I hope youve enjoyed reading this blog and stay tuned for more coming soon! You can create a service principal by creating an app registration (Application) in Azure AD . Resources can include Microsoft 365 services, software as a service (SaaS) applications, custom applications, databases, HR systems, and so on. objectId will be a unique value for application object and each of the service principal. There are many authentication and. Always make sure to save the service principals password because there is no way to recover it if you were not able to save or have forgotten it. Monitor your service accounts to ensure usage patterns are correct, and that the service account is used. They shouldnt have more permissions than they need. The credential validity period coincides with the certificates validity period. rev2023.4.17.43393. See, Create a location-based Conditional Access policy, More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, Application and service principal objects in Azure AD, Application and service principal relationship in Azure AD, Azure AD workbook to help you assess Solorigate risk, How to use managed identities for App Service and Azure Functions, Create an Azure AD application and service principal that can access resources, Use Azure PowerShell to create a service principal with a certificate, Create a location-based Conditional Access policy, Access reviews for service principals assigned to privileged roles, Manual check of resource access control list using the Azure portal. Ensure the permission type for application is supported. In this post, I wanted to clarify the use case, difference and similarities between Service Principals and Managed Identities. As always, holler when having any questions petender@microsoft.com or @pdtit on Twitter, Comments are closed. Certificate based authentication on this service principal has now been enabled. My recommendation would be to remove the contributor role assignment and add the correct level. OpenVPN vs. IPsec - Pros and cons, what to use? In some cases, the lines between service principal and service account can blur. From here go to the Certificates & Secrets section, as you can see no certificates and secrets have been added yet. The expected result would be similar to the one shown below. Go to portal.azure.com and open the app registrations service. One instance of Azure AD associated with a single organization is named Tenant. And for sure, your IT Sec will give you a lot of grief if you did all that. Refer to the image below showing the certificate. What do you mean by "pass the hash on the service account to get an interactive shell"? Once the certificate is selected we can see the Thumbprint of the certificate in the Azure Portal as well. Want to support the writer? But whats the alternative? There are many more ways to configure Azure service principals like adding, removing, and resetting credentials. On the right side of the screen make sure you give the application a friendly name, which you can easily refer to. The tool that will be the focus of this article is the Azure PowerShell. Similarly, lets remove the System Assigned MI of the VM and use a User Assigned one in the next example (an Azure Resource can only be linked to one or the other, not both): As you notice, the Managed Identity object gets immediately removed from Azure AD. Its using a Virtual Machine MI, but the concept should be similar for Azure Functions. What we are able to do, however, is retrieve the users and check their authentication methods, i.e. To create a managed identity, go the Azure portal and navigate to the managed identity blade. Delegated permissions are used when a user is connecting via this service principal. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. This as we first need to generate a certificate. Sometimes you want to take action based on that, but not usually. Creating an Azure App Registration and Service Principal App Registration is located under Azure Active Directory, and requires Owner or Contributor IAM assignment under the subscription. A service principal is created when a user from that tenant consents to use of the application or API. If you mean that a random user could login as the service, they would still need the password, and presumably I won't be writing it on a post-it note next to my monitor. Fair, but security is like an onion. Press J to jump to the feed. From the Azure Portal, Create new Resource, and search for User Assigned Managed Identity. The ApplicationID represents the global application and is the same for application instances, across tenants. Since this is a learning-by-doing article, here are some prerequisites so you can follow along. The Service Principals access can be restricted by assigning Azure RBAC roles so that they can access the specific set of resources only. Within Azure when we want to automate tasks we have to use something similar, and its called a Service Principal. Consider a webapp with LDAP authentication. Azure Service Principals can have a password, secret key, or certificate-based credentials. While this seems all fair from a security perspective, since we are not literally using the Azure administrative accounts (former service account concepts, remember) anymore, there are also a few challenges involved in using SPs: Where Service Principals are important and very useful from a security perspective, I also pointed out some challenges. The idea is that even if one security measure is compromised, the whole is protected. Next step is to generate the password that follows the 20 characters long with 6 non-alphanumeric characters complexity. We are now able to connect with PowerShell and the service principal to this log analytics workspace. When using Service Principals there are two ways you can authenticate as that service principal: Using a Certificate This allows you to link a certificate to the Service Principal which you can use for authentication. Once done execute the below PowerShell code to connect to the Azure environment with the service principal. Before zooming in on these, lets take a step back and look at the different Azure Identity Objects we have available in Azure Active Directory today. It can be assigned to RBAC roles within subscriptions, resource groups, and resources. But again, there are no means to secure service principals any further. Grant the service account permissions needed to perform tasks, and no more. a log analytics workspace as well with the same service principal, and want to use a client secret (which I wouldnt recommend though if it supports certificate auth). After running the code, the new service principal should be created, and the properties are stored in the $sp variable. How to make Service Principals synchronise with Active Directory Domain Services (AADDS)? An example here could be out of an integration with Key Vault, where different Workload services belonging to the same application stack, need to read out information from Key Vault. By clicking Post Your Answer, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy. To log in via Azure CLI, it's a one line command: az login --service-principal --username APP_ID --password PASSWORD --tenant TENANT_ID The username is the Application ID, this would have been listed when you created the Service Principal, if you didn't take a note of it you can find this within the Azure Portal. Working with Azure Service Principal Accounts. Whereby this data is retrieved via the service principal from the Log analytics workspace in Azure! Specify the Resource Group, Azure Region and Name for this resource. Once you or the script has finished, you can easily run the following command to disconnect from the Microsoft Graph API. Once done hit Add Permissions. See the image below for reference. The tenant ID would also have been listed, if you dont have a note of it you can run the command to get a note of it. We are now ready to use the service principal in PowerShell scripts based on the above permissions. Once selected we can configure either Delegated or Application permissions, the difference between these two is quite simple. It would be best if youre working on a test tenant. The whole idea is to make every successful attack as low-impact as possible. For a 1:1 relation between both, you would use a System Assigned, where for a 1:multi relation, you would use a User Assigned Managed Identity. It has layers. Enforcecompliance I have a small script that creates my Service Principal and it generates a random password to go with the Service Principal so that I have it for those password-based authentication occasions. Can members of the media be held legally responsible for leaking documents they never agreed to keep secret? Confirm by clicking create and Wait for the resource creation to complete successfully. The Request API permissions screen on the right will open, in here we can select the Microsoft Graph API. Get many of our tutorials packaged as an ATA Guidebook. Provisioning and management of Azure resources. We have an app that needs to do app stuff, and those 2 concepts seems to be more or less the same thing: it's an identity with permission along with a password/secret/whatever credential. Still interested? To log in via PowerShell it is slightly more complex and requires a bit more code. In the above code GeneratePassword(20, 6), the first value means the length of the password, and the second value means the number of non-alphanumeric characters to include. In the application context, no one is signed in. You need to add one of the built-in RBAC roles scoped to the storage account to your service principal. Azure AD is the trusted Identity Object store, in which you can create different Identity Object types. Get-AzureADDirectoryRoleMember, and filter for objectType "Service Principal", or use Eg if I give my app the Files.ReadWrite permission, I can mess with the OneDrives of ALL users in my org. Only those that really need full administrator rights should have them! Automation tools and scripts often need admin or privileged access. A service account exists of a username and a password. These accounts are frequently used to run a specific scheduled task, web application pool or even SQL Server service. Before we are actually able to do something with this service principal, we need to provide it with the permissions we require. Select another Azure Resource in your subscription, for example an Azure Web App, Logic App, and once more select Identity from the settings. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. An Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) service principal is the local representation of an application object in a tenant or directory. Still, if I'm only using pure AAD this won't be a problem. (NOT interested in AI answers, please). Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. For example, in the image below, you can see that the AzVM_Reader service principal now has Reader access to the AzVM1 virtual machine. This, as older APIs like the Azure Active Directory API wont get the latest and greatest functionality of all that Azure Active Directory has to offer. 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