If I am the owner of an AAD application that has Azure RBAC role assignments subscriptions that my user account isn't a part of, how can I (either portal or Powershell) check what those assignments are?
Related
Azure ARM handles identity requirements for the requests it receives through Azure AD. The requesting user should be a valid Azure AD user with a valid identity and authorization roles. The azure subscription for which the request is made should comply to deployment limits and biling policies.
There is a role of Azure Tenant that is associated with requesting user and Subscription. What role these tenants play and what is the workflow ?
I'm not sure what you mean exactly by the role of the Azure tenant in this context, but you can assign roles at the tenant scope and that's what the ARM template documentation describes. For example, you can assign an Owner role to a user at the tenant scope so that the user is an Owner of the tenant. As for the relationship between tenants and subscriptions, multiple subscriptions can trust the same Azure AD tenant, but each subscription can only trust a single tenant. You can associate a subscription with a tenant by logging in and selecting the Subscription, and then changing the directory. With a Global Admin or User Admin role, you can add or remove users from your tenant.
As I'm sure you already know, an Azure tenant is a dedicated and trusted instance of Azure AD. Typically, each tenant represents a single organization. The words "tenant" and "directory" are used interchangeably. The tenant is an account in Azure that comes with a subdomain and an associated Azure Active Directory. In order to use an Azure Active Directory you need to become a tenant within the system. So a tenant is basically securing a .onmicrosoft.com subdomain. At that point you would have one account registered in your Azure AD.
So in the context of the ARM template, you need an Azure tenant to house your users and link to your subscriptions.
A tenant represents an organization in Azure Active Directory. It's a dedicated Azure AD service instance that an organization receives and owns when it signs up for a Microsoft cloud service such as Azure, Microsoft Intune, or Microsoft 365. Each Azure AD tenant is distinct and separate from other Azure AD tenants. Once you have an Azure AD tenant, you can define an application and assign it permissions so it can call REST APIs. Your organization may already have an Azure AD tenant that you can use for your application.
In Azure AD, users are segmented into tenants. A tenant is a logical construct that represents a secure, dedicated instance of Azure AD typically associated with an organization. Each subscription is associated with an Azure AD tenant. Next, the ARM checks whether the user has sufficient permission to access a resource using Azure RBAC (Role based Access Control) which manages the permissions. An Azure role specifies a set of permissions a user may take on a specific resource. Next, the resource request is checked against an Azure Resource Policy which are defined to allow specific operations for a specific resource. Next, ARM checks the Azure subscription limit for the specific resources in that subscription for resource groups. And finally, the financial commitment associated with the subscription is checked as a final control before deploying the resource for management through the ARM.
ARM flow and working
Please find the below Microsoft documentation for your reference: -
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/govern/resource-consistency/resource-access-management
Thanking you,
I activated my global admin role in Privileged Identity Management like so
When I navigate to the Access Control blade under a subscription, I see the Add role assignment options disabled.
Doesn't global admin has global rights and can do this?
Thanks
Doesn't global admin has global rights and can do this?
No. You're global admin in your Azure AD so you can perform all operations in Azure AD. Azure AD roles are different than Azure Subscription roles.
To be able to perform IAM related activities in an Azure Subscription, you must be assigned an Owner or User Access Administrator role in that Azure Subscription.
Considering you're the global admin in your Azure AD, you can elevate your permissions to perform IAM activities in Azure Subscription. Please see this link for more details: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/role-based-access-control/elevate-access-global-admin.
Other option would be to ask someone in your team with proper access in the Azure Subscription to assign you in Owner or User Access Administrator role.
Azure roles happen to be different than Azure AD roles.
By default AD roles manage AD and azure roles manage azure resources. However there are some cross roles which can access resources across when needed. more information here
Since Global Administrator is a cross-service role, he can elevate himself by granting himself the user access administrator role as here. Then I was able to see the disabled options, enabled.
more information
What is the difference between Role Assignments and appRoleAssignments in Microsoft Azure?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/role-based-access-control/role-assignments-list-rest
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/serviceprincipal-list-approleassignments?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http
Primary difference is that Role Assignments is an Azure Subscription thing while App Role Assignments is Microsoft Graph API thing.
You use Role Assignments to assign access to users in your Azure AD to various resources in an Azure Subscription. Based on the role assigned, a user is able to perform activities against the Azure resources in an Azure Subscription.
App Role Assignments is essentially assigning access to users in your Azure AD to the custom roles that you created for your Azure AD application. These roles are essentially custom roles specific to your application (e.g. Administrator, User etc.) and is used in your application code to restrict access to various parts of your application e.g. a user in "Administrator" app role can access admin screens while a user in "User" app role can't.
I'am a permanent member of the RBAC role "User Access Admin" on a resource in Azure. But when I try to access the resource from Azure AD PIM, I get a 403 error.
I can access and manage permissions the resource in the portal via IAM and I have the correct license.
Why doesn't PIM let me manage the resource?
Regards,
Carl
The User Access Administrator belongs to the Azure RBAC roles which are used to manage the Azure resources in the subscription, if you have this role, you can manage the role assignments in Access control (IAM) of the subscription/resource directly.
Privileged Identity Management(PIM) is a feature of Azure AD, even it can also be used to manage the role assignments in subscription, to use it e.g. Assign users to roles, you need the Azure AD admin roles which are different from Azure RBAC roles, in this case, at least you need Privileged role administrator, see here.
To give an Azure AD admin role to a user, follow this link.
What is the difference between IAM and Azure AD on the azure cloud?
They don't make it clear.
Identity Access Management is what they call the Role-Based Access Control system in Azure subscriptions. Basically, it allows you to give users certain roles on subscriptions, resource groups, or individual resources.
Azure AD is a more general identity management solution. It allows you to manage users and applications, users' access to those applications and more. Calling it the "same as on-prem AD" is not really quite right, since their features differ quite a lot. The general purpose is similar to on-prem AD of course.
Logically Azure subscriptions exist within one Azure AD (they are linked to one). But having your user account in Azure AD does not give you access to Azure subscriptions! In addition to a user having to be a member (or invited guest user) of the AAD assigned to the subscription, you also have to use the RBAC (IAM) system to assign roles for users.
Azure AD is for Authentiction - User must prove who they are using a Username and Password
IAM (RBAC) is for Authorization - a User is assigned a role or permissions to use a specific resource.
What is the difference between IAM and Azure AD on the azure cloud?
Azure IAM is Azure Role-Based Access control (RBAC). Work for Azure subscription, to manage Azure resources.
Using RBAC, you can segregate duties within your team and grant only
the amount of access to users that they need to perform their jobs.
Instead of giving everybody unrestricted permissions in your Azure
subscription or resources, you can allow only certain actions. For
example, use RBAC to let one employee manage virtual machines in a
subscription, while another can manage SQL databases within the same
subscription.
Azure AD same as on-prem AD, create users to access or manage some applications.
Azure IAM same as Active directory group(have some permissions), Azure AD users in this group will have those permissions.
Identify and access management (IAM) is called RBAC (Role-Based Access Control). This is used to grant level of access such as reader , contributor , owner to Azure resources and hence perform role assignment.
Azure AD is identity management solution for Azure. It is a live directory or a database that stores the user accounts and their password.