Tag Archives: Microsoft

The Evolution of AD RMS to Azure Information Protection – Part 6 – Deep Dive into Client Bootstrapping

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The Evolution of AD RMS to Azure Information Protection – Part 6 – Deep Dive into Client Bootstrapping

Today I’m back with more Azure Information Protection (AIP) goodness.  Over the past five posts I’ve covered the use cases, concepts and migration paths.  Today I’m going to get really nerdy and take a look behind the curtains at how the MSIPC client shipped with Office 2016 interacts with AIP .  I’ll be examining the MSIPC client log and reviewing procmon and Fiddler captures.  If the thought of examining log files and SOAP calls excites you, this is a post for you.  Make sure to take a read through my previous posts to ensure you understand my lab infrastructure and configuration as well as key AIP concepts.

Baselining the Client

Like any good engineer, I wanted to baseline my machine to ensure the MSIPC client was functioning correctly.  Recall that my clients are migrating from an on-premises AD RMS implementation to AIP.  I haven’t completed my removal of AD RMS so the service connection point for on-premises AD RMS is still there and the migration scripts Microsoft provides are still in use.  Let’s take a look at the registry entries that are set via the Migrate-Client and Migrate-User script.  In my last post I covered the purpose of the two scripts.  For the purposes of this post, I’m going to keep it brief and only cover registry entries applicable to the MSIPC client shipped with Office 2016.

  1. Migrate-Client
    • Condition: Runs each computer startup only if it detects it has not run before or the version variable in the script has been changed.
    • Registry Entries Modified:
      • Deletes HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSIPC\ServiceLocation keys
      • Deletes HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\MSIPC\ServiceLocation key
      • Deletes HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSIPC\ServiceLocation\LicensingRedirection key
      • Deletes HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\MSIPC\ServiceLocation\LicensingRedirection key
      • Add Default value to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSIPC\ServiceLocation\EnterpriseCertification key with data value pointing to AIP endpoint for tenant
      • Add Default value to HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\MSIPC\ServiceLocation\EnterpriseCertification key with data value pointing to AIP endpoint for tenant
      • Add a value for the FQDN and single label URLs to on-premises AD RMS licensing pipeline to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSIPC\ServiceLocation\LicensingRedirection key with data values pointing to AIP endpoints for tenant
      • Add a value for the FQDN and single label URLs to on-premises AD RMS licensing pipeline to HKLM\Software\Wow6432NodeMicrosoft\MSIPC\ServiceLocation\LicensingRedirection key with data values pointing to AIP endpoints for tenant
  2. Migrate-User
    • Condition: Runs each user logon only if it detects it has not run before or the version variable in the script has been changed.
    • Registry Entries Modified:
      • Deletes HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\DRM key
      • Deletes HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\MSIPC key
      • Deletes HKCU\Software\Classes\Microsoft.IPViewerChildMenu\shell key
      • Add DefaultServerUrl value to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\DRM key and set its data value to the AIP endpoint for the tenant
    • Files Modified:
      • Deletes the contents of the %localappdata%\Microsoft\MSIPC folder

A quick review of my client settings validates that all the necessary registry entries are in place and I have no issues consuming and created protected content.

Resetting the Client

If you have administered AD RMS in the past, you will be very familiar with how to re-bootstrap an RMS client.  Microsoft has made that entire process easier by incorporating a “reset” function into the AIP client.  The function can be accessed in Microsoft Office by hitting the drop down arrow for the AIP icon on the toolbar and selecting the Help and Feedback option.

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After clicking the Help and Feedback option, a new window pops up where you can select the Reset Settings option to which performs a series of changes to the registry, deletions of RMS licenses, and AIP metadata.  Lastly, I log out of the machine.

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Bootstrapping the Client with Azure Information Protection

After logging back in I start up Fiddler, open Microsoft Word, and attempt to open a file that was protected with my AD RMS cluster. The file opens successfully.

One thing to note is if you’re using Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge like I was, you’ll need to take the extra steps outlined here to successfully capture due to the AppContainer Isolation feature added back in Windows 8. If you do not take those extra steps, you’ll get really odd behavior. Microsoft Edge will fail any calls to intranet endpoints (such as AD FS in my case) by saying it can’t contact the proxy. Trying with Internet Explorer will simply cause Fiddler to fail to make the calls and to throw a DNS error. Suffice to say, I spent about 20 minutes troubleshooting the issue before I remembered Fiddler’s dialog box that pops up every new install about AppContainer and Microsoft Edge.

The first thing we’re going to look at is the MSIPC log files which keep track of the client activity. I have to give an applause to whichever engineer over at Microsoft thought it would be helpful to include such a detailed log. If you’ve administered on-premises AD RMS in the past on previous versions of Microsoft Office, you’ll know the joys (pain?) of client side tracing with DebugView.

When we pop open the log we get some great detail as to the client behavior. We can see the client read a number of registry entries. The first thing we see is the client discover that is not initialized so it calls an API to bootstrap the user. Notice in the below that it has identified my user and it’s mentioning OAuth as a method for authentication to the endpoint.

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Following this we have a few more registry queries to discover the version of the operating system. We then have our first HTTP session opened by the client. I’m pretty sure this session is the initial user authentication to Azure AD in order to obtain a bearer access token for the user to call further APIs

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Bouncing over to Fiddler we can check out the authentication process. We can see the machine reach out to Azure AD (login.windows.net), perform home realm discovery which Azure AD determines that geekintheweeds.com is configured for federated authentication. The client makes the connection to the AD FS server where the user is seamlessly authenticated via Kerberos. The windowstransport endpoint is called which supports the WS-Trust 1.3 active profile.  In an WS-Trust active flow, the client initiates the request (hence it’s active) vs the passive flow where the service provider initiates the flow.  This is how Office applications support modern (aka federated) authentication.

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After the assertion is obtained, it’s posted to the /common/oauth2/token endpoint at login.windows.net.  The assertion is posted within a request for an access token, refresh token, and id token request using the saml1_1-bearer token grant type for the Azure RMS endpoint.

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The machine is returned an access token, refresh token, and id token.  We can see the token returned is a bearer token allowing client to impersonate my user moving forward.

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Dumping the access token into the Fiddler TextWizard and decoding the Base64 gives us the details of the token.  Within the token we can see an arm (authenticated method reference) of wia indicating the user authenticated using Windows authentication.  A variety of information about the user is included in the token including UPN, first name, and last name.

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I’m fairly certain the tokens are cached to a flat file based upon some of the data I did via procmon while the bootstrap process initiated.  You can see the calls to create the file and write to it below.

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After the tokens are obtained and cached we see from the log file that the MSIPC client then discovers it doesn’t have machine certificates.  It goes through the process of creating the machine certificates.

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We now see the MISPC client attempts to query for the SRV record Microsoft introduced with Office 2016 to help with migrations from AD RMS.  The client then attempts discovery of service by querying the RMS-specific registry keys in the HKLM hive and comes across the information we hardcoded into the machine via the migration scripts.  It uses this information to make a request to the non-authenticated endpoint of https://<tenant_specific>/_wmcs/certification/server.asmx.

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Bouncing back to Fiddler and continuing the conversation we can see a few different connections are created.  We see one to api.informationprotection.azure.com, another to mobile.pipe.aria.microsoft.com, and yet another to the AIP endpoint for my tenant.

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I expected the conversation between api.informationprotection.azure.com and the AIP endpoint for my tenant.  The connection to mobile.pipe.aria.microsoft.com interested me.  I’m not sure if it was randomly captured or if it was part of the consumption of protected content.  I found a few Reddit posts where people were theorizing it has something to do with how Microsoft consumes telemetry from Microsoft Office.  As you could probably guess, this piqued my interest to know what exactly Microsoft was collecting.

We can see from the Fiddler captures that an application on the client machine is posting data to https://mobile.pipe.aria.microsoft.com/Collector/3.0/.  Examination of the request header shows the user agent as AriaSDK Client and the sdk-version of ACT-Windows Desktop.  This looks to be the method in which the telemetry agent for Office collects its information.

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If we decode the data within Fiddler and dump both sets of data to Notepad we get some insight into what’s being pulled. Most of the data is pretty generic in that there is information about the version of Word I’m using, the operating system version, information that my machine is a virtual machine, and some activity IDs which must relate to something MS holds on their end. The only data point I found interesting was that my tenant ID is included in it. Given tenant id isn’t exactly a secret, it’s still interesting it’s being collected. It must be fascinating to see this telemetry at scale. Interesting stuff either way.

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Continuing the conversation, let’s examine the chatter with my tenant’s AIP endpoint since the discovery was requested by the MSIPC client.  We see a SOAP request of GetServerInfo posted to https://<tenant_specific>/_wmcs/certification/server.asmx.  The response we receive from the endpoint has all the information our RMS client will need to process the request.  My deep dive into AD RMS was before I got my feet with Fiddler so I’ve never examined the conversations with the SOAP endpoints within AD RMS.  Future blog post maybe?  Either way, I’ve highlighted the interesting informational points below.  We can see that the service is identifying itself as RMS Online, has a set of features that cater to modern authentication, runs in Cryptomode 2, and supports a variety of authentication methods.  I’m unfamiliar with the authentication types beyond X509 and OAuth 2.  Maybe carry overs from on-prem?  Something to explore in the future.  The data boxed in red are all the key endpoints the RMS client needs to know to interact with the service moving forward.  Take note the request at this endpoint doesn’t require any authentication.  That comes in later requests.

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After the response is received the MSIPC writes a whole bunch of registry entries to the HKCU hive for the user to cache all the AIP endpoint information it discovered.  It then performs a service discovery against the authenticated endpoint using its bearer token it cached to the tokencache file.

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Once the information is written to the registry, the client initiates a method called GetCertAndLicURLsWithNewSD.  It uses the information it discovered previously to query the protected endpoint https://<tenant_specific>/_wmcs/oauth2/servicediscovery/servicediscovery.asmx.  Initially it receives a 401 unauthorized back with instructions to authenticate uses a bearer token.

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The client tries again this time providing the bearer token it obtained earlier and placed in the tokencache file.  The SOAP action of ServiceDiscoveryForUser is performed and the client requests the specific endpoints for certification, licensing, and the new tracking portal feature of AIP.

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The SOAP response contains the relevant service endpoints and user for which the query applied to.

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The MSIPC client then makes a call to /_wmcs/oauth2/certification/server.asmx with a SOAP request of GetLicensorCertificate.  I won’t break that one down response but it returns the SLC certificate chain in XrML format.  For my tenant this included both the new SLC I generated when I migrated to AIP as well as the SLC from my on-premises AD RMS cluster that I uploaded.

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The MISPC log now shows a method called GetNewRACandCLC being called which is used to obtain a RAC and CLC. This is done by making a call to the certification pipeline.

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The call to /_wmcs/oauth2/certification/certification.asmx does exactly as you would expect and calls the SOAP request of Certify. This included my user’s RAC, and both SLCs and certificates in that chain. The one interesting piece in the response was a Quota tag as seen below. I received back five certificates, so maybe there is a maximum that can be returned? If you have more than 4 on-premises AD RMS clusters you’re consolidating to AIP, you might be in trouble. 🙂

6AIP22.png

The MISPC log captures the successful certification and logs information about the RAC.

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Next up the client attempts to obtain a CLC by calling continuing with the GetNewRACandCLC method. It first calls the /_wmcs/licensing/server.asmx pipeline and makes a GetServerInfo SOAP request which returns the same information we saw in the last request to server.asmx. This request isn’t authenticated and the information returned is written to the HKCU hive for the user.

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The service successfully returns the users CLC.  The last step in the process is the MSIPC service requests the RMS templates associated with the user.  You can see the template that is associated custom AIP classification label I created.

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Last but not least, the certificates are written to the %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\MSIPC directory.

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Conclusion

Very cool stuff right? I find it interesting in that the MSIPC client performs pretty much the same way it performs with on-premises exempting some of the additional capabilities introduced such as the search for the SRV DNS records and the ability to leverage modern authentication via the bearer token. The improved log is a welcome addition and again, stellar job to whatever engineer at Microsoft thought it would be helpful to include all the detail that is included in that log.

If you’ve used AD RMS or plan to use AIP and haven’t peeked behind the curtains I highly recommend it. Seeing how all the pieces fit together and how a relatively simple web service and a creative use of certificates can provide such a robust and powerful security capability will make your appreciate the service AD RMS tried to be and how far ahead of its time it was.

I know I didn’t cover the calls to the AIP-classification specific web calls, but I’ll explore that in my next entry.  Hopefully you enjoyed nerding out on this post as much as I did. Have a great week and see you next post!

The Evolution of AD RMS to Azure Information Protection – Part 5 – Client-Side Migration and Testing

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The Evolution of AD RMS to Azure Information Protection – Part 5 – Client-Side Migration and Testing

Welcome to the fifth entry in my series on the evolution of Microsoft’s Active Directory Rights Management Service (AD RMS) to Azure Information Protection (AIP).  We’ve covered a lot of material over this series.  It started with an overview of the service, examined the different architectures, went over key planning decisions for the migration from AD RMS to AIP, and left off with performing the server-side migration steps.  In this post we’re going to round out the migration process by performing a staged migration of our client machines.

Before we jump into this post, I’d encourage you to refresh yourself with my lab setup and the users and groups I’ve created, and finally the choices I made in the server side migration steps.  For a quick reference, here is the down and dirty:

  • Windows Server 2016 Active Directory forest named GEEKINTHEWEEDS.COM with servers running Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), Active Directory Domain Name System (AD DNS), Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS), Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS), Azure Active Directory Connect, and Microsoft SQL Server Express.
  • Forest is configured to synchronize to Azure AD using Azure AD Connect and uses federated authentication via AD FS
  • Users Jason Voorhies and Ash Williams will be using a Windows 10 client machine with Microsoft Office 2016 named GWCLIENT1
  • Users Theodore Logan and Michael Myers will be using a Windows 10 client machine with Microsoft Office 2016 named GWCLIENT2
  • Users Jason Voorhies and Theodore Logan are in the Information Technology Windows Active Directory (AD) group
  • Users Ash Williams and Michael Myers are in the Accounting Windows AD group
  • Onboarding controls have been configured for a Windows AD group named GIW AIP Users of which Jason Voorhies and Ash Williams are members

Prepare The Client Machine

To take advantage of the new features AIP brings to the table we’ll need to install the AIP client. I’ll be installing the AIP client on GWCLIENT1 and leaving the RMS client installed by Office 2016 on GWCLIENT2. Keep in mind the AIP client includes the RMS client (sometimes referred to as MSIPC) as well.

If you recall from my last post, I skipped a preparation step that Microsoft recommended for client machines. The step has you download a ZIP containing some batch scripts that are used for performing a staged migration of client machines and users. The preparation script Microsoft recommends running prior to any server-side configuration Prepare-Client.cmd.  In an enterprise environment it makes sense but for this very controlled lab environment it wasn’t needed prior to server-side configuration. It’s a simple script that modifies the client registry to force the RMS client on the machines to go to the on-premises AD RMS cluster even if they receive content that’s been protected using an AIP subscription. If you’re unfamiliar with the order that the MSIPC client discovers an AD RMS cluster I did an exhaustive series a few years back.  In short, hardcoding the information to the registry will prevent the client from reaching out to AIP and potentially causing issues.

As a reminder I’ll be running the script on GIWCLIENT1 and not on GIWCLIENT2.  After the ZIP file is downloaded and the script is unpackaged, it needs to be opened with a text editor and the OnPremRMSFQDN and CloudRMS variables need to be set to your on-premises AD RMS cluster and AIP tenant endpoint. Once the values are set, run the script.

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Install the Azure Information Protection Client

Now that the preparation step is out of the way, let’s get the AIP client installed. The AIP client can be downloaded directly from Microsoft. After starting the installation you’ll first be prompted as to whether you want to send telemetry to Microsoft and use a demo policy.  I’ll be opting out of both (sorry Microsoft).

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After a minute or two the installation will complete successfully.

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At this point I log out of the administrator account and over to Jason Voorhies. Opening Windows Explorer and right-clicking a text file shows we now have the classify and protect option to protect and classify files outside of Microsoft Office.

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Testing the Client Machine Behavior Prior to Client-Side Configuration

I thought it would be fun to see what the client machine’s behavior would be after the AIP Client was installed but I hadn’t finished Microsoft’s recommended client-side configuration steps. Recall that GIWCLIENT1 has been previously been bootstrapped for the on-premises AD RMS cluster so let’s reset the client after observing the current state of both machines.

Notice on GWICLIENT1 the DefaultServer and DefaultServerUrl in the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\DRM do not exist even though the client was previously bootstrapped for the on-premises AD RMS instance. On GIWCLIENT2, which has also been bootstrapped, has the entries defined.

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I’m fairly certain AIP cleared these out when it tried to activate when I started up Microsoft Word prior to performing these steps.

Navigating to HKCU\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\MSIPC shows a few slight differences as well. On GIWCLIENT1 there are two additional entries, one for the discovery point for Azure RMS and one for JOG.LOCAL’s AD RMS cluster. The JOG.LOCAL entry exists on GIWCLIENT1 and not on the GIWCLIENT2 because of the baseline testing I did previously.

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Let’s take a look at the location the RMS client stores its certificates which is %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\MSIPC.  On both machines we see the expected copy of the public-key CLC certificate, the machine certificate, RAC, and use licenses for documents that have been opened.  Notice that even though the AD RMS cluster is running in Cryptographic Mode 1, the machine still generates a 2048-bit key as well.

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Now that the RMS Client is reset on GIWCLIENT1, let’s go ahead and see what happens the RMS client tries to do a fresh activation after having AIP installed but the client-side configuration not yet completed.

After opening Microsoft Word I select to create a new document. Notice that the labels displayed in the AIP bar include a custom label I had previously defined in the AIP blade.

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I then go back to the File tab on the ribbon and attempt to use the classic way of protecting a document via the Restrict Access option.

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After selecting the Connect to Rights Management Servers and get templates option the client successfully bootstraps back to the on-premises AD RMS cluster as can be seen from the certificates available to the client and that all necessary certificates were re-created in the MISPC directory.

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That’s Microsoft Office, but what about the scenario where I attempt to use the AIP client add in for Windows Explorer?

To test this behavior I created a PDF file named testfile.pdf.  Right-clicking and selecting the Classify and protect option opens the AIP client to display the default set of labels as well as a new GIW Accounting Confidential label.

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If I select that label and hit Apply I receive the error below.

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The template can’t be found because the client is trying to pull it from my on-premises AD RMS cluster.  Since I haven’t run the scripts to prepare the client for AIP, the client can’t reach the AIP endpoints to find the template associated with the label.

The results of these test tell us two things:

  1. Installing the AIP Client on a client machine that already has Microsoft Office installed and configured for an on-premises AD RMS cluster won’t break the client’s integration with that on-premises cluster.
  2. The AIP client at some point authenticated to the Geek In The Weeds Azure AD tenant and pulled down the classification labels configured for my tenant.

In my next post I’ll be examining these findings more deeply by doing a deep dive of the client behavior using a combination of procmon, Fiddler, and WireShark to analyze the AIP Client behavior.

Performing Client-Side Configuration

Now that the client has been successfully installed we need to override the behavior that was put in place with the Prepare-Client batch file earlier.  If we wanted to redirect all clients across the organization that were using Office 2016, we could use the DNS SRV record option listed in the migration article.  This option indicates Microsoft has added some new behavior to the RMS Client installed with Office 2016 such that it will perform a DNS lookup of the SRV record to see a migration has occurred.

For the purposes of this lab I’ll be using the Microsoft batch scripts I referenced earlier.  To override the behavior we put in place earlier with the Prepare-Client.cmd batch script, we’ll need to run both the Migrate-Client and Migrate-User scripts.  I created a group policy object (GPO) that uses security filtering to apply only to GIWCLIENT1 to run the Migrate-Client script as a Startup script and a GPO that uses security filtering to apply only to GIW AIP Users group which runs the Migrate-User script as a Login script.  This ensures only GIWCLIENT2 and Jason Voorhies and Ash Williams are affected by the changes.

You may be asking what do the scripts do?  The goal of the two scripts are to ensure the client machines the users log into point the users to Azure RMS versus an on-premises AD RMS cluster.  The scripts do this by adding and modifying registry keys used by the RMS client prior to the client searching for a service connection point (SCP).  The users will be redirected to Azure RMS when protecting new files as well as consuming files that were previously protected by an on-premises AD RMS cluster.  This means you better had performed the necessary server-side migration I went over previously, or else your users are going to be unable to consume previously protected content.

We’ll dig more into AIP/Office 2016 RMS Client discovery process in the next post.

Preparing Azure Information Protection Policies

Prior to testing the whole package, I thought it would be fun to create some AIP policies. By default, Microsoft provides you with a default AIP policy called the Global Policy. It comes complete with a reasonably standard set of labels, with a few of the labels having sublabels that have protection in some circumstances. Due to the migration path I undertook as part of the demo, I had to enabled protection for All Employees sublabels of both the Confidential and Highly Confidential labels.

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In addition to the global policy, I also created two scoped policies. One scoped policy applies to users within the GIW Accounting group and the other applies to users within the GIW Information Technology group. Each policy introduces another label and sublabel as seen in the screenshots below.

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Both of the sublabels include protection restricting members of the relevant groups to the Viewer role only. We’ll see these policies in action in the next section.

Testing the Client

Preparation is done, server-side migration has been complete, and our test clients and users have now been completed the documented migration process. The migration scripts performed the RMS client reset so no need to repeat that process.

For the first test, let’s try applying protection to the testfile.txt file I created earlier. Selecting the Classify and protect option opens up the AIP Client and shows me the labels configured in my tenant that support classification and protection. Recall from the AIP Client limitations different file types have different limitations. You can’t exactly append any type of metadata to content of a text file now can you?

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Selecting the IT Staff Only sublabel of the GIW IT Staff label and hitting the apply button successfully protects the text file and we see the icon and file type for the file changes.  Opening the file in Notepad now displays a notice the file is protected and the data contained in the original file has been encrypted.

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We can also open the file with the AIP Viewer which will decrypt the document and display the content of the text file.

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Next we test in Microsoft Word 2016 by creating a new document named AIP_GIW_ALLEMP and classifying it with the High Confidential All Employees sublabel.  The sublabel adds protection such that all users in the GIW Employees group have Viewer rights.

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Opening the AIP_GIW_ALLEMP Word document that was protected by Jason Voorhies is successful and it shows Ash Williams has viewer rights for the file.

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Last but not least, let’s open the a document we previously protected with AD RMS named GIW_GIWALL_ADRMS.DOCX.  We’re able to successfully open this file because we migrated the TPD used for AD RMS up to AIP.

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At this point we’ve performed all necessary steps up the migration.  What you have left now is cleanup steps and planning for how you’ll complete the rollout to the rest of your user base.  Not bad right?

Over the next few posts ‘ll be doing a deep dive of the RMS Client behavior when interacting with Azure Information Protection.   We’ll do some procmon captures to the behavior of the client when it’s performing its discovery process as well as examining the web calls it makes to Fiddler.  I’ll also spend some time examining the AIP blade and my favorite feature of AIP, Tracking and Revocation.

See you next time!

 

The Evolution of AD RMS to Azure Information Protection – Part 3 – Planning The Migration

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The Evolution of AD RMS to Azure Information Protection – Part 3 – Planning The Migration

Welcome to the third post in my series exploring the evolution of Active Directory Rights Management Service (AD RMS) into Azure Information Protection (AIP).  My first post provided an overview of the service and some of its usages and my second post covered how the architecture of the solution has changed as the service has shifted from traditional on-premises infrastructure to  a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering).  Now that we understand the purpose of the service and its architecture, let’s explore what a migration will look like.

For the post I’ll be using the labs I discussed in my first post.  Specifically, I’ll be migrating lab 2 (the Windows Server 2016 lab) from using AD RMS to Azure Information Protection.  I’ve added an additional Windows 10 Professional machine to that lab for reasons I’ll discuss later in the post.  The two Windows 10 machines are named CLIENT1 and CLIENT2.  Microsoft has assembled some guidance which I’ll be referencing throughout this post and using as the map for the migration.

With the introduction done, let’s dig in.

Before we do any button pushing, there’s some planning necessary to ensure a successful migration.  The key areas of consideration are:

  • Impact to collaboration with trusted organizations
  • Tenant key storage
  • AIP Client Rollout
  • Integrated Rights Management (IRM) functionality of Microsoft Exchange Server or Microsoft SharePoint Server

Impact to collaboration with trusted organizations

Possibly most impactful to an organization is the planning that goes into how the migration will affect collaboration with partner organizations.  Back in the olden days of on-premises AD RMS, organizations would leverage the protection and control that came with AD RMS to collaborate with trusted partners.  This was accomplished through trusted user domains (TUDs) or federated trusts.  With AIP the concept of TUDs and additional infrastructure to support federated trusts is eliminated and instead replaced with the federation capabilities provided natively via Azure Active Directory.

Yes folks, this means that if you want the same level of collaboration you had with AD RMS using TUDs, both organizations will need to need to have an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant with a license that supports the Azure Rights Management Service (Azure RMS).    In a future post in the series, we’ll check out what happens when the partner organization doesn’t migrate to Azure AD and attempts to consume the protected content.

Tenant Key Storage

The tenant key can be thought to as the key to the kingdom in the AIP world.  For those of you familiar with AD RMS, the tenant key serves the same function as the cluster key. In the on-premises world of AD RMS the cluster key was either stored within the AD RMS database or on a hardware security module (HSM).

When performing a migration to the world of AIP, storage of the tenant key has a few options.  If you’re using a cluster key that was stored within the AD RMS database you can migrate the key using some simple PowerShell commands.  If you’re opted to use HSM storage for your cluster key, you’re going to be looking at the bring your own key (BYOK) scenario.  Finally, if you have a hard requirement to keep the key on premises you can explore the hold your own key option (HYOK).

For this series I’ve configured my labs with a cluster key that is stored within the AD RMS database (or software key as MS is referring to it).  The AD RMS cluster in my environment runs in cryptographic mode 1, so per MS’s recommendation I won’t be migrating to cryptographic mode 2 until after I migrate to AIP.

AIP Client Rollout

Using AIP requires the AIP Client be installed.  The AD RMS Client that comes with pre-packaged with Microsoft Office can protect but can’t take advantage of the labels and classification features of AIP.   You’ll need to consider this during your migration process and ensure any middleware that uses the AD RMS Client is compatible with the AIP Client.  The AIP Client is compatible with on-premises AD RMS so you don’t need to be concerned with backwards compatibility.

As I mentioned above, I have two Windows 10 clients named CLIENT1 and CLIENT2.  In the next post I’ll be migrating CLIENT2 to the AIP Client and keeping CLIENT1 on the AD RMS Client.  I’ll capture and break down the calls with Fiddler so we can see what the differences are.

Integrated Rights Management (IRM) functionality of Microsoft Exchange Server or Microsoft SharePoint Server

If you want to migrate to AIP but still have a ways to go before you can migrate Exchange and SharePoint to the SaaS counterparts, have no fear.  You can leverage the protection capabilities of AIP (aka Azure RMS component) by using the Microsoft Rights Management Service Connector.  The connector requires some light weight infrastructure to handle the communication between Exchange/SharePoint and AIP.

I probably won’t be demoing the RMS Connector in this series, so take a read through the documentation if you’re curious.

We’ve covered an overview of AIP, the different architectures of AD RMS and AIP, and now have covered key planning decisions for a migration.  In the next post in my series we’ll start getting our hands dirty by initiating the migration from AD RMS to AIP.  Once the migration is complete, I’ll be diving deep into the weeds and examining the behavior of the AD RMS and AIP clients via Fiddler captures and AD RMS client debugging (assuming it still works with the AIP client).

See you next post!

The Evolution of AD RMS to Azure Information Protection – Part 1

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The Evolution of AD RMS to Azure Information Protection – Part 1

Collaboration.  It’s a term I hear at least a few times a day when speaking to my user base.  The ability to seamlessly collaborate with team members, across the organization, with trusted partners, and with customers is a must.  It’s a driving force between much of the evolution of software-as-a-service collaboration offerings such as Office 365.  While the industry is evolving to make collaboration easier than ever, it’s also introducing significant challenges for organizations to protect and control their data.

In a recent post I talked about Microsoft’s entry into the cloud access security broker (CASB) market with Cloud App Security (CAS) and its capability to provide auditing and alerting on activities performed in Amazon Web Services (AWS).  Microsoft refers to this collection of features as the Investigate capability of CAS.  Before I cover an example of the Control features in action, I want to talk about the product that works behind the scenes to provide CAS with many of the Control features.

That product is Azure Information Protection (AIP) and it provides the capability to classify, label, and protect files and email.  The protection piece is provided by another Microsoft product, Azure Active Directory Rights Management Services (Azure RMS).  Beyond just encrypting a file or email, Azure RMS can control what a user can do with a file such as preventing a user from printing a document or forwarding an email.  The best part?  The protection goes with the data even when it leaves your security boundary.

For those of you that have read my blog you can see that I am a huge fanboy of the predecessor to Azure RMS, Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS, previously Rights Management Service or RMS for you super nerds).  AD RMS has been a role available in Microsoft Windows Server since Windows Server 2003.  It was a product well ahead of its time that unfortunately never really caught on.  Given my love for AD RMS, I thought it would be really fun to do a series looking at how AIP has evolved from AD RMS.   It’s a dramatic shift from a rather unknown product to a product that provides capabilities that will be as standard and as necessary as Antivirus was to the on-premises world.

I built a pretty robust lab environment (two actually) such that I could demonstrate the different ways the solutions work as well as demonstrate what it looks to migrate from AD RMS to AIP.  Given the complexity of the lab environment,  I’m going to take this post to cover what I put together.

The layout looks like this:

 

1AIP1.png

On the modern end I have an Azure AD tenant with the custom domain assigned of geekintheweeds.com.  Attached to the tenant I have some Office 365 E5 and Enterprise Mobility + Security E5 trial licenses  For the legacy end I have two separate labs setup in Azure each within its own resource group.  Lab number one contains three virtual machines (VMs) that run a series of services included Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS), AD RMS, and Microsoft SQL Server Express.  Lab number two contains four VMs that run the same set as services as Lab 1 in addition to Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) and Azure Active Directory Connect (AADC).  The virtual network (vnet) within each resource group has been peered and both resource groups contain a virtual gateway which has been configured with a site-to-site virtual private network (VPN) back to my home Hyper-V environment.  In the Hyper V environment I have two workstations.

Lab 1 is my “legacy” environment and consists of servers running Windows 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2 (AD RMS hasn’t changed in any meaningful manner since 2008 R2) and a client running Windows 7 Pro running Office 2013.  The DNS namespace for its Active Directory forest is JOG.LOCAL.  Lab 2 is my “modern” environment and consists of servers running Windows Server 2016 and a Windows 10 client running Office 2016 .  It uses a DNS namespace of GEEKINTHEWEEDS.COM for its Active Directory forest and is synchronized with the Azure AD tenant I mentioned above.  AD FS provides SSO to Office 365 for Geek in The Weeds users.

For AD RMS configuration, both environments will initially use Cryptographic Mode 1 and will have a trusted user domain (TUD).  SQL Server Express will host the AD RMS database and I will store the cluster key locally within the database.  The use of a TUD will make the configuration a bit more interesting for reasons you’ll see in a future post.

Got all that?

In my next post I’ll cover how the architecture changes when migrating from AD RMS to Azure Information Protection.