Exploring Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM) – Part 3 – Deep Dive

Posted on June 6, 2018 by mattfeltonma

Welcome back fellow geeks to my third post on my series covering Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (AAD PIM). In my first post I provided an overview of the service and in my second post I covered the initial setup and configuration of PIM. In this post we’re going to take a look at role activation and approval as well as looking behind the scenes to see if we can figure out makes the magic of AAD PIM work.

The lab I’ll be using consists of a non-domain joined Microsoft Windows 10 Professional version 1803 virtual machine (VM) running on Hyper V on my home lab. The VM has a local user configured that is a member of the Administrators group. I’ll be using Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome as my browsers and running Telerik’s Fiddler to capture the web conversation. The users in this scenario will be sourced from the Journey Of The Geek tenant and one will be licensed with Office 365 E5 and EMS E5 and the other will be licensed with just EMS E5. The tenant is not synchronized from an on-premises Windows Active Directory. The user Homer Simpsons has been made eligible for the Security Administrators role.

With the intro squared away, let’s get to it.

First thing I will do is navigate to the Azure Portal and authenticate as Homer Simpson. As expected, since the user is not Azure MFA enforced, he is allowed to authenticate to the Azure Portal with just a password. Once I’m into the Azure Portal I need to go into AAD PIM which I do from the shortcut I added to the user’s dashboard.

Navigating to the My roles section of the menu I can see that the user is eligible to for the Security Administrator Azure Active Directory (AAD) role.

Selecting the Activate link opens up a new section where the user will complete the necessary steps to activate the role. As you can see from my screenshot below, the Security Administrator role is one of the roles Microsoft considers high risk and enforces step-up authentication via Azure MFA. Selecting the Verify your identity before proceeding link opens up another section that informs the user he or she needs to verify the identity with an MFA challenge. If the user isn’t already configured for MFA, they will be setup for it at this stage.

Homer Simpson is already configured for MFA so after the successful response to the MFA challenge the screen refreshes and the Activation button can now be clicked.

After clicking the Activation button I enter a new section where I can configure a custom start time, configuration an activation duration (up to the maximum configured for the Role), provide ticketing information, and provide an activation reason.. As you can see I’ve adjusted the max duration for an activation from the default of one hour to three hours and have configured a requirement to provide a ticket number. This could be mapped back to your internal incident or change management system.

After filling in the required information I click the Activate button, the screen refreshes back to the main request screen, and I’m informed that activation for this role requires approval. In addition to modifying the activation and requiring a ticket number, I also configured the role to require approval.

At this point I opened an instance of Google Chrome and authenticated to Azure AD as a user who is in the privileged role administrator role. Opening up AAD PIM with this user and navigating to the My roles section and looking at the Active roles shows the user is a permanent member of the Security Administrators, Global Administrators, and Privileged Role Administrators roles.

I then navigate over to the Approve requests section. Here I can see the pending request from Homer Simpson requesting activation of the Security Administrator role. I’m also provided with the user’s reason and start and end time. I’d like to see Microsoft add a column for the user’s ticket number. My approving user may want to reference the ticket for more detail on why the user is requesting the role

At this point I select the pending request and click the Approve button. A new section opens where I need to provide the approval reason after which I hit the Approve button.

After approving the blue synchronization-like image is refreshed to a green check box indicating the approval has been process and the user’s role is now active.

If I navigate to My audit history section I can see the approval of Homer’s request has been logged as well as the reasoning I provided for my approval.

If I bounce back to the Microsoft Edge browser instance that Homer Simpsons is logged into and navigate to the My requests and I can see that my activation has been approved and it’s now active.

At this point I have requested the role and the role has been approved by a member of the Privileged Role Administrators role. Let’s try modifying an AIP Policy. Navigating back to Homer Simpsons dashboard I select the Azure Information Protection icon and receive the notification below.

What happened? Navigating to Homer Simpsons mailbox shows the email confirming the role has been activated.

What gives? To figure out the answer to that question, I’m going to check on the Fiddler capture I started before logging in as Homer Simpson.

In this capture I can see my browser sending my bearer token to various AIP endpoints and receiving a 401 return code with an error indicating the user isn’t a member of the Global Administrators or Security Administrators roles.

I’ll export the bearer token, base64 decode it and stick it into Notepad. Let’s refresh the web page and try accessing AIP again. As we can see AIP opens without issues this time.

At this point I dumped the bearer token from the failure and the bearer token from a success and compared the two as seen below. The IAT, NBF, and EXP are simply speak to times specific to the claim. I can’t find any documentation on the aio or uti claims. If anyone has information on those two, I’d love to see it.

I thought it would be interesting at this point to deactivate my access and see if I could still access AIP. To deactivate a role the user simply accesses AAD PIM, goes to My Roles and looks the Active Roles section as seen below.

After deactivation I went back to the dashboard and was still able to access AIP. After refreshing the browser I was unable to access AIP. Since I didn’t see any obvious cookies or access tokens being created or deleted. My guess at this point is applications that use Azure AD or Office 365 Roles have some type of method of receiving data from AAD PIM. A plausible scenario would be an application receives a bearer token, queries Azure AD to see if the user is in one a member of the relevant roles for the application. Perhaps for eligible roles there is an additional piece of information indicating the timespan the user has the role activated and that time is checked against the time the bearer token was issued. That would explain my experience above because the bearer token my browser sent to AIP was obtained prior to activating my role. I verified this by comparing the bearer token issued from the delegation point at first login to the one sent to AIP after I tried accessing it after activation. Only after a refresh did I obtain a new bearer token from the delegation endpoint.

Well folks that’s it for this blog entry. If you happen to know the secret sauce behind how AAD PIM works and why it requires a refresh I’d love to hear it! See you next post.

Exploring Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM) – Part 2 – Setup

Posted on May 29, 2018 by mattfeltonma

Welcome back to part 2 of my series on Azure Active Directory Privileged Identity Management (AAD PIM). In the first post I covered the basics of the service. If you haven’t read it yet, take a few minutes to read through it because I’ll be jumping right into using the service going forward. In this post I’m going to cover the setup process for AAD PIM.

Before you can begin using AAD PIM, you’ll need to purchase a license that includes the capability. As we saw in my last post, at this time that means a standalone Azure AD Premium P2 or Enterprise Mobility + Security E5 license. Once the license is registered as being purchased by your tenant, you’ll be able to setup AAD PIM.

Your first step is to log into the Azure Portal. After you’ve logged in you’ll want to click the Create a Resource button and search for Azure AD Privileged Identity Management.

Select the search result and AAD PIM application will be displayed with the Create button. Click the create button to spin the service up for your tenant.

It will only take a few seconds and you’ll be informed the service has successfully been spun up and you’ll be given the option to add a link to your dashboard.

The global admin who added AAD PIM to the tenant will become the first member of the Privileged Role Administrator role. This is a new role that was introduced with the service. Members of this role are your administrators of AAD PIM and has full read and write access to it. Beware that other global admins, security administrators, and security readers only have read access to it. As soon as you successfully spin up the service, you’ll want to add another Privileged Role Administrator as a backup.

Upon opening AAD PIM for the first time, you’ll receive a consent page as seen below. The consent process requires confirmation of the user’s identity using Azure MFA. If the user isn’t enabled for it, it will be configured at this point.

After successfully authenticating with Azure MFA. The screen will update to show the status check was completed as seen below. This is a great example of Microsoft exercising the concept of step-up authentication. The user may have authenticated to the Azure Portal with a password or perhaps a still-valid session cookie. By prompting for an Azure MFA challenge the assurance of the user being the real user is that much higher thus reducing the risk of the user accessing such sensitive configuration options.

After clicking the Consent button the service becomes fully usable. The primary menu options are displayed as seen in the picture below. For the purpose of this post we’re going to click on the Azure AD directory roles option under the Manage section.

The Manage section of the menu is refreshed and a number of new options are displayed. Before I jump into the Wizard, I’ll navigate through each option in the section to explain its purpose.

The Roles option gives us a view of all of the users who are members of privileged roles within Azure AD and Office 365. In the activation column it’s shown as to whether or not the user is a permanent or eligible admin. The expiration column shows any user that is eligible and has actively requested and been approved for temporary access to the privileged role. As you can see from my screenshot from my test tenant I have a number of users in the global admin roles which is a big no no. We’ll remediate that in a bit using the Wizard.

Selecting the Add user button brings up a new screen where new users can be configured for privileged roles. Microsoft has done a good job of giving AAD PIM the capability of managing a multitude of Azure AD and Office 365 roles. Adding users to roles through this tool will make automatically make the user an eligible for the role rather than a permanent member like through other means would.

The Filter button allows for robust filtering options including the permission state (all, eligible, permanent), activation state (all, active, or inactive), and by role. The Refresh button’s function is obvious and the group option allows you to group the data either by user or by role. The Review button allows you to kick off an access review which we’ll cover in a later post. Lastly we have the Export button which exports the data to a CSV.

The Users option under the Manage section presents the same options as the Roles option except it takes a user-centric view.

The Alerts option under the Manage section displays the alerts referenced here. You can see it is alerting me to the fact I have too many permanent global admins configured for my tenant. I also have the option to run a manual scan rather than waiting on the next automatic scan.

The Access Reviews option under the Manage section is used to create new access review. I’ll cover the capability in a future post.

Skipping over the Wizard option for a moment, we have the Settings option. Here we can configure a variety of settings for roles, alerts, and access reviews.

Let’s dig into the settings for roles first.

Here we can configure the default settings for all roles as well as settings specific to one role. When a user successfully activates a privileged role, the membership in that role is time bound with a default of one hour. If after doing some baselining we find one hour is insufficient, we could bump it up to something higher. We can also configure notifications to notify administrators of activation of a role. There is also the option to require an incident or request reference that may map back to an internal incident management or request management system. Azure MFA can be required when a user activates a role. You’ll want to be aware that the MFA setting is automatically enforced for roles Microsoft views as critical such as global administrator.

Finally we have the option to require an approval. If you’ve played around with AAD PIM since preview, you may remember the approval workflow. For some reason the product team removed it when AAD PIM original went general available. This effectively meant users could elevate their access whenever they wanted. Sure they weren’t permanent members but there were no checks and balances. For organizations with a high security posture it made AAD PIM of little value and forced the on-demand management of privileged roles to be done using complicated PowerShell scripts or third-party tools that were integrated with the Graph API. It’s wonderful to see the product team responded to customer feedback and has added the feature back.

Toggling to Enable for the require approval option adds a section where you can select approvers for requests for the role.

Moving on to the Alerts settings we have the ability to configure parameters for some of the alerting as can be seen from the examples below.

The default values for the configurable thresholds around the “There are too many global administrator” should be a good wake up call to organizations as to the risk Microsoft associates with global admin access. The thresholds for the “Roles are being activated too frequently” should be left as the default until the behavior of your user base is better understood. This will help you to identify deviations from standard behavior indicating a possible threat as well as to identify opportunities to improve the user experience by bumping up the activation time span for users holding privileged roles that the hour long default activation time is insufficient.

Lastly we have Access Review settings. Here we can enable or disable mail notifications to reviewers are the beginning and end of an access review. Reminders can also be sent to reviewers if they have no completed a review they are a part of. A very welcome feature of requiring reviewers to provide reasons for approvals of a review. This can be helpful to capture business requirements as to why a user needs continued access to a role. Finally, the default access review duration can be adjusted.

Now on to the Wizard. The Wizard is a great tool to use when you first configure AAD PIM in order to get it up and running and begin capturing behavioral patterns. The steps within the Wizard are outlined below.

The Discover privileged roles step displays a simple summary of the privileged roles in use and the amount of permanent and eligible users. We can see from the below my tenant has exceeded either the 3 global admins or greater than 10% of users default thresholds for the “There are too many global admins” alert. Selecting any of the roles displays a listing of the users holding permanent or eligible membership in the role.

Clicking the next button bring us to the “Convert users to eligible step” where we can begin converting permanent members to eligible members. From a best practices perspective, you should ensure you keep at least two permanent members in the Privileged Role Administrator role to avoid being locked out if one account becomes unavailable. You can see that I’m making Ash Williams and Jason Voorhies eligible members of the global admins group.

After clicking the Next button I’m moved to the “Review the changes to your users in the privileged roles” step. I commit the changes by hitting the OK button and my two users are now setup as eligible members of the roles.

As you’ve seen throughout the post AAD PIM is incredibly easy to configure. I firmly believe that the only successful security solutions moving forward will be solutions that are simple to use and transparent to the users. These two traits will allow security professionals to focus less of their time on convoluted solutions and more time working directly with the business to drive real value to the organization.

I’m going to start something new with a quick bulleted list of key learning points that I came across while performing the lab and doing the research for the post.

AAD PIM can be configured after the first Azure AD Premium P2 or EMS E5 license is associated with the tenant
Be aware that at this time Microsoft does not enforce a technical control to prevent all users from benefiting from PIM but the licensing requirements require an individual license for each user benefitting from the feature. Make sure you’re compliant with the licensing requirements and don’t build processes around what technical controls exist today. They will change.
Once AAD PIM is activated by the first global admin, immediately assign a second user permanent membership in the Privileged Role Administrators role.

That’s it folks. In the next post in my series I’ll take a look at what the user experience is like for a requestor and approver. I’ll also look at some Fiddler captures to see I capture any detail as to how/if the modified privileges are reflected in the logical security token.

Thanks!

Exploring Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM) – Part 1

Posted on May 25, 2018 by mattfeltonma

We’re going to take a break from Azure Information Protection and shift our focus to Azure Active Directory Privileged Identity Management (AAD PIM).

If you’ve ever had to manage an application, you’re familiar with the challenge of trying to keep a balance between security and usability when it comes to privileged access. In many cases you’re stuck with users that have permanent membership in privileged roles because the impact to usability of the application is far too great to manage that access on an “as needed basis” or as we refer to it in the industry “just in time” (JIT). If you do manage to remove that permanent membership requirement (often referred to as standing privileged access) you’re typically stuck with a complicated automation solution or a convoluted engineering solution that gives you security but at the cost of usability and increasing operational complexity.

Not long ago the privileged roles within Azure Active Directory (AAD), Office 365 (O365), and Azure Role-Based Access Control had this same problem. Either a user was a permanent member of the privileged role or you had to string together some type of request workflow that interacted with the Graph API or triggered a PowerShell script. In my first entry into Azure AD, I had a convoluted manual process which involved requests, approvals, and a centralized password management system. It worked, but it definitely impacted productivity.

Thankfully Microsoft (MS) has addressed this challenge with the introduction of Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (AAD PIM). In simple terms AAD PIM introduces the concept of an “eligible” administrator which allows you to achieve that oh so wonderful JIT. AAD PIM is capable of managing a wide variety of roles which is another area Microsoft has made major improvements on. Just a few years ago close to everything required being in the Global Admin role which was a security nightmare.

In addition to JIT, AAD PIM also provides a solid level of logging and analytics, a centralized view into what users are members of privileged roles, alerting around the usage of privileged roles, approval workflow capabilities (love this feature), and even provides an access review capability to help with access certification campaigns. You can interact with AAD PIM through the Azure Portal, Graph API, or PowerShell.

To get JIT you’ll need an Azure Active Directory Premium P2 or Enteprise Mobility and Security E5 license. Microsoft states that every use that benefits from the feature requires a license. While this is a licensing requirement, it’s not technically enforced as we see in my upcoming posts.

You’re probably saying, “Well this is all well and good Matt, but there is nothing here I couldn’t glean from Microsoft documentation.” No worries my friends, we’ll be using this series to walk to demonstrate the capabilities so you can see them in action. I’ll also be breaking out my favorite tool Fiddler to take a look behind the scenes of how Microsoft manages to elevate access for the user after a privileged role has been activated.

The Evolution of AD RMS to Azure Information Protection – Part 7 – Deep Dive into cross Azure AD tenant consumption

Posted on May 9, 2018 by mattfeltonma

Each time I think I’ve covered what I want to for Azure Information Protection (AIP), I think of another fun topic to explore. In this post I’m going to look at how AIP can be used to share information with users that exist outside your tenant. We’ll be looking at the scenario where an organization has a requirement to share protected content with another organization that has an Office 365 tenant.

Due to my requirements to test access from a second tenant, I’m going to supplement the lab I’ve been using. I’m adding to the mix my second Azure AD tenant at journeyofthegeek.com. Specific configuration items to note are as follows:

The tenant’s custom domain of journeyofthegeek.com is an Azure AD (AAD)-managed domain.
I’ve created two users for testing. The first is named Homer Simpson (homer.simpson@journeyofthegeek.com) and the second is Bart Simpson (bart.simpson@journeyofthegeek.com).
Each user have been licensed with Office 365 E3 and Enterprise Mobility + Security E5 licenses.
Three mail-enabled security groups have been created. The groups are named The Simpsons (thesimpsons@journeyofthegeek.com), JOG Accounting (jogaccounting@journeyofthegeek.com), and JOG IT (jogit@journeyofthegeek.com).
Homer Simpson is a member of The Simpsons and JOG Accounting while Bart Simpson is a member of The Simpsons and JOG IT.
Two additional AIP policies have been created in addition to the Global policy. One policy is named JOG IT and one is named JOG Accounting.
The Global AIP policy has an additional label created named PII that enforces protection. The label is configured to detect at least one occurrence of a US social security number. The document is protection policy allows only members of the The Simpsons group to the role of viewer.
The JOG Accounting and JOG IT AIP policies have both been configured with an additional label of either JOG Accounting or JOG IT. A sublabel for each label has also been created which enforces protection and restricts members of the relevant departmental group to the role of viewer.
I’ve repurposed the GIWCLIENT2 machine and have created two local users named Bart Simpson and Homer Simpson.

Once I had my tenant configuration up and running, I initialized Homer Simpson on GIWCLIENT2. I already had the AIP Client installed on the machine, so upon first opening Microsoft Word, the same bootstrapping process I described in my previous post occurred for the MSIPC client and the AIP client. Notice that the document has had the Confidential \ All Employees label applied to the document automatically as was configured in the Global AIP policy. Notice also the Custom Permissions option which is presented to the user because I’ve enabled the appropriate setting in the relevant AIP policies.

I’ll be restricting access to the document by allowing users in the geekintheweeds.com organization to hold the Viewer role. The geekintheweeds.com domain is associated with my other Azure AD tenant that I have been using for the lab for this series of posts. First thing I do is change the classification label from Confidential \ All Employees to General. That label is a default label provided by Microsoft which has an RMS Template applied that restricts viewers to users within the tenant.

One interesting finding I discovered through my testing is that the user can go through the process of protecting with custom permissions using a label that has a pre-configured template and the AIP client won’t throw any errors, but the custom permissions won’t be applied. This makes perfect sense from a security perspective, but it would be nice to inform the user with an error or warning. I can see this creating unnecessary help desk calls with how it’s configured now.

When I attempt to change my classification label to General, I receive a prompt requiring me to justify the drop in classification. This is yet another setting I’ve configured in my Global AIP policy. This seems to be a standard feature in most data classification solutions from what I’ve observed in another major vendor.

After successfully classifying the document with the General label protection is removed from the document. At this point I can apply my custom permissions as seen below.

I repeated the process for another protected doc named jog_protected_for_Ash_Williams.docx with permissions restricted to ash.williams@geekintheweeds.com. I packaged both files into an email and sent them to Ash Williams who is a user in the Geek In The Weeds tenant. Keep in mind the users in the Geek In The Weeds tenant are synchronized from a Windows Active Directory domain and use federated authentication.

After opening Outlook the message email from Homer Simpson arrives in Ash William’s inbox. At this point I copied the files to my desktop, closed Outlook, opened Microsoft Word and used the “Reset Settings” options of the AIP client, and signed out of my Office profile.

At this point I started Fiddler and opened one of the Microsoft Word document. Microsoft Word pops-up a login prompt where I type in my username of ash.williams@geekintheweeds.com and I’m authenticated to Office 365 through the standard federated authentication flow. The document then pops open.

Examining the Fiddler capture we see a lot of chatter. Let’s take a look at this in chunks, first addressing the initial calls to the AIP endpoint.

If you have previous experience with the MSIPC client in the AD RMS world you’ll recall that it makes its calls in the following order:

Searches HKLM registry hive
Searches HKCU registry hive
Web request to the RMS licensing pipeline for the RMS endpoint listed in the metadata attached to the protected document

In my previous deep dives into AD RMS we observed this behavior in action. In the AIP world, it looks like the MSIPC client performs similarly. The endpoint we see it first contacting is the Journey of the Geek which starts with 196d8e.

The client first sends an unauthenticated HTTP GET to the Server endpoint in the licensing pipeline. The response the server gives is a list of available SOAP functions which include GetLicensorCertificate and GetServerInfo as seen below.

The client follows up the actions below:

Now that the client knows the endpoint supports the GetServerInfo SOAP function, it sends an unauthenticated HTTP POST which includes the SOAP action of GetServerInfo. The AIP endpoint returns a response which includes the capabilities of the AIP service and the relevant endpoints for certification and the like.
It uses that information received from the previous request to send an unauthenticated HTTP POST which includes the SOAP action of ServiceDiscoveryForUser. The service returns a 401.

At this point the client needs to obtain a bearer access token to proceed. This process is actually pretty interesting and warrants a closer look.

Let’s step through the conversation:

We first see a connection opened to odc.officeapps.live.com and an unauthenticated HTTP GET to the /odc/emailhrd/getfederationprovider URI with query strings of geekintheweeds.com. This is a home realm discovery process trying to the provider for the user’s email domain.
My guess is this is MSAL In action and is allowing support for multiple IdPs like Azure AD, Microsoft Live, Google, and the like. I’ll be testing this theory in a later post where I test consumption by a Google user.

The server responds with a number of headers containing information about the token endpoints for Azure AD (since this is domain associated with an Azure AD tenant.)
A connection is then opened to odc.officeapps.live.com and an unauthenticated HTTP GET to the /odc/emailhrd/getidp with the email address for my user ash.williams@geekintheweeds.com. The response is interesting in that I would have thought it would return the user’s tenant ID. Instead it returns a JSON response of OrgId.

Since I’m a nosey geek, I decided to unlock the session for editing. First I put in the email address associated with a Microsoft Live. Instead of OrgId it returned MSA which indicates it detects it as being a Microsoft Live account. I then plugged in a @gmail.com account to see if I would get back Google but instead I received back neither. OrgId seems to indicate that it’s an account associated with an Azure AD tenant. Maybe it would perform alternative steps depending on whether it’s MSA or Azure AD in future steps? No clue.
Next, a connection is made to oauth2 endpoint for the journeyofthegeek.com tenant. The machine makes an unathenticated requests an access token for the https://api.aadrm.com/ in order to impersonate Ash Williams. Now if you know your OAuth, you know the user needs to authenticate and approve the access before the access token can be issued. The response from the oauth2 endpoint is a redirect over to the AD FS server so the user can authenticate.
After the user successfully authenticates, he is returned a security token and redirected back to login.microsoftonline.com where the assertion is posted and the user is successfully authenticated and is returned an authorization code.
The machine then takes that authorization code and posts it to the oauth2 endpoint for my journeyofthegeek.com tenant. It receives back an Open ID Connect id token for ash.williams, a bearer access token, and a refresh token for the Azure RMS API.

Decoding the bearer access token we come across some interesting information. We can see the audience for the token is the Azure RMS API, the issuer of the token is the tenant id associated with journeyofthegeek.com (interesting right?), and the identity provider for the user is the tenant id for geekintheweeds.com.
After the access token is obtained the machine closes out the session with login.microsoftonline.com and of course dumps a bunch of telemetry (can you see the trend here?).
A connection is again made to odc.officeapps.live.com and the /odc/emailhrd/getfederationprovider URI with an unauthenticated request which includes a query string of geekintheweeds.com. The same process as before takes place.

Exhausted yet? Well it’s about to get even more interesting if you’re an RMS nerd like myself.

Let’s talk through the sessions above.

A connection is opened to the geekintheweeds.com /wmcs/certification/server.asmx AIP endpoint with an unauthenticated HTTP POST and a SOAP action of GetServerInfo. The endpoint responds as we’ve observed previously with information about the AIP instance including features and endpoints for the various pipelines.
A connection is opened to the geekintheweeds.com /wmcs/oauth2/servicediscovery/servicediscovery.asmx AIP endpoint with an unauthenticated HTTP POST and a SOAP action of ServiceDiscoveryForUser. We know from the bootstrapping process I covered in my last post, that this action requires authentication, so we see the service return a 401.
A connection is opened to the geekintheweeds.com /wmcs/oauth2/certification/server.asmx AIP endpoint with an unauthenticated HTTP POST and SOAP action of GetLicensorCertificate. The SLC and its chain is returned to the machine in the response.
A connection is opened to the geekintheweeds.com /wmcs/oauth2/certification/certification.asmx AIP endpoint with an unauthenticated HTTP POST and SOAP action of Certify. Again, we remember from my last post that this requires authentication, so the service again responds with a 401.

What we learned from the above is the bearer access token the client obtained earlier isn’t attended for the geekintheweeds.com AIP endpoint because we never see it used. So how will the machine complete its bootstrap process? Well let’s see.

A connection is opened to the journeyofthegeek.com /wmcs/oauth2/servicediscovery/servicediscovery.asmx AIP endpoint with an unauthenticated HTTP POST and SOAP action of ServiceDiscoveryForUser. The service returns a 401 after which the client makes the same connection and HTTP POST again, but this time including its bearer access token it retrieved earlier. The service provides a response with the relevant pipelines for the journeyofthegeek.com AIP instance.
A connection is opened to the journeyofthegeek.com /wmcs/oauth2/certification/server.asmx AIP endpoint with an authenticated (bearer access token) HTTP POST and SOAP action of GetLicensorCertificate. The service returns the SLC and its chain.
A connection is opened to the journeyofthegeek.com /wmcs/oauth2/certification/certification.asmx AIP endpoint with an authenticated (bearer access token) HTTP POST and SOAP action of Certify. The service returns a RAC for the ash.williams@geekintheweeds.com along with relevant SLC and chain. Wait what? A RAC from the journeyofthegeek.com AIP instance for a user in geekintheweeds.com? Well folks this is supported through RMS’s support for federation. Since all Azure AD’s in a given offering (commercial, gov, etc) come pre-federated, this use case is supported.
A connection is opened to the journeyofthegeek.com /wmcs/licensing/server.asmx AIP endpoint with an uauthenticated HTTP POST and SOAP action of GetServerInfo. We’ve covered this enough to know what’s returned.
A connection is opened to the journeyofthegeek.com /wmcs/licensing/publish.asmx AIP endpoint with an authenticated (bearer access token) HTTP POST and SOAP action of GetClientLicensorandUserCertificates. The server returns the CLC and EUL to the user.

After this our protected document opens in Microsoft Word.

Pretty neat right? Smart move by Microsoft to take advantage and build upon of the federated capabilities built into AD RMS. This is another example showing just how far ahead of their game the product team for AD RMS was. Heck, there are SaaS vendors that still don’t support SAML, let alone on-premises products from 10 years ago.

In the next few posts (can you tell I find RMS fascinating yet?) of this series I’ll explore how Microsoft has integrated AIP into OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online.

Have a great week!

Journey Of The Geek

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

Tag Archives: Microsoft

Exploring Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM) – Part 3 – Deep Dive

Exploring Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM) – Part 2 – Setup

Exploring Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM) – Part 1