and Azure B2C Active Directory. The first one is used within organizations, the latter can be used for multi-tenant situations where you let people from 'outside' your domain register with their own identity provider (other AAD, Oauth, etc).
Simply said, the AAD is for within the organization, Azure B2C AD is for external users.
The B2C AD features are a layer on top of the 'regular' AAD, so every feature in the AAD is available in B2C AAD as well.
Azure B2C was made with extensibility in mind, and you can (programmatically) add extra schema attributes to the users in your B2C Organization (such as companyId or other identifiers you use to differentiate in your product). We use a mixture of security groups for setting user 'roles', and we use custom claims with the extra schema attributes so I know what client a user belongs to (I'm working on a multi-tenant SaaS app).
If you are going to store a lot of information about the user that is LOB-application data, use a separate database to store that, as the (B2C) AAD is not a very good place to store large amount of (nested) data.
I am the primary developer on a multi-tenant SaaS web application hosted in Microsoft Azure. We use Azure AD for all authentication. Because our application holds personal information, we and our customers want a way to restrict access to specific users. We just need a simple yes/no restriction in place so only assigned users may access the application. We've considered Application Roles, but it seems like a lot of overhead when the only needed option is "authorized".
While researching this, I came across the following "User assignment required" property in Azure AD.
User assignment required property in Azure Portal
After some testing, I found that it functioned exactly as we need it to. The customer has full control over which users may access the application, and neither party has to configure Application Roles. The only downside is that this property is configured on the customer's end. Is there a way for me, as the developer, to require this setting? Or perhaps a way to enable this setting by default?
Clarification: The end-goal is minimal configuration done by the customer. If "User assignment required" can be enabled by the developers (before customer registration), that would be ideal.
Basically you cannot specify it in advance, it is up to the customer's administrator to set up the requirement.
This is their concern, not your application's concern.
One possible way would be to set appRoleAssignmentRequired on the created Service Principal to true via a Graph API call.
But that will require quite privileged access, with their admin logged in.
Service Principal entity reference
Get SP by app Id
I'm quite new to all things MS/AD and coming from the app developer side of things so please bear with me if i'm not using the right terminology. I can't find confirmation in the online docs for this, so grateful for any ideas or links that could be helpful.
The scenario: my organization is a O365 shop and have a bunch of stuff in Azure. One project is a custom platform with several web apps. Most are accessed by our own folks via SSO, but some of these apps will be accessed by external users from our partners/vendors. A couple of these are MS shops but most are not and we can't require MS accounts.
The twist: we need to delegate user management to our partners/vendors. So as an example, for app3 we will have tons of partner/vendor organizations that need access. We want to give 1 person from that organization the responsibility of inviting their colleagues and removing folks when anyone leaves their organization. In many cases, they won't necessarily have the same email address domains so we can't restrict/group in that manner. In other cases, we need each national office of a global organization to have its own delegated admin to manage staff so there may be separate organizations with users that have the same email address domain.
My questions: Is Azure AD B2C the right approach for this?
Can it support this kind of delegated management (something like https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-accessmanagement-self-service-group-management)?
Would we need configure a separate Azure AD B2C directories for each external organization or should these be groups within one Azure AD B2C directory?
At this time there is no out-of-the-box support for user management delegation in Azure AD B2C, whether it's delegatin user management to other B2C admins using local (.onmicrosoft.com) accounts or external users using local (#myemail.com) or social accounts. Azure AD B2C does not support self-service group management capabilities either. You can request either of these in the Azure AD B2C feedback forum.
Is the same instance of these apps going to support people from these multiple organizations?
If the answer is no, meaning that your are going to have one instance of the app for organization A, and another for organization B, you can definitely have multiple Azure AD B2C directories and wire up each application to each directory.
If a single instance of these apps will need to support multiple of these organization, then I can think of two options for you:
Use Azure AD B2C and build all the delegation and user management logic yourself. You can have a custom attributes to assign users their "organization" and another to indicate whether they can manage users or not. You would then need to create a user management UI that queries the Graph for all users that are in the same "organization" and let the user manage those. You would also need to build the invitation feature, first into this UI by creating the user through Azure AD Graph and setting its "organization" claim accordingly, and then by directing users to the Password Reset policy as their "account verification" flow.
Use Azure AD and the B2B collaboration feature (including its ability to delegate invitations). This also opens up the self-service group management capabilities you referenced. If you don't want these users to get access to other things in your organization, you would probably want to create a separate Azure AD tenant for this and also invite people from your on Azure AD via B2B collaboration.
Conceptually, B2C is meant for external users, and Azure AD is meant for internal users, with B2B complementing those internal users with partners that collaborate enough with those internal users to be almost thought of as internal users. That being said, use whichever one best suits your needs. Don't forget to keep in mind that their pricing model is very different.
We want to create a MVC web application using claims-based authentication, expecting roles as one of the claims. We want to Federate authentication providers using the Azure Access Control Service to manage this federation. One of the authentication providers is our Azure AD.
The problem is that Azure AD doesn't seem to be able to generate role (or even group) claims. What is the appropriate method to manage group or role access in Azure AD and have role claims served by Azure Access Control Service.
Thanks.
Edit:
A previous comment asked for details: We want to provide access to our cloud application to 3rd parties using their active directory (to simplify user management for them). Our application has a few levels of access to information that the 3rd parties can configure. We were hoping they could do this in their AD (based on our instructions). Groups seemed like the obvious choice, but if there is another way that works, as long as we can provide instructions, it'll work.
We want our application to get claims for a user's level of access. If we had only one partner that was using Azure AD, we could use the graph API against that endpoint, but with multiple partners changing over time, we wanted to federate them so our application only needs to trust the federation server. We were assuming that we needed Azure ACS to manage the federation.
AAD does support roles / groups and you can administer them from the Azure Portal.
Howeve, these are not passed in the "canned" set of claims.
You need to use the Graph API and then convert them e.g. Windows Azure Active Directory: Converting group memberships to role claims.
Update:
ACS requires something to federate with. You can't hook a customer AD up to ACS - you need something like ADFS on top of their AD.
I assume your cloud app. runs in Azure?
Then make your app. multi-tenanted. If your customers have their own Azure tenant, it will work. You just need to add the Graph API code to your app. ACS is not required.
Your customers then run DirSync. This keeps their Azure tenant in sync. with their AD changes.
So two options:
Customer does not have Azure tenant. They install ADFS and federate with AAD.
Customer's who do have Azure tenant use DirSync.
Good news: we have recently turned on the Application Roles and Groups Claim features in Azure AD.
Get a quick overview here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/ad/archive/2014/12/18/azure-active-directory-now-with-group-claims-and-application-roles.aspx
Deep dive post and video on app roles feature is here: http://www.dushyantgill.com/blog/2014/12/10/roles-based-access-control-in-cloud-applications-using-azure-ad/
Deep dive post and video on app roles feature is here: http://www.dushyantgill.com/blog/2014/12/10/authorization-cloud-applications-using-ad-groups/
Hope that helps.
Groups aren't the best choice because they are unique within each directory. Unless you get your customers to define a set of groups that have well-known names and match against the strings, that is (the object IDs of a group is different per directory even if they have the same name). I'm actually from the Azure AD team and we are seriously considering releasing a feature to allow you to define roles in your app that your customers can assign their users to. Please stay tuned on this. In the meantime, unfortunately groups are the only way to go. You would have to call "GetMemberGroups" using the Graph to retrieve the groups that the user is assigned to.
What are your timelines for releasing this application? You can contact me directly to see if we can work with your scenario.