Office 365 Group Naming Policies – Part 2

Posted on January 17, 2018 by mattfeltonma

Welcome back.

In my first post I covered some of the methods organizations use to enforce a naming standard for groups, such as Active Directory groups, that are used to authorize access to data. I also covered the challenges that are introduced when a mechanism for enforcing the naming standard doesn’t exist or isn’t effective and how this problem is becoming more prevalent with the increase in consumption of software-as-a-service applications.

Office 365 Groups are a core foundational component of Office 365 helping to enable simple, fast, and efficient collaboration within an organization. For an organization to take full advantage of this, its end users need to be empowered to spin up Office 365 groups for mail-based collaboration or create new Teams for real-time collaboration. To make this work, IT can’t get in the way of the business and needs to let the business spin up and down Office 365 Groups as it needs them. Microsoft has introduced a number of solutions to help with this including group expiration, integration with Office 365 retention policies, and the feature I’ll cover today, naming policies.

The naming policy feature is still in private preview but today I’m going to show you how to test the feature in your own tenant. As a point of reference, I’m using a set of trial O365 E5 and Azure AD Premium P2 licenses within the commercial offering of Office 365 for my testing. I can’t speak to whether or not the instructions below will work for Office 365 GCC or Office 365 Government.

The first thing I needed to do was install the Azure AD Preview module. To do this I had to first remove the existing Azure AD module I had installed on my system and then install the Azure AD Preview module as seen below.

Comparing the modules using a get-command shows that the preview module has the new cmdlets below.

Add-AzureADAdministrativeUnitMember
Add-AzureADApplicationPolicy
Add-AzureADMSLifecyclePolicyGroup
Add-AzureADScopedRoleMembership
Add-AzureADServicePrincipalPolicy
Get-AzureADAdministrativeUnit
Get-AzureADAdministrativeUnitMember
Get-AzureADApplicationPolicy
Get-AzureADDirectorySetting
Get-AzureADDirectorySettingTemplate
Get-AzureADMSDeletedDirectoryObject
Get-AzureADMSDeletedGroup
Get-AzureADMSGroup
Get-AzureADMSGroupLifecyclePolicy
Get-AzureADMSLifecyclePolicyGroup
Get-AzureADObjectSetting
Get-AzureADPolicy
Get-AzureADPolicyAppliedObject
Get-AzureADScopedRoleMembership
Get-AzureADServicePrincipalPolicy
New-AzureADAdministrativeUnit
New-AzureADDirectorySetting
New-AzureADMSGroup
New-AzureADMSGroupLifecyclePolicy
New-AzureADObjectSetting
New-AzureADPolicy
Remove-AzureADAdministrativeUnit
Remove-AzureADAdministrativeUnitMember
Remove-AzureADApplicationPolicy
Remove-AzureADDirectorySetting
Remove-AzureADMSDeletedDirectoryObject
Remove-AzureADMSGroup
Remove-AzureADMSGroupLifecyclePolicy
Remove-AzureADMSLifecyclePolicyGroup
Remove-AzureADObjectSetting
Remove-AzureADPolicy
Remove-AzureADScopedRoleMembership
Remove-AzureADServicePrincipalPolicy
Reset-AzureADMSLifeCycleGroup
Restore-AzureADMSDeletedDirectoryObject
Set-AzureADAdministrativeUnit
Set-AzureADDirectorySetting
Set-AzureADMSGroup
Set-AzureADMSGroupLifecyclePolicy
Set-AzureADObjectSetting
Set-AzureADPolicy

The cmdlets we’re interested in for this demonstration are the used to create and manage a new Graph API resource type called a directorySetting. The resource type is used to configure settings within Azure Active Directory. The directorySetting resource types are created from a template of configuration settings called a directorySettingTemplate resource type. Running the cmdlet Get-AzureADDirectorySettingTemplate displays the available to build a custom directorySetting from.

After connection to Azure AD using the Connect-AzureAD cmdlet, I can take a look at the templates available. The template I’m interested in for this blog is the Group.Unified template because it contains the settings for the naming policy as seen below.

Now that I’ve identified the template I want to draw from for a new directorySetting, I’m going to create a variable named $template and assign the Group.Unified template to it. Running a quick Get-Member on the newly assigned displays a method named CreateDirectorySetting. I’ll use this method to create a new instance of a directorySetting resource type based off the template and assign it to a variable named $setting.

If I run a Get-Member on $setting I can see that I’ve created a new instance of the directorySetting resource type which has the settings inherited from the Group.Unified template with some of those settings being configured with default values.

You’ll want to pay attention to these default values because once the settings become active for the tenant and seem to override settings configured within the GUI. For example, if you are denying users the ability to create new Office 365 groups via the configuration setting in the Azure Active Directory blade in the Azure Portal, leaving the EnableGroupCreation setting as true will override that. I’m not sure that is the intended behavior, but hey this is still preview right?

The next step is to configure the PrefixSuffixNamingRequirement setting with the naming convention I want enforced across my tenant. This Microsoft article does a good job explaining your options and the syntax. I went with a simple naming convention of including the fixed string “JOG” along with the value from the user’s department attribute in Azure Active Directory followed by the string value the user chooses for the group name.

Checking the values property of the $setting shows that the PrefixSuffixNamingRequirement is now populated with the value I entered above.

Now that the settings has been configured I make it active by using the New-AzureADDirectorySetting cmdlet and including the $setting directory object as input.

I then log into the Office 365 portal as a standard user and navigate to Outlook Web App and attempt to create a new Office 365 group. All new groups are now created using the naming convention I defined and it’s displayed clearly to the end users.

Hopefully Microsoft will refine the documentation as the feature moves out of preview and into general availability. I also think this is a simple and static setting that would make sense to configurable from the GUI. I’d also like to see the settings configurable with the directorySetting resource type be in sync with any corresponding settings in the GUI to avoid confusion.

That’s all there is to it. Overall it’s a very simple yet elegant solution that solves naming convention woes while giving the business freedom to collaborate without having to go through IT. You can’t beat that.

Thanks!

Office 365 Groups Naming Policies – Part 1

Posted on January 15, 2018 by mattfeltonma

Groups… It’s a term every business user consuming technology has heard at some point in time. Most users only experience groups when they’re unable to access a specific application or file and the coworker sitting next to them informs them they need to call IT and get added to the department group. Those of us who work on the technology side of the fence are very familiar with the benefits groups bring to the table when controlling access to data. We are also quite familiar with the challenges they can bring when managing them at scale.

Something as simple as a lack of an enforced naming convention can create serious pain for an organization if it relies heavily upon the naming convention to determine the function and owner of a group. The pain bleeds through IT and into the business as workers struggle with long wait times for on-boarding new employees due to IT trying to determine which groups the users need to be in. When it comes time to perform an access review, business owners may waste valuable time trying to determine if removing an employee from a specific group will impact that employee’s ability to fulfill their job responsibilities.

In the on-premises world organizations deal with the challenge of naming conventions in different ways. Most rely upon first or second level help desk to create groups according to the organization’s naming standard. This method introduces the risk of human error and presents challenges when the group information for a particular application is sourced from a variety of different identity backends which force the staff to learning multiple tools. Others make use of identity management (IDM) systems that automate the creation of groups and enforce the naming convention. This method is very effective but also very costly due to high costs in implementing and operating an IDM. A very small minority of organizations have evolved to the point where the naming conventions are no longer important due to robust reporting systems and entitlement databases.

Very few organizations are able to successfully execute the third method, which leaves them with the first or second. The introduction of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) has made the first and second methods of enforcing a naming convention much more complicated. Using the first method of leveraging help desk staff to create the groups manually is no longer scalable and the second method of using a centralized IDM system is often limited by the vendor’s ability to write connectors to the wide variety of APIs in use across the thousands of SaaS vendors. All is not lost, as it seems some vendors have begun to recognize the challenge this can introduce to their customers.

If your organization is a consumer of Office 365, you’ve more than likely begun to use Office 365 Groups. Office 365 groups offer a variety of features not found in the traditional security/distribution group or shared mailbox. Take a look at this link for a comparison chart that documents the features. One important thing to note is Office 365 Groups can only be only created in Azure Active Directory (AAD). You cannot synchronize an on-premises Active Directory Domain Services security or distribution group to AAD and convert it to an Office 365 Group. This means you can’t leverage an existing solution for enforcing naming conventions unless that solution has a connector into Azure AD. Given features Office 365 provide and that they are the construct used by Microsoft Teams, you may make the decision to allow your users to create Office 365 Groups on the fly in order to allow them to take full advantage of collaboration tools available in Office 365. To quote Peter Venkman, “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”.

Calm down my friend. Microsoft has a solution coming in the pipeline that will solve your Office 365 Groups naming convention woes. In my next post I’ll demonstrate the feature and walkthrough how to test the feature out while it is in preview.

pfsense + squid + Kerberos

Posted on December 30, 2017 by mattfeltonma

Hi everyone,

I hope all of you had an enjoyable holiday. I spent my week off from work spending time with the family and catching up on some reading. One area I decided to spend some time reading up on is Microsoft’s Cloud App Security. For those unfamiliar with the solution, it’s Microsoft’s entry into the cloud access security broker (CASB) (or Cloud Security Gateway (CSG) if you’re a Forrester reader) market. If you haven’t heard of “CASB” or “CSG”, don’t worry too much. While the terminology is new, many of the collection of technologies encompassing a typical CASB or CSG are not new, simply used together in new and creative ways. For a quick intro, take a read through this article and follow up with some Forrester and Gartner research for a deeper dive.

Since I haven’t had much experience with a product specifically marketing itself as a CASB, I thought it would be a great opportunity to play around with Microsoft’s solution. A good first step for any organization to grasp the value of a CASB is to explore what’s happening within the organization outside the view of IT, or as the marketers love to call it, shadow IT. The ease of consuming cloud technologies such as software as a service (SaaS) applications has been both a blessing and a curse. The new technology has been wonderful in cutting IT costs, bringing the technology closer to the business, providing for shorter time to market for new features, and providing simpler integration paths for different applications and services. On the negative side, the ease of use of these solutions means an average employee is using far more of them than is officially sanctioned by IT. This can lead to issues like loss of critical data, non-compliance with policy, or multiple business groups within an organization subscribing to the same service resulting in redundant licensing costs.

Wouldn’t it be great to get visibility into that shadow IT? Since a majority of cloud solutions work over standard HTTP(S) the services are readily accessible to the user without the user having to request additional ports be opened on the firewall. This means it’s much more challenging to track who is using what and what they’re doing with those services. Many organizations attempt to control these types of solutions with a traditional forward web proxy. However, too much focus is put on blocking the “bad” sites instead of analyzing the overall patterns of usage of services. Microsoft’s Azure AD Cloud Discovery is a feature of Azure Active Directory that can be used in conjunction with Cloud App Security’s catalog of app to provide visibility into what’s being accessed as well as providing information as to the risks the services being accessed present to the organization.

To simulate a typical medium to large organization and get some good testing done with Cloud App Discovery, I’m going to add a forward web proxy to my home lab. As I’ve mentioned in previous blog entries I have a small form factor computer running pfsense which I use as my lab networking security appliance. Out of the box, it supports a base install of Squid which can be added and configured to act as a forward web proxy with minimal effort. It gets a bit more challenging when you want to add authentication to the proxy because the built-in options for the pfsense implementation are limited to local, LDAP, and RADIUS authentication. I want authentication so I can identify users connecting to the proxy and associate the web connections with specific users but I want to use Kerberos so I get that seamless single sign on experience.

Like many open source products, the documentation on how to setup Squid running on pfsense and using Kerberos authentication is pretty terrible. Searching the all-powerful Google presents lots of forum posts with people asking how to do it, pieces of answers that don’t make much sense, and some Wikis on how to configure Squid to use Kerberos on a standard server. Given the lack of good documentation, I thought it would be fun to work my way through it and compile a walkthrough. I’m issuing the standard disclaimer that this is intended for lab purposes only. If you’re trying to deploy pfsense and Squid in a production environment, do more reading and spend time doing it safely and securely.

I won’t be covering the basic setup of pfsense as there are plenty of guides out there and the process is simple for anyone with any experience in the network appliance realm. For this demonstration I’ll be running a box with pfsense 2.4.2 installed.

On to the walkthrough!

The first step in the process is to add the Squid package through the pfsense package manager UI.

On the Package Manager screen, select the Available Packages section and install the Squid package. After the installation is complete, you’ll see Squid shown in the Installed Packages section.

Notice the package installed is a branch of the 3.5 release while the latest release available directly via Squid is 4.0. It’s always fun to have the latest and greatest, but pfsense is an all-in-one solution so it comes with some sacrifices. Let’s get some of the basic configuration settings done with. Go to the Services menu, select the Squid Proxy Server menu item, and go the General section. First up choose the interface you want Squid to be available for and specify a port for it to listen on.

Now check off the Allow Users on Interface unless you have a reason to limit it to certain subnets attached to the interface. Additionally I’d recommend checking the Resolve DNS IPv4 First option. I banged my head against the wall with a ton of issues with Squid when I turned on authentication and this option wasn’t set. You can thank me for saving you hours of Google and trying other options.

Setup basic logging with the settings below.

Basic settings are complete and it’s a good time to test the proxy from a client machine to verify its base functionality. You can do this by directing one of your client machines to use the proxy and attempting to access a website.

After you have verified functionality you’ll need to add support for SSH to the pfsense box since we’ll need to make some changes via the command shell. For that you’ll want to navigate the System menu, select the Advanced menu item, and go to the Admin Access section. Scroll down from there to the Secure Shell section and click the checkbox for Enable Secure Shell and set a the SSH port to the port of your choice. I chose 50,000.

The Secure Shell Server is active, but the firewall blocks access to it across all interfaces by default. You now need to create the appropriate firewall rule to allow access from devices behind the interface you wish to use to SSH to the box. For me this is the interface that my lab devices connect to. For this you’ll select Firewall from the top menu, select the Rules menu item, and select the appropriate interface from the menu items. Once there, click the Add button to create a firewall rule allowing devices within the subnet to hit the router interface over the port you configured earlier as seen below. The SSH listener will now be running and will be accessible from the designated interface.

Now you must configure DNS such that the pfsense box can resolve the Active Directory DNS namespace to perform Kerberos related activities. You can go the easy route and make the Active Directory domain controller the primary DNS server for pfsense via the GUI. However, I use pfsense as the primary DNS resolver for the lab environment and forward queries to Google’s DNS servers at 8.8.8.8.

In order to continue using with my preferred configuration, I needed to take a few additional steps. First I needed to add a Domain Override to the DNS Resolver service on pfsense to ensure it doesn’t pass the query along to the external DNS server. I did this by selecting Services from the main menu, selecting the DNS Resolver menu item, and going to the General Settings section. I then scrolled down to the Domain Overrides section and added the appropriate override for my Active Directory DNS namespace as seen below. Take note that you can’t go modifying the resolv.conf as you would in a normal Linux distro since pfsense will scrub any changes you make to the file each time it restarts its services. Get used to this behavior, we’re going to see it a number of times through this blog entry and we’ll have to learn to work around that limitation (feature?).

Next up you’ll want to verify name resolution is working as intended and it can be tested by running a query from the pfsense box. Go to the Diagnostics on the main menu, select the DNS Lookup item, and type in the hostname representing the Active Directory DNS namespace. It should resolve to the entries representing domain controllers in your Active Directory domain. Successful testing makes the DNS configuration complete.

On to the guts of the configuration. Pfsense comes with the krb5 package installed so all you need to do is configure it. For that you are going to need to access the command shell. Open up your favorite SSH client and connect to the pfsense box as an administrative user. Upon successful login you’ll see the menu below.

You want to hit the command shell so choose option 8 and you will be dropped into the shell.

The first step is to configure the krb5 package to integrate with the Active Directory domain. For that you’ll need to create a krb5.conf file. Create a new a krb5.conf file in the /etc/ directory and populate it with the appropriate information. I’ve included the content of my krb5.conf file as an example.

[libdefaults] default_realm = JOURNEYOFTHEGEEK.LOCAL dns_lookup_realm = false dns_lookup_kdc = true default_tgs_enctypes = aes128-cts-hmac-sha1-96 default_tkt_enctypes = aes128-cts-hmac-sha1-96 permitted_enctypes = aes128-cts-hmac-sha1-96

[realms] JOURNEYOFTHEGEEK.LOCAL = { kdc = jog-dc.journeyofthegeek.local }

[domain_realm] .journeyofthegeek.local = JOURNEYOFTHEGEEK.LOCAL journeyofthegeek.local = JOURNEYOFTHEGEEK.LOCAL

[logging] kdc = FILE:/var/log/kdc.log Default = FILE:/var/log/krb5lib.log

Check out the MIT documentation on the options available to you in the krb5.conf. I made the choice to limit the encryption algorithms to AES128 for simplicity purposes, feel free to use something else if you wish. Once the settings are populated the file can be saved.

It’s time to test the Kerberos configuration. You do that by using running kinit and authenticating as a valid user in the Active Directory domain. If the configuration is correct klist will display the a valid Kerberos ticket granting ticket (TGT) for the user.

The system is now configured to interact with the Active Directory domain using Kerberos. You now need to create a security principal in Active Directory to represent the Squid service. Create a new user in Active Directory and name it whatever you wish, I used svc_squid for this lab. Since I chose to use AES128, I had to select the account control option on the user account in Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) that the service supported AES128. You can ignore that step if you chose not to force an encryption level. Now a service principal name (SPN) for the service is needed to identify the service when a user attempts to authenticate to it. For that you’ll need to open an elevated command prompt and use the setspn command.

Wonderful you have a security principal created and it includes the appropriate identifier. You now need to create a keytab that the service can use to authenticate to Active Directory. In comes ktpass. From the same elevated command prompt run the command as seen below.

Pay attention to case sensitivity because it matters when we’re talking MIT Kerberos, which is Kerberos implementation pfsense is using. The link I included above will explain the options. I set the crypto option to AES128 to ensure the keytab aligns with the other options I’ve configured around encryption.

Next up you need to transfer the keytab to the pfsense box. I used WinSCP to transfer the keytab to the pfsense box to the /usr/local/etc/squid/ directory. The keytab is on the pfsense box but you need to tell Squid where the keytab is. In a typical Squid implementation you’d define variable in the Squid startup script which would be consumed by the authentication helper. However, this is another case where pfsense will overwrite any changes you make to the startup script.

In addition to being unable to modify the startup script to set, pfsense also overwrites any changes you make directly to the squid.conf file. To get around this you’ll need to add the configuration options to the config file through the pfsense GUI. From within the GUI go to the Services section of the main menu, select the Squid Proxy Server menu item, go to the General section, scroll down and hit the Advanced Options button and scroll to the Advanced Features section. In the Custom Options (Before Auth) field, you’ll want to add the lines below.

The first four lines I’ve added here are called directives in Squid. The first directive instructs Squid to use the negotiate_kerberos_auth authentication helper. The options I’ve added to the helper set a few different configuration options for the helper. The -k option allows me to direct Squid to the keytab file I added to the server which I couldn’t do with a variable in the startup script. The -d option writes debug information for the helper to Squid cache.log and the -t option shuts off the replay cache for MIT Kerberos. The second directive sets the child authentication processes to 1,000. You’ll want to do some research on this directive if you’re moving this into a production environment. I simply choose 1000 so I wouldn’t run any risk of getting my authentication requests queued for the purposes of this lab. The third directive is set to on by default and should only be set to off if you run into issues with PUT/POST requests.

The fourth directive starts enforcing access controls within Squid. Access controls within Squid are a bit weird. The Squid wiki does a decent job of explaining how they work. The short of what I’ve done in the fourth directive is create an access list called auth which will contain all users who successfully authenticate against Squid. The next line denies users access to the http_access list if the user doesn’t below to the auth access line (blocking non-authenticated users). The final line allows users who are in the auth list into the http_access list (allows authenticated users).

With that last amount of configuration, you’ve gotten pfsense and Squid configured for Kerberos authentication. I’ll quickly demonstrate the what a successful implementation looks like. For that I’m going to bounce over to a Windows 10 domain-joined machine with Chrome installed and configured to use the proxy server. Navigating to Amazon displays the webpage with no authentication prompts and running a klist from a command prompt shows I have a Kerberos ticket for the proxy.

Going back into the pfsense GUI, going to the Services menu, selecting the Squid Proxy Server menu item and navigating to the Real Time section shows the access log displaying Rick Sanchez accessing Amazon and successful consumption of the Kerberos ticket in the Cache Log section.

In a future post I’ll dig a bit deeper into Azure AD Cloud Discovery and setup automatic forwarding of logs using the Microsoft collector.

Have a happy New Year!

Integrating Azure AD and AWS – Part 4

Posted on December 12, 2017 by mattfeltonma

Update: In November 2019 AWS introduced support for integration between Azure AD and AWS SSO. The integration offers a ton more features, including out of the box support for multiple AWS accounts. I highly recommend you go that route if you’re looking to integrate the two platforms. Check out my series on the new integration here.

We’ve reached the end of the road for my series on integrating Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for single sign-on and role management. In part 1 I walked through the many reasons the integration is worth looking at if your organization is consuming both clouds. In part 2 I described the lab I used to for this series, described the different way application identities (service accounts for those of you in the Microsoft space) are handled in Active Directory Domain Services versus Azure AD, and walked through what a typical application identity looks like in Azure AD. In part 3 I walked through a portion of the configuration steps, did a deep dive into the Azure AD and AWS federation metadata, examined a SAML assertion, and configured the AWS end of the federated trust through the AWS Management Console. This included creation of an identity provider representing the Azure AD tenant and creation of a new IAM role for users within the Azure AD tenant to assert.

In this final post I’ll cover the remainder of the configuration, describe the “provisioning” capabilities of Azure AD in this integration, and pointing out some of the issues with the recommended steps in the Microsoft tutorial.

Before I continue with the configuration, let me cover what I’ve done so far.

Part 2
- Added the AWS application from the Azure AD Application Gallery through the Azure Portal.
Part 3
- Assigned an Azure Active Directory user to the application through the Azure Portal.
- Configured the Azure AD to pass the Role and RoleSessionName claims through the Azure Portal.
- Created the SAML identity provider representing Azure AD in the AWS Management Console.
- Created an AWS IAM Role and associated it with the identity provider representing Azure AD in the AWS Management Console.

At this point JoG users can assert their identity to their heart’s content but we don’t have a list of what AWS IAM roles stored in Azure AD for our users to assert. So how do we assert a role from Azure AD if the listing of the roles exists in AWS? The wonderful concept of application programmatic interfaces (APIs) swoops in and saves the day. Don’t get me wrong, if you hate yourself you can certainly provision them manually by modifying the application manifest file every time a new role is created or deleted. However, there is an easier route of having Azure AD pick up those roles directly from AWS on an automated schedule. How does this work? Well nothing works better than demonstrating how the roles can be queried from the AWS API.

The AWS SDK for .NET makes querying the API incredibly easy. We’re not stuck worrying about assembling the request and signing it. As you can see below the script is six lines of code in PowerShell.

The result is a listing of the roles configured in AWS which includes the AzureADEC2Admins role I created earlier. This example demonstrates the power a robust API brings to the table when integrating cloud services.

When Microsoft speaks of provisioning in regards to the AWS integration, they are talking about provisioning the roles defined in AWS to the the application manifest file in Azure AD. This provides us with the ability to assign the roles from within the Azure Portal as we’ll see later. This differs from many of the Azure AD integrations I’ve observed in the past where it will provision a record for the user into the software as a service (SaaS) offering. Below is a simple diagram of the provisioning process.

To do support provisioning we need to navigate to the AWS Management Console, open the Services Menu, and select IAM. We then select Users and hit the Add User button. I named the user AzureAD, gave it programmatic access type, and attached the IAMReadOnlyAccess policy. AWS then presented me with the access key ID and secret access key I’ll need to provide to Azure AD. Yes, we are going to follow security best practices and provide the account with the minimum rights and permissions it needs to provide the functionality. The Microsoft tutorial instructs you to generate the credentials under the context of the AWS administrator effectively giving the application full rights to the AWS account. No Microsoft, just no.

I next bounce back to the Azure portal and to the AWS application configuration. From here I select the Provisioning option, switch the drop-down box to Automatic, and plug the access key ID into the clientsecret field and the secret access key into the secret token field. A quick test connection shows success and I then save the configuration. Note that you must first save the configuration before you can turn on the synchronization.

After the screen refreshes I move down to the Settings section and turn the Provisioning Status to On and set the Scope to Sync only assigned users and groups (kind of a moot point for this, but oh well). I then Save the configuration once again and give it about 10 minutes to pull down the roles.

I then navigate back to the Users and Groups section and edit the Rick Sanchez assignment. Hitting the role option now shows me the AzureADEC2Admins role I configured in AWS IAM.

Let’s take another look at the service principle representing the AWS application in PowerShell. Using the Azure AD PowerShell cmdlets I referenced in entry 2 we connect to Azure AD and run the cmdlet Get-AzureADServicePrincipal which when run shows the manifest has been updated to include the newly synchronized application role.

We’ve configured the SAML trust on both ends, defined the necessary attributes, setup synchronization, and assigned Rick Sanchez an IAM role. In a moment we’ll demonstrate all of the pieces coming together.

Before I wrap it up, I want to quickly mention a few issues I ran into with this integration that seemed to resolve themselves without any intervention.

Up to a few nights ago I was unable to get the Provisioning piece working. I’m not putting it past user error (this is me we’re talking about) but I tried numerous times and failed but was successful a few nights ago. I also noticed from some recent comments in the Microsoft tutorial people complaining of similar errors. Maybe something broke for a bit?
The value of the audience attribute in the audienceRestriction section of the SAML assertion generated by Azure AD doesn’t match the identifier within the AWS federation metadata. Azure AD inserts some garbage looking audience value by default which was causing the assertions to be rejected by AWS. After setting the identifier to the value of urn:amazon:webservices as referenced in the AWS federation metadata the assertion was consumed without issue. I saw similar complaints in the Microsoft tutorial so I’m fairly confident this wasn’t just my issue.The story gets a bit stranger. I wanted to demonstrate the behavior for this series by removing the identifier I had previously added. Oddly enough the assertion was consumed without issue by AWS. I verified using Fiddler that the audience value was populated with that garbage entry. Either way, I would err on the side of caution and would recommend populating the identifier with the entry referenced in the AWS metadata as seen below.

The last thing I want to point out is the Microsoft tutorial states that you are required to create the users in AWS prior to asserting their identity. This is inaccurate as AWS does not require a user record to be pre-created in AWS. This is different from a majority (if not all) of the SaaS integrations I’ve done in the past so this surprised me as well. Either way, it’s not required which is a nice benefit if you’ve ever had to deal with the challenging of managing the identify lifecycle across cloud offerings.

Let’s wrap up this series by having Rick Sanchez log into the AWS Management Console and shutdown an EC2 instance. Here I have logged into the Windows 10 machine named CLIENT running in Azure. We navigate to https://myapps.microsoft.com and log into Azure AD as Rick Sanchez. We then hit the Amazon Web Services icon and are seamless logged into the AWS Management Console.

Examining the assertion in Fiddler shows the Role and RoleSessionName claims in the assertion.

Navigating to the EC2 Dashboard displays the instance I prepared earlier using my primary account. Rick has full rights over administration of the instance for activities such as starting and starting the instance. After successfully terminating the instance I log into the AWS Management Console as my primary AWS account and go to CloudTrail and see the log entries recording the activities of Rick Sanchez.

With that let’s cover some key pieces of information to draw from the series.

The Azure AD and AWS integration differs from most SaaS integrations I’ve done when it comes to user provisioning. Most of the time a user record must exist prior to the user authenticating. There are a growing number of SaaS providers provisioning upon successful authentication as provisioning challenges grow to further consumption of cloud services, but they are still few and far between. AWS does a solid job with eliminating the pain of pre-provisioning users.
The concept of associating roles with specific identity providers is really neat on Amazon’s part. It allows the customer to manage permissions and associate those permissions with roles in AWS, but delegate the right on a per identity provider basis to assert a specific set of roles.
Microsoft’s definition of provisioning in this integration is pulling a listing of roles from AWS and making them configurable in the Azure Portal.
The AWS API is solid and quite easy to leverage when using the AWS SDKs. I would like to see AWS switch from what seems to be proprietary method of application access to OAuth to become more aligned with the rest of the industry.
Don’t trust vendors to make everything point and click. Take the time to understand what’s going on in the background. In a SAML integration such as this, a quick review of the metadata can save you a lot of headaches when troubleshooting issues.

I learned a ton about AWS over these past few weeks and also got some good deep dive time into Azure AD which I haven’t had time for in a while. Hopefully you found this series valuable and learned a thing or two yourself.

In my next series I plan on writing a simple application to consume the Cognito service offered by AWS. For those of you more familiar with the Microsoft side of the fence, it’s similar to Azure AD B2C but with some unique features Microsoft hasn’t put in place yet making a great option to solve those B2C identity woes.

Thanks and have a wonderful holiday!

Journey Of The Geek

The chronicles of a Bostonian tech geek navigating through life and technology

Author Archives: mattfeltonma

Office 365 Group Naming Policies – Part 2

Office 365 Groups Naming Policies – Part 1