This is an old revision of the document!
Identity and Access Management
Azure AD
- Custom AAD roles require a P1 or P2 license
- Because Azure AD is HTTP/HTTPS based, it does not use Kerberos authentication. Instead, it uses HTTP and HTTPS protocols such as SAML, WS-Federation, and OpenID Connect for authentication (and OAuth for authorization).
- MFA is supported for free tier AAD by way of Security Defaults.
- Security Defaults is a a built-in set of protections against identity based attacks.
AAD Roles
The Account Administrator is the user that initially signed up for the Azure subscription, and is responsible as the billing owner of the subscription.
Only the Billing Administrator of an account can transfer ownership of a subscription.
Conditional Access
- Conditional Access is a capability that takes in various signals and determines whether a given user should be granted access to resources.
- Conditional Access is recommended over per-user MFA requirements for requiring MFA.
- Conditional Access requires a AAD P1 license, but the risk-based policy capabilties requires a P2 license
- When a user/group is both included and excluded in a policy the exclusion overrides the inclusion.
- If there are more than one policies with criteria that is met and one grants access and another blocks access the block policy will take effect over the grant policy.
Examples of conditions
- Require multi-factor authentication.
- Require device to be marked as compliant.
- Require hybrid Azure AD joined device.
- Require approved client app.
- Require app protection policy.
- Require password change.
Control user access based on session controls to enable limited experiences within specific cloud applications. As an example, Conditional Access App Control uses signals from Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps to block the download, cut, copy, and print capabilities for sensitive documents, or to require labeling of sensitive files. Other session controls include sign-in frequency and application enforced restrictions that, for selected applications, use the device information to provide users with a limited or full experience, depending on the device state.
App Identity
When you have applications, hosted services, or automated tools that needs to access or modify resources, you can create an identity for the app. This identity is known as a service principal.
For services that support Managed Identities they should be used instead of service principles.
Managed Identities
- Managed Identities provides Azure services with automatically managed identity in AAD. You can use the identity with any service that supports AAD, like Azure Key Vault.
Types
- System-assigned. Some Azure services allow you to enable a managed identity directly on a service instance. When you enable a system-assigned managed identity, an identity is created in Azure AD. The identity is tied to the lifecycle of that service instance. When the resource is deleted, Azure automatically deletes the identity for you. By design, only that Azure resource can use this identity to request tokens from Azure AD.
- User-assigned. You may also create a managed identity as a standalone Azure resource. You can create a user-assigned managed identity and assign it to one or more instances of an Azure service. For user-assigned managed identities, the identity is managed separately from the resources that use it.
Terminology
- Client ID
- Principle ID
- Azure Instance Metadata Service (IMDS)
Administrative Units
- An Administrative Unit (AU) is a mechanism for limiting the permissions of an Azure AD role to apply to a selected set of users and/or groups instead of an entire AAD directory. It limits the scope of the role. When a group is selected the scope only applies to the group itself, not the users that are a member of the group.
An administrative unit is an Azure AD resource that can be a container for other Azure AD resources. An administrative unit can contain only users, groups, or devices.
- An administrative unit is similar in some ways to an organization unit in traditional AD.
- A AAD P1 license or better is required for each AU administrator, but members can be AAD free license or better.
- To create an Administrative Unit the user must be a Global Administrator or Privileged Role Administrator.
Applications and Permissions
- Delegated permissions are used by apps that have a signed-in user present.
- Application permissions are used by apps that run without a signed-in user present, for example, apps that run as background services or daemons.
