Today we continue exploring the new integration between Microsoft’s Azure AD (Azure Active Directory) and AWS (Amazon Web Services) SSO (Single Sign-On).  Over the past three posts I’ve covered the high level concepts of both platforms, the challenges the integration seeks to solve, and how to enable the federated trust which facilitates the single sign-on experience.  If you haven’t read through those posts, I recommend you before you dive into this one.  In this post I’ll be covering the neatest feature of the new integration, which is the support for automated provisioning.

If you’ve ever worked in the identity realm before, you know the pains that come with managing the life cycle of an identity from initial provisioning, changes resulting to the identity such as department and position changes, to the often forgotten stage of de-provisioning.  On-premises these problems were used solved by cobbled together scripts or complex identity management solution such as SailPoint Identity IQ or Microsoft Identity Manager.  While these tools were challenging to implement and operate, they did their job in the world of Windows Active Directory, LDAP, SQL databases and the like.

Then came cloud, and all bets were off.  Identity data stores skyrocketed from less than a hundred to hundreds and sometimes thousands (B2C has exploded far beyond event that).  Each new cloud service introduced into the enterprise introduced yet another identity management challenge.  While some of these offerings have APIs that support identity management operations, most do not, and those that do are proprietary in nature.  Writing custom code to each of the APIs is a huge challenge that most enterprises can’t keep up.  The result is often manual management of an identity life cycle, through uploading exported CSV files or some poor soul pointing and clicking a thousand times in a vendor portal.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was some mythical standard out that would help to solve this problem, use a standard API through REST, and support the JSON format?  Turns out there is and that standard is SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management).  You may be surprised to know the standard has been around for a while now (technically 2011).  I recall hearing about it at a Gartner conference many many hears ago.  Unfortunately, it’s taken a long time to catch on but support is steadily increasing.

Thankfully for us, Microsoft has baked support into Azure AD and AWS recognized the value and took advantage of the feature.  By doing this, the identity life cycle challenges of managing an Azure AD and AWS integration has been heavily re-mediated and our lives made easier.

Azure AD Provisioning – Example

Let’s take a look at how set it up, shall we?

The first place you’ll need to go is into the AWS account which is the master for the organization and into the AWS SSO Settings.  In Settings you’ll see the provisioning option which is initially set as manual.  Select to enable automatic provisioning.

AWS SSO Settings – Provisioning

Once complete, a SCIM endpoint will be created.  This is the endpoint in AWS (referred to as the SCIM service provider in the SCIM standard) that the SCIM service on Azure AD (referred to as the client in the SCIM standard) will interact with to search for, create, modify, and delete AWS users and groups.  To interact with this endpoint, Azure AD must authenticate to it, which it does with a bearer access token that is issued by AWS SSO.  Be aware that the access token has a one year life span, so ensure you set some type of reminder.  A quick search through the boto3 API doesn’t show a way to query for issued access tokens (yes you can issue more than one at at time) so you won’t be able to automate the process as of yet.

After SCIM is enabled, AWS SSO Settings for provisioning now reports SCIM in use.

Next you’ll need to bounce over to Azure AD and go into the enterprise app you created (refer to my third post for this process).   There you’ll navigate to the Provisioning blade and select Automatic as the provisioning method.

You’ll then need to configure the URL and access token you collected from AWS and test the connection.  This will cause Azure AD to test querying the endpoint for a random user and group to validate functionality.

If your test is successful you can then save the settings.

You’re not done yet.  Next you have to configure a mapping which map attributes in Azure AD to the resource and attributes in the SCIM schema.  Yes folks, SCIM does have a schema for attributes and resources (like users and groups).  You can extend it as needed, but in this integration it looks to be using the default user and group resources.

Let’s take a look at what the group mappings look like.

The attribute names on the left are the names of the attributes in Azure AD and the attributes on the right are the names of the attributes Azure AD will write the values of the attributes to in AWS SSO.  Nothing too surprising here.

How about the user mappings?

Lots more attributes in the user mappings by default.  Now I’m not sure how many of these attributes AWS SSO supports.  According to the SCIM standard, a client can attempt to write whatever it wants and any attributes the service provider doesn’t understand is simply discarded.  The best list of attributes I could find were located here, and it’s not near this number.  I can’t speak to what the minimum required attributes are to make AWS work, because their official instructions on this integration doesn’t say.  I know some of the product team sometimes reads the blog, so maybe we’ll luck out and someone will respond with that answer.

The one tweak you’ll need to make here is to delete the mailNickName mapping and replace it with a mapping of objectId to externalId.  After you make the change, click the save icon.

I don’t know why AWS requires this so I can only theorize.  Maybe they’re using this attribute as a primary key in the back end database or perhaps they’re using it to map the users to the groups?  I’m not sure how Azure AD is writing the members attribute over to AWS.  Maybe in the future I’ll throw together a basic app to visualize what the service provider end looks like.

Now you need to decide what users and groups you want to sync to AWS SSO.  Towards the bottom of the provisioning blade, you’ll see the option to toggle the provisioning status.  The scope drop down box has an option to sync all users and groups or to sync only assigned users and groups.  Best practice here is basic security, only sync what you need to sync, so leave the option on sync only assigned users and group.

The assigned users and groups refers to users that have been assigned to the enterprise application in Azure AD.  This is configured on the Users and Groups blade for the enterprise app.  I tested a few different scenarios using an Azure AD dynamic group, standard group, and a group synchronized from Windows AD.  All worked successfully and synchronized the relevant users over.

Once you’re happy with your settings, toggle the provisioning status and save the changes.  It may take some time depending on how much you’re syncing.

If the sync is successful, you’ll be able to hop back over to AWS SSO and you’ll see your users and groups.

Microsoft’s official documentation does a great job explaining the end to end cycle.  The short of it is there’s an initial cycle which grabs all users and groups from Azure AD, then filters the list down to the users and groups assigned to the application.  From there it queries the target system to match the user with the matching attribute and if it isn’t found creates it, and if found and needs updating, updates it.

Incremental cycles are down from that point forward every 40 minutes.  I couldn’t find any documentation on how to adjust the synchronization frequency.  Be aware of that 40 minute sync and consider the end to end synchronization if you’re sourcing from Windows Active Directory.  In that case making changes in Windows AD could take just over an hour (assuming you’re using the 30 minute sync interval in Azure AD Connect) to fully synchronize.

As I described in my third post, I have a lab environment setup where a Windows Active Directory domain is syncing to Azure AD.  I used that environment to play out a few scenarios.

In the first scenario I disabled Marge Simpson’s account.  After waiting some time for changes to synchronize across both platforms, I saw in AWS SSO that Marge Simpson was now disabled.

For another scenario, I removed Barney Gumble from the Network Operators Active Directory group.  After waiting time for the sync to complete, the Network Operators group is now empty reflecting Barney’s removal from the group.

Recall that I assigned four groups to the app in Azure AD, Network Operators, Security Admins, Security Auditors, and Systems Operators.  These are the four groups syncing to AWS SSO.  Barney Gumble was only a member of the Network Operators group, which means removing him put him out of scope for the app assignment.  In AWS SSO, he now reports as being disabled.

For our final scenario, let’s look at what happens when I deleted Barney Gumble from Windows Active Directory.  After waiting the required replication time, Barney Gumble’s user account was still present in AWS SSO, but set as disabled.  While Barney wouldn’t be able to login to AWS SSO, there would still be cleanup that would need to happen on the AWS SSO directory to remove the stale identity records.

The last thing I want to cover is the logging capabilities of the SCIM service in Azure AD.  There are two separate logs you can reference.  The first are the Provisioning Logs which are currently in preview.  These logs are going to be your go to to troubleshoot issues with the provisioning process.  They’re available with an Azure AD P1 or above license and are kept for 30 days.  Supposedly they’re kept for free for 7 days, but the documentation isn’t clear whether or not you have the ability to consume them.  I also couldn’t find any documentation on if it’s possible to pull the logs from an API for longer term retention or analysis in Log Analytics or a 3rd party logging solution.

If you’ve ever used Azure AD, you’ll be familiar with the second source of logs.  In the Azure AD Audit logs, you get additional information, which while useful, is more catered to tracking the process vs troubleshooting the process like the provisioning logs.

Before I wrap up, let’s cover a few key findings:

• The access token used to access the SCIM endpoint in AWS SSO has a one year lifetime.  There doesn’t seem to be a way to query what tokens have been issued by AWS SSO at this time, so you’ll need to manage the life cycle in another manner until the capability is introduced.
• Users that are removed from the scope of the sync, either by unassigning them from the app or deleting their user object, become disabled in AWS SSO.  The records will need to be cleaned up via another process.
• If synchronizing changes from a Windows AD the end to end synchronization process can take over an hour (30 minutes from Windows AD to Azure AD and 40 minutes from Azure AD to AWS SSO).

That will wrap up this post.  In my opinion the SCIM service available in Azure AD is extremely under utilized.  SCIM is a great specification that needs more love.  While there is a growing adoption from large enterprise software vendors, there is a real opportunity for your organization to take advantage of the features it offers in the same way AWS has.  It can greatly ease the pain your customers and enterprise users experience having to manage the life cycle of an identity and makes for a nice belt and suspenders to modern identity capabilities in an application.

In the last post of my series I’ll demonstrate a few scenarios showing how simple the end to end experience is for users.  I’ll include some examples of how you can incorporate some of the advanced security features of Azure AD to help protect your multi-cloud experience.

See you next post!