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. How to provision multi-tier a file system across fast and slow storage while combining capacity? Now lets try something different, lets say you want to connect to a regular Azure resource, i.e. An Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) service principal is the local representation of an application object in a tenant or directory. The scope and role to be applied can be picked to give just enough access permissions. Azure Service Principal vs. Service Account Automation tools and scripts often need admin or privileged access. After you understand the purpose, scope, and permissions, create your service account, use the instructions in the following articles. Use this measurement to schedule communications to the owner, disable, and then delete the accounts. To create a service principal we will use Cloud Shell on Azure Portal using the az ad sp create-for-rbac command. The Azure service principal has been created, but with no Role and Scope assigned yet. Each application you see in the Enterprise Applications overview in Azure AD can therefore be referred to as a service principal. But again, there are no means to secure service principals any further. If you are using older APIs I would strongly recommend you to move to the Microsoft Graph API where possible. If you dont have one, you could. Happy Friday everyone. Signing into via PowerShell or Azure CLI can be quite quickly achieved. Still, they will make creating an Azure service principal as efficient and as easy as possible. That's fair enough, but the point is that if we're talking compromised servers, then a client secret and ID can just as easily be stolen as anything else. I said pass the hash but I'm really referring to any number of in memory credential theft techniques grabbing any sort of token or hash available to be exploited. Instead of creating a separate object type in Azure AD, Microsoft decided to roll forward with an application object that has a service principal. Thanks a lot for sharing. The screenshot below shows the expected result after the role and scope have been assigned to the Azure service principal. Server Fault is a question and answer site for system and network administrators. As I mentioned at the start of this post that isnt great best practice. In this case you need to find out yourself what kind of permissions you need and, important as well, know to which API you are connecting to. Very timely as just last week I was discussing with a junior member of the team the importance of using Service Principals and Managed Identitiesgreat read! Could someone ELI5 the difference and the typical use case please? The display name. Login to edit/delete your existing comments. Create a naming convention for service accounts to search, sort, and filter them, Don't assign built-in roles to service accounts, The service principal is assigned a privileged role, Don't include service accounts as members of any groups with elevated permissions. Your email address will not be published. Next is to get the Base64 encoded value of the self-signed certificate and save it to the $keyValue variable. Identify modifications to service principal credentials or authentication methods, Detect the user who consented to a multi-tenant app, and detect illicit consent grants to a multi-tenant app, - Run the following PowerShell to find multi-tenant apps, Use of a hard-coded shared secret in a script using a service principal, Tracking who uses the certificate or the secret, Monitor the service principal sign-ins using the Azure AD sign-in logs, Can't manage service principal sign-in with Conditional Access, Monitor the sign-ins using the Azure AD sign-in logs, Contributor is the default Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) role, Evaluate needs and apply the least possible permissions. Since this is a service account that won't see interactive use, presumably we can generate a strong random password for it, so the level of security should be the same. For example reading out an Azure Storage Account Access key or similar. 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. The service principal is where access policies and permissions are assigned for the application. OpenVPN vs. IPsec - Pros and cons, what to use? Establish a regular review process to ensure service accounts are regularly reviewed by owners, security team, or IT team. Most software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications accommodate multi-tenancy. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. Lets walk through a quick demo scenario for both, using a Virtual Machine as Azure Resource: Switching to Azure Key Vault / Access Policies, we can now define this System Assigned Managed Identity having get and list permissions (or any other) for keys, secrets or certificates. Consider the alternative of a service principal: Both require some kind of secret to authenticate, whether a user password or client secret. Which specific conditional auth policy do you have in mind? 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. User Assigned Managed Identity, which means that you first have to create it as a stand-alone Azure resource by itself, after which it can be linked to multiple Azure Resources. One thing that was often essential to these automation tasks was a service account. to configure some permissions I cant limit it down to very specific permissions via MS Graph. Avoid creating multi-use service accounts. After a few minutes or when doing a refresh it will show the value below and will never show the full value anymore. Enter a name for the application (the service principal name). Project BICEP! Support ATA Learning with ATA Guidebook PDF eBooks available offline and with no ads! On the other hand, an Azure service principal can be set up to use a username and password or a certificate for authentication. One instance of Azure AD associated with a single organization is named Tenant. Whenever Azure services need to work together, there are secrets involved, as well as service accounts. Whereby this data is retrieved via the service principal from the Log analytics workspace in Azure! Confirm the scopes service accounts request for resources, If an account requests Files.ReadWrite.All, evaluate if it needs File.Read.All, Ensure you trust the application developer, or API, with the requested access, Limit service account credentials (client secret, certificate) to an anticipated usage period, Schedule periodic reviews of service account usage and purpose, Ensure reviews occur prior to account expiration, Azure AD Sign-In Logs in the Azure portal, Service accounts not signed in to the tenant, Changes in sign-in service account patterns, Don't set service principal credentials to, Use certificates or credentials stored in Azure Key Vault, when possible, Determine service account review cycle, and document it in your CMDB, Communications to owner, security team, IT team, before a review, Determine warning communications, and their timing, if the review is missed, Instructions if owners fail to review or respond, Disable, but don't delete, the account until the review is complete, Instructions to determine dependencies. A service principal requires application permissions in AAD, which are very strong due to not being linked to a specific identity. And why couldn't you also apply it to service accounts? Sharing best practices for building any app with .NET. This allows a client application to request that the service authenticate an account even if the client does not have the account name. Set an expiration date for credentials that prevents them from rolling over automatically. Select App registrations and + New registration. As you can see Im successfully connected! Designed for deployment to Azure Functions + Azure CDN, using the Azure Developer CLI and Bicep files. The following sections cover how you monitor, review permissions, determine continued account usage, and ultimately deprovision the account. They're typically used interchangeably. This is handy for running app services as this identity and granting that account access to storage accounts, vaults, etc. To do that, use the code below. Service principals and managed identities can use OAuth 2.0 scopes in a delegated context impersonating a signed-on user, or as service account in the application context. Use a managed identity when possible. Important to know is that, in the background, an App Registration has been created as well for the service principal, whereby the application ID is matching and the Objectids are different. Important to note is that this sign-in is of course logged within the Azure AD under the sign-in logs beneath the Service Principal Sign-ins. Why is there such a strong recommendation against user accounts as service accounts in AAD? This as the App Registration is simply a different object in your Azure AD, however both objects belong to the same application in Azure AD as you can see. We recommend the following practices for service account privileges. To log in via Azure CLI, its a one line command: The username is the Application ID, this would have been listed when you created the Service Principal, if you didnt take a note of it you can find this within the Azure Portal. Not sure what you mean with full access? The service account uses the resource owner password flow to authenticate, which isn't supported by all auth providers. In January 2023, Microsoft announced the General Availability of the Azure OpenAI Service (AOAI), which allows Azure customers to access OpenAI models directly within their Azure subscription and with their own capacity. I'm not sure what you mean by "typical Azure user". Once created, you will see that we have created an Enterprise Application within the Azure AD Portal and this can be referred to as a Service Principal, as explained earlier. The only required part is the Display Name. Hope those are enough reasons for you to start exploring and using service principals in the future and replace your service accounts :-)! In the application context, no one is signed in. Use the information to monitor and govern the account. Not sure if this answers your question, otherwise a bit more explanation is required. Now lets add both of the methods to see how you can make use of them. requirements of regulatory password standards. A service principal is an instance created from the application object and inherits certain properties from that application object. Meaning the service principal determines the permissions the process will get after a sign-in. On Windows and Linux, this is equivalent to a service account The fact that there is administrative overhead (and potential security risk) involved is probably the biggest one. Azure has a notion of a Service Principal which, in simple terms, is a service account. rev2023.4.17.43393. Of course, it is! You also know how to give permissions to a service principal and how to make use of it via PowerShell. The review includes the owner and an IT partner, and they certify: Deprovision service accounts under the following circumstances: Deprovisioning includes the following tasks: After the associated application or script is deprovisioned: More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, Create and assign a custom role in Azure Active Directory, How to use managed identities for App Service and Azure Functions, Create an Azure Active Directory application and service principal that can access resources, Get-AzureADServicePrincipalOAuth2PermissionGrant, Script to list all delegated permissions and application permissions in Azure AD, User or group accountable for managing and monitoring the service account. Course logged within the Azure service principal by all auth providers strong recommendation against user accounts service! 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