Identity and Access (Azure AD)

• Old-school corporate security
  • Network perimeters, firewalls, and physical access controls
  • Does not work good with bring your own device (BYOD), mobile apps, and cloud applications.
• Identity = new primary security boundary
  • Proper authentication and assignment of privileges is critical to maintaining control of your data.
  • Allows to maintain a security perimeter outside physical control
  • Possible to always be sure who has the ability to see & manipulate data and infrastructure with single sign-on and appropriate role-based access configuration.

Authentication and authorization

• Azure provides services to manage both through Azure Active Directory

Authentication

• 📝 Verification of a person or service looking to access a resource.
  • Establishes if they are who they say they are.
• Challenges a party for legitimate credentials, and provides the basis for creating a security principal for identity and access control use.
• Sometimes called az AuthN.

Authorization

• 📝 Establishes what level of access an authenticated person or service has.
• Specifies what data they’re allowed to access and what they can do with it.
• Sometimes shortened to AuthZ.

Azure Active Directory

• Called also as Azure AD.
• Cloud-based identity service.
• Can synchronize with existing on-premises Active Directory or can be used stand-alone.
• Allows to share identities in cloud (e.g. Microsoft 365), mobile on-premises applications.
• ❗📝 No SLA for free tier, 99.9% for standard & premium
• Some services:
  • Authentication.
    • Self-service password reset
    • Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
    • Custom banned password list, and smart lockout services.
  • Single-Sign-On (SSO)
  • Application management. Manage cloud and on-premises apps using Azure AD Application Proxy, SSO, the My apps portal (also referred to as Access panel), and SaaS apps.
  • Business to business (B2B) identity services: Manage guest users and external partners.
  • Business-to-Customer (B2C) identity services: Customize and control how users sign up, sign in, and manage their profiles when using apps & services.
  • Device Management
    • Manage how your cloud or on-premises devices access your corporate data.

Single sign-on

• More identities for single user
  • = more passwords & harder for users to remember them
  • = more risk of credential-related security incident
  • = harder management: more account lockouts and password reset requests
    • if a user leaves an organization = all identities must be tracked down
• Single sign-on (SSO) = single identity
  • = one password to access across all applications
  • 📝 less effort to manage e.g. if someone leaves an organization
• 📝 Allows you to use third-party e.g. on-prem identities in Azure.

SSO with Azure Active Directory

• Ability to combine data sources into an intelligent security graph.
  • Graph enables the ability to
    • provide threat analysis
    • real-time identity protection
• Applied to all accounts in Azure AD (can be synchronized from on-prem).
• Centralized identity provider is good
  • centralized security controls, reporting, alerting, and administration of the identity infrastructure.
• E.g. allows signing into email and Office 365 documents without having to reauthenticate.

Multi-factor authentication

• Called also MFA
• Requires two or more elements for full authentication.
  • Element categories:
    • Something you know
      • E.g. a password or the answer to a security question
    • Something you possess
      • E.g. a mobile app that receives a notification or a token-generating device
    • Something you are
      • E.g. a fingerprint or face scan used often on mobile devices.
• 💡 Enable it wherever possible for more security.

Azure AD MFA

• Integrates also with other third-party MFA providers.
• 💡 Always use at least for Global Administrator role in Azure AD.
• 📝 You can activate conditionally using Azure AD Identity Protection
  • E.g. any time a user is signing in from an unknown computer.

Providing identities to services

• Valuable for services to have identities
• Often, and against best practices, credential information is embedded in configuration files.
  • With no security around these configuration files, anyone with access to the systems or repositories can access these credentials and risk exposure.

Service identities in Azure AD

Service principals

• Identity: A thing that can be authenticated.
  • e.g. users with user name + password
  • e.g. applications or other servers with secret keys or certificates.
• Principal: an identity acting with certain roles or claims
  • You can have same identity but different role which you are executing.
    • E.g. running sudo on a Bash prompt or on Windows using “run as Administrator.”
  • Groups are often also considered principals because they can have rights assigned.
• Service principal = an identity that is used by a service or application that can be assigned roles.

Managed identities

• Azure infrastructure automatically takes care of authenticating the service and managing the account.
• Can be instantly created for any Azure service that supports it
• Allows the authenticated service secure access of other Azure resources just like any AD account.

Roles in Azure

• All co-exists.
• Three categories: classic roles, azure roles, azure ad roles

Classic roles

• 📝 Before Role-based access control was introduced there were 3 roles:
  • Account Administrator: ❗ One per Azure account
  • Service Administrator:❗ One per Azure subscription
  • Co-Administrator: ❗ 200 per subscription

Role-based access control

• Called also Azure roles.
• 📝 Provides fine-grained access management for Azure resources
• Role
  • Sets of permissions
  • E.g. “Read-only” or “Contributor”
  • Identities are mapped to roles directly or through group membership.
• Role assignments
  • When you are assigned to a role, RBAC allows you to perform specific actions, such as read, write, or delete.
  • E.g.
    • Allow one user to manage VMs in a subscription
    • Allow an application to access all resources in a resource group.
• Can be granted at the service instance level, but they also flow down the Azure Resource Manager hierarchy.
  • Roles assigned at a higher scope, like an entire subscription, are inherited by child scopes, like service instances.
  • 
• 💡 Segregate duties within your team and grant only the amount of access to users that they need to perform their jobs.
• Four fundamental Azure roles: Owner, Contributor, Reader, User Access Administrator

Azure AD Roles

• On-tenant level
• Global Administrator: Person who signs up for Azure AD tenant, can do anything.
• Also User Administrator, Billing Administrator

Privileged Identity Management

• Also known as Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM)
• Includes ongoing auditing of role members
  • needed as their organization changes and evolves.
• Provides:
  • Oversight of role assignments
  • Self-service
  • Just-in-time role activation
  • Azure AD and Azure resource access reviews.