We are going to use the Active Directory module to sync our users. We are still debating on whether to maintain roles within Sitecore or AD. We have had performance issues in a previous implementation of Sitecore when syncing with AD, so that makes us a little hesitant to have roles in AD. We will be creating an OU for users who need to be in Sitecore.
What is the recommendation from Sitecore regarding users and roles and AD?
Would keeping roles within Sitecore make sense and users in AD to see if that would make a difference in performance?
If we decided to have roles within Sitecore now and then move to AD later, would that be possible? How would security on existing items be affected?
Thanks
In my implementations of the AD module, using indirect membership (role in role in role in role) has performance implications. If you have a direct membership (User A is in Role B) model, I have not seen many performance issues unless, as #Patrck Perrone mentioned, you are using filters that pull back a massive number of users.
My typical recommendation for folks who are not sure which direction to go with their security is to use AD groups to manage your users belonging to specific roles, and then map those AD groups as members of the Sitecore roles. In that way, you can secure all your content to Sitecore roles, and your users will automatically gain access via their AD group.
Example:
In Active Directory: User Jay => Member of AD Group 'nonlinear\Sitecore Authors'
In Sitecore Roles: 'nonlinear\Sitecore' is member of 'sitecore\Author'
In Sitecore content: 'Home' item workflow secured to 'sitecore\Author'
In the above example, all users who are sitecore\Author members will be able to work on the Home page. User Jay, when added to the AD Group 'nonlinear\Sitecore Authors', will gain this access due to the relationship defined between the roles.
The benefit here is that if AD goes down, or you decide to stop using the AD roles, you don't have to re-apply security to your content. You would just start adding your AD users directly to sitecore\Author.
This is also helpful for local developers or offline developers working locally on their laptop who do cannot connect to the active directory repository. They can still setup all the content security and test with local Sitecore domain users while disconnected from AD.
The performance issues I have seen in the past with AD syncs were due to the query against AD returning vast amounts of data. I recommend you create a dedicated OU for security groups (and users if you are lucky enough that your organization can support this) related to Sitecore. Think of these security groups as Sitecore roles and assign AD users as members to these security groups accordingly.
On the Sitecore side, you should still use roles. Only, instead of assigned users from AD you will assign security groups to those roles.
This will allow you to continue to authorize groups of people in Sitecore per role, while delegating the task of maintaining individual membership to roles in AD where it typically should remain.
Related
We are looking to set up a solution to monitor primarily the Global Admin role in Azure AD, so if a user is added to or removed from the role an e-mail is sent to a specific mailbox.
On our local AD we have a working solution for this, but I can't seem to find a similar solution for AAD.
In the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center > Alerts > Alert Policies there is a policy called "Elevation of Exchange admin privilege" which basically does what I want, except it only targets the Exchange Admin role.
I've tried creating a new policy from scratch, but as far as I can tell there is no way to choose to target a specific role. There is only the "Granted Exchange admin permission" and nothing really comes up when I search for "role" or "admin" in the "Activity is" drop down.
I've also looked at the MCAS (MS Cloud App Security) policies but nothing there seems to be what I need either.
I found this article: Monitor Office 365 admin role changes in all customer tenants but it seems to be geared more towards multitenant environments and requires quite a bit och additional setup. I was hoping there was a simpler solution for a single tenant environment.
Kind regards
If you have MCAS, I think it's possible that you have PIM as well (privileged identity Management. it requires aad P2 skus. But assuming you do, then it's very simple to do this. You would just go into the PIM in azure, click azure ad roles, click manage roles, choose the global admin role, Click role settings, and you will see options like this
If you don't have PIM, then it becomes quite a bit more complicated but could probably be less complicated than your example, you could set up log analytics to ingest azure ad data, and using a query pull out that information (role assignment event for example), then you could set up an alert in monitor referencing a log analytics workspace. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/reports-monitoring/howto-analyze-activity-logs-log-analytics
In our organization, we have been inviting guest users to our AAD Tenant to successfully share resources with our B2B partners. However, we have a fear that there may be some business users that have been oversharing with individuals (e.g. xxx#gmail.com accounts or Business accounts we don't approve of).
We would like to better monitor these scenarios, and I've been able to determine a user's source via the Azure Portal:
Here, we can easily see that this particular user is coming from an External Azure Active Directory.
Is there a Microsoft Graph API or Azure AD API where I can get this information, so we can write some automation around this? Also, is there a way to determine which tenant this user is homed in? I have played around with the Users endpoint a bit, but don't see this information...maybe there is a different endpoint or permissions scope that I need?
Thanks for any assistance!
You cannot get tenant information of a guest user, but we can handle users by domain the user belongs to. you can allow or block invitations to B2B users from specific organizations .Please refer to this document.
I am working on a solution in which we are securing Hadoop echo system and its components.
My use case is I want to Authenticate the user from its AD and these ADs can be multiple. in short, this is a multi-tenant solution and each tenant or customer have their own AD so how can I link OpenLDAP with multiple AD
NOTE: There is no trust relationship needed between the ADs. means a user must authenticate from its own AD not any other.
Assuming you've considered the possible security implications of doing this (i.e. ensure CustomerA cannot adversely impact CustomerB) as well as potential customer unease (I've had to maintain completely separate servers to house different customer directories because clients were uneasy about having the service running their partition on the same machine running some other customer's directory service) ... Referrals should be able to do this -- different OUs in OpenLDAP would refer out to the various AD environments. You may need to configure an option within your application to follow referrals.
My requirement is to have Multi-tenant application. I am trying to select the correct AD directory structure. I am under the understanding that a tenant is an AD directory. I need to be able to have group, role, and policy security options as well as user self sign-up. I have started on the journey of using Azure B2C directories but this does not seem to be the correct solution because roles do not seem available. Lastly, I also need the ability to manage authorizations to all tenants which I would like to build an Admin app to do so; I plan to use Microsoft Graph API for that but I am not sure if that will work either. Can someone help me to answer these questions. I have been searching as well as testing many scenarios.
You can assign user roles and group roles through AAD. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/users-groups-roles/directory-assign-admin-roles
You can also manage permissions through roles based access control. You do not need to use b2c to manage user permissions unless you are connecting your outside company to Microsoft AAD, rather than building a custom app within Azure. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/role-based-access-control/role-assignments-portal
The tenant includes your resources that you want managed under that tenant. It is not exactly synonymous with an AAD because it can include more than just your AAD. You can use it solely to manage your AAD if you wish, though (and even include subscriptions in other tenants that are linked to your AAD tenant).
Graph API is useful for managing more complex user data. Whether you need this depends on what you are aiming to accomplish.
In my application, a User is assigned multiple Roles, and a Role is assigned(granted) multiple Permissions.
So in my code, I never check against a Role, but always against a fine grained Permission.
Here is described why I think Permissions based access is better than Role based:
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/299732
Within Azure AD, I can assign roles to a user.
But I see no way of creating Permissions and associate them to Roles, so I guess this part must stay in my app ?
Then how should I link the Azure Application Roles to my app's Permissions ?
My assumption is I need to build an UI for doing this, using the Graph API to retrieve the list of roles defined in Azure for the application.
If that is the case, then I don't see much benefits using the built-in roles function in Azure vs keeping the role definition in my app...
Am I missing something ?
The key point of using Azure AD claims is to keep users information in the Active Directory rather than in the application.
In you case, you need to create permissions mapped to roles in your application.
Then theses roles can be mapped to Azure AD AppRoles or Groups.
I suggest you not to map directly users to roles.
If you deals with Group, you don't need to add/remove users to/from applications: Roles and permissions are inherited from groups users belong to.
Mapping directly to Groups
For the moment, it would be my preferred scenario. Users are assigned to groups and your customs roles are mapped to these groups.
When you create a new user, you just need to add it in some groups and there is no action required in your application (same things when you delete the user).
If you are not afraid of preview (and have an Azure AD Premium license), Azure Ad provides a way to dynamically assign users to group.
Just keep in mind that for the moment nested group memberships aren't currently supported.
So if a Group A is in Group B and Group B has some permissions in your application, Users from Group A will not have permission inherited from Group B.
Mapping Groups to application roles
This option seems to be an overkill because it requires one more step: Map Azure Ad Group to Azure Application Roles and Map theses roles to your custom roles.
You need to implement all this logic using the AAD Graph API and your UI will be more complex.
Only reason to use this option in your scenario is if you have a large directory with lots of groups and applications : If a user is in more than 200 groups so the Jwt token returned by the Azure AD will not contain the groups and you will have to query one more time the Azure AD to get the user groups (see).
In this scenario, it could make sense to map groups to application roles because when a user authenticates to an application, Azure Ad will always provides you the roles of the users (or the roles of the group that the user belong to)
you can find interesting code sample here:
active-directory-dotnet-graphapi-console.
At this point in time, Azure Active Directory application roles are meant primarily for the scenario where each user can only have one role and thise roles are mapped to a simple authorization model.
While it is technically possible to support multiple roles per user, that can only be managed via the Graph API and would require you to build a UI for your user admin / users to manage.
As you've noted, your scenario is more complex than this with multiple roles per user and multiple (potentially customizeable and overlapping) set of permissions.
Given these two points, your approach of implementing all of the authorization yourself is a sound one.
Check out this article which outlines in more details the authorization scenarios Azure AD is best suited for:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/guidance-multitenant-identity-app-roles/