My organization is taking a look at the security of registered applications within Azure Active Directory (AAD) and have concerns around the ability of individuals to add client secrets and certificates for applications that are using the "application permissions" model. I'm working to help narrow the roles of individuals within the organization to restrict this, but this investigation begged the question of what a malicious insider could do if he or she could add a client secret to this application.
I've looked through the 30 Days of Microsoft Graph blog series, which is excellent, but wanted to clarify what else can be done to prevent an insider from gaining access to the permissions this application would allow.
Does the redirect URL itself protect against this kind of scenario, provided the organization retains control of all registered URLs (meaning, for example, that https://localhost isn't registered)? Based on this post under Step 3, I assume the answer is yes but wanted to make sure this is the case.
Is it technically correct to say that without the redirect URL being secured/owned by the organization, a malicious insider who could add client secrets could exploit the permissions granted by the application?
If you are able to add a client secret to an app that already has been granted application permissions to something, then this user can use the new secret to get tokens and access those resources as the app.
Redirect URL is not used with application permissions, only delegated permissions.
This is because there are no redirects in the client credentials grant flow, which is used when acquiring a token with app permissions.
It's just an HTTP request.
So you are correct in your assumption that being able to add a new secret to an app that already has permissions can be a security issue.
There are audit logs though, and I believe adding a secret/certificate is logged.
Related
Our application allows users to authenticate via Azure Active Directory using OpenID Connect.
However, some organizations do not allow users to approve applications, and require administrators to approve the application first.
Right now, this means that if a user wants to connect using their work account, we have to first send them to Azure, where they then enter their password, and then are told that our application requires administrator approval. Not a great experience.
Ideally, I would like to give only users whose tenants allow them to approve new applications (or those that already have) the option of logging in via AAD. Is this possible to do through an API call?
Microsoft does not provide such an API for this purpose.
As a workaround, you can quickly check it using auth code flow: Request an authorization code.
Enter their password is necessary. Sign in to this url with customer's credential:
https://login.microsoftonline.com/{tenant}/oauth2/v2.0/authorize?
client_id=6731de76-14a6-49ae-97bc-6eba6914391e
&response_type=code
&redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%2Fmyapp%2F
&response_mode=query
&scope=https%3A%2F%2Fgraph.microsoft.com%2Fmail.read%20api%3A%2F%2F
&state=12345
&code_challenge=YTFjNjI1OWYzMzA3MTI4ZDY2Njg5M2RkNmVjNDE5YmEyZGRhOGYyM2IzNjdmZWFhMTQ1ODg3NDcxY2Nl
&code_challenge_method=S256
Then they can see if they need admin consent or not.
The essence is the same as the steps you described. But it can save a lot of time.
I have a registered App which requires several application permissions (getting them through Admin Consent flow).
The app is multi-tenant and is already serving a lot of users.
Now I would like to add some more permissions to what the App is requesting and I just want to make sure that adding these permissions won't effect my current users that are using the app.
I understand that in order for the new permissions to apply on existing users, their corresponding organizations admins will have to re-consent, but other than that, I would like to make sure (cant find it in docs) that current users will still be able to use the app the same way as they did before (without the features that requires the new permissions).
Is that really the case? nothing won't 'stop working' because of the permissions change?
When you add permissions to an app registration, previous consents do not get revoked. however depending on the scopes that your app requests, it may force a new consent window to appear. since you are using application permissions, regular users cannot consent to the permissions. for example if your client is requesting a .default scope, then it will try to get all the permissions specified in the api permissions, which would include the new permission (that needs consent). if your token requests only include the old permissions in the scope, then nothing should change.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/v2-permissions-and-consent#example-3-the-user-has-consented-and-the-client-requests-additional-scopes
But, I don't believe that the application will fail even if consent hasn't been given to the new application permissions, but it will fail to receive the new scopes if requested. and any resulting function that uses those additional permissions will fail, until an admin consents to those new permissions.
As shown by many samples I have two AAD application registrations, one for my javascript-based front end, and one for my JSON-only web APIs.
If I fully trust my client AAD application, why does AAD require me to create a second AAD application for my web APIs?
For example, assuming I add specific roles to my client AAD application, if client signs in with AAD and gets an id token and access token containing my roles, it only needs to send the access token to my APIs. The API only needs to crack the JWT, validate the audience, issuer, tenant, roles permissions, and signature. In this world, no client secret is needed in the web APIs, a second AAD application registration not needed, and still no call to AAD from my APIs. Unfortunately, without two AAD applications, I cannot figure out a way to have AAD include roles into my access token.
If I didn't fully trust the issuer from mucking with claims, I can see why I would need two AAD applications and a client secret. But since I do trust my AAD application and the signature of the JWT, why the extra complexity? Or maybe there is a way to do this that I haven't found?
Thanks!
Responding to Marc here because just not enough characters in the comments field -- The sample you referenced is an excellent sample, specifically the JavaScript one calling the Web API. It is what I am doing right now in fact. However, the problem is that Web API in the sample is open to anybody who has authenticated on the tenant. I need to secure the Web API down to certain individuals in the tenant, and simply checking the client/app id is not sufficient as anybody who can create an AAD app can fake it.
So what I need to do is have roles added to the the access token so I know that my application authenticated the user, and that user has been granted the required roles. For example, here is a Microsoft sample. And even here a Microsoft video walking through the process.
If I don't have two AAD applications w/client secret, the roles claims is never provided in the access token. It is always provided in the id token, but not the access token.
I feel like I am missing something obvious here. If AAD would just put the roles I requested into the JWT when I authenticated against it, and I validated its signature, audience, issuer, and roles, I wouldn't need any of this extra complexity?
Ah, I think I understand where you are going: you would like to control which users can access an API, no matter what client app they are using to access the API with. That's a function of the API - you cannot control that through AAD. In AAD you can control which users can access which applications (UI) using either user access restrictions (enterprise tab) or role-based access. However, access to an API is controlled in AAD at the calling application level via scopes. APIs are never accessed directly by users but only by other apps so controlling access permissions at user level would cause admin havoc. So, you can control what permissions a user has in the app they are using and you can control what permissions that application (client) has in other applications (APIs, resource servers) it is using.
In other words: role is about user access to UI, scope is about one apps' access to another.
App secrets provide added security for getting tokens - they have no bearing on what permissions are included in the token.
Can you provide a link showing that two apps are needed? That should only be the case if the API you want to call is not provided by the web app which served the JS to the browser. None of the 'official' samples require you to register two apps (Graph API, used in some of these samples is a separate API and it is already registered). A problem with tokens passed from the browser is that they were acquired by a public client, not using any secrets apart from user creds. Therefore, they are easier to steal and re-use. Your own back-end app may want to use a secret to get its own token (extension grant) to call yet another API using a token that does not reside in a public client.
I have successfully configured qn Azure AD App Registration, allowing a client_credentials based OAuth 2.0 flow to work. This allows a third party application to access Microsoft Graph API. The app has "Calendar.Read" permission. Meaning the app can pretty much read any of the calendars (including CEO's).
I now have a conversation with security. What is out there in the Microsoft world, that I can use to lock down usage of API access via this Application Permission? Is there ability to do things like:
Restrict IP ranges the App can be accessed from?
Restrict users that can access the App? (However in Client_credentials, there is no user context)
Log traffic / activity happening via the App?
The only thing i can think of now is to say the Redirect URL configuration on the app means, no other application can get an access token using the Client_credentials, even if the application id & passkey get compromised
Any advice on further security controls that can be put in place?
Restricting access: You would need to do this in your application. The Client Credential flow doesn't allow for restricting what users as you point out. However there is nothing stopping you from adding user authentication to your application, possibly using a delegated graph auth flow to determine who they are.
IP Ranges: This is not possible currently.
Logging Traffic: This is not possible on the graph side currently, however you could/should log traffic on your applications side.
Redirect urls will not help you because they are not used int eh client credential flow.
In general application only auth (client credential flow) + a broad authorization scope is very powerful, but must be managed correctly. You don't inadvertently want to build a totally new users/permissions model over the top of the graph :)
There are very few options available currently available to offer these controls at token issuance (in Azure AD) or at API access (in Microsoft Graph). However, you can achieve similar results by carefully managing access to the app's credentials. Here are a couple steps you can take (not exhaustive):
App credentials: keep them secret, keep them safe
Use Key Vault. You can configure many of the restrictions you mention for access to data in Key Vault, including IP ranges and which users access. Key Vault also offers auditing of access to secrets. Don't forget to also be careful about which users have management access to the Key Vault (e.g. other users with access to the same Azure subscription).
Use certificates (public/private key pair), rather than client secrets (passwords), to authenticate the app. People tend to manage certificates much more carefully than they manage shared passwords, and developers are much less likely to hard-code the secret into scripts/code.
Be careful and deliberate about which users can manage the app's credentials
This is often overlooked. A user (or another app) who can access existing credentials, or add a new authorized credential to an app can act as the app and (mis)use all the permissions the app has been granted. This includes:
Users (and apps) in the "Company Administrator", "Application Administrator" and "Cloud Application Administrator" directory roles.
Users who are set as owners of the app registration (Application object) and enterprise app (ServicePrincipal object) for the app.
Users (or systems) who have access to the server or service the application resides on (which will have, or have access to, the credentials).
For all of these cases, ensure this is the smallest possible number of users, and they actually have a legitimate need. For users who do need access, wherever possible enforce just-in-time, time-limited access (not persistent access), such as with Azure AD Privileged Identity Management, for time-bound, just-in-time access for Azure AD directory roles and Azure resources.
I have been doing some R&D on using the MicrosoftGraphAPI to fetch the skus subscribed by my organization.
I have created an app as described in the documentation. I did all the steps in the above link except 'Assign application to role'.
Using postman am able to get the oauth2 token by sending a post request using the link
https://login.microsoftonline.com/<mytenantid>/oauth2/token
with the client_id, client_secret, resource(https://graph.microsoft.com) and grant_type(client_credentials) parameters.
After this token is obtained I can fire a get request https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/subscribedSkus with the Authorization header set as Bearer {token} which will return the SKUs subscribed by my organization.
So far so good. :-)
Now the requirement is I need to fetch the subscribed SKUs by one of the client (let's say having the azure ad tenant id 'ABCDEFG') of my organization.
I can successfully do that by registering an app in the client's tenant 'ABCDEFG' with the same steps as above.
This approach is fine if my organization has say 1 or 2 clients.
However, if the client numbers are more than say 30 this approach of registering an application in each Azure AD instance is not feasible.
If the application that I registered in my organizations AAD was multi-tenant then how should it help me?
What will be the steps needed to obtain the access token for each tenant?
Can somebody assist with some detailed explanation?
Since you need application-level access, you would assign one of the Application permissions listed in the documentation for getting SKUs: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/api-reference/v1.0/api/subscribedsku_list.
Directory.Read.All, Directory.ReadWrite.All
In this case you should require the Read Directory Data (Directory.Read.All) application permission.
Then you mark your app as multi-tenanted.
Now then in order for another org to use your app, they will have to be on-boarded.
You will need some kind of page where their administrator can click a button/link to start using your app.
This should redirect the admin to:
https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/authorize?client_id=your-client-id&prompt=admin_consent&response_type=code+id_token&redirect_uri=url-where-to-send-user-back
Once they sign in, they will be presented with a consent screen, where they can approve the permissions that your app requires.
If and when they do that, they will be redirected back to your app (to the URL you specified) and you can use the Id token to know which Azure AD tenant registered.
During this process a service principal for your app is created in their tenant, and the required permission is granted to it.
This means you can then get an access token for their tenant from: (using the same credentials)
https://login.microsoftonline.com/their-tenant-id/oauth2/token
Remember that access tokens are specific to an Azure AD tenant, so you will have to get an access token for each tenant.
One thing I would like to point out is that you should instead try to use delegated permissions if possible.
The application permission given here gives quite large access to your app, and some admins might not use your service for that reason alone.
Delegated permissions are more complex to handle, but allow your app to act on behalf of a user instead of purely as itself.