The Azure service principal has been created in the previous section, but with no Role and Scope. In January 2023, Microsoft announced the General Availability of the Azure OpenAI Service (AOAI), which allows Azure customers to access OpenAI models directly within their Azure subscription and with their own capacity. Use a managed identity when possible. Automation tools and scripts often need admin or privileged access. Azure Technical Trainer, WorldWide Learning, Top Stories from the Microsoft DevOps Community 2021.01.29, Project Bicep Next Generation ARM Templates, Login to edit/delete your existing comments, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/managed-identities-azure-resources/tutorial-windows-vm-access-cosmos-db, https://yourazurecoach.com/2020/08/13/managed-identity-simplified-with-the-new-azure-net-sdks/, Subscription Id = can be found from the Azure CLI under /subscriptions/xxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx format, Subscription Name = can be found from your Azure Portal / Subscriptions; make sure you use the exact name as is listed, Service Principal Id = appId from the Azure CLI output, Service Principal Key = password from the Azure CLI output, Tenant ID = tenant from the Azure CLI output, First, Someone needs to create the Service Principal objects, which could be a security risk, Client ID and Secret are exposed / known to the creator of the Service Principal, Client ID and Secret are exposed / known to the consumer of the Service Principal, Object validity is 1 or 2 years; Ive been in situations where I deployed an App, which after one year stopped working (losing the token, which means no more authentication possibilities), From the Azure Portal, select the Virtual Machine; under settings, find, From the Azure Virtual Machine blade, navigate to, This will prompt for your confirmation when saving the settings. After running the code, the new service principal should be created, and the properties are stored in the $sp variable. Evaluate service principals to reduce privileges. The code below will create the Azure service principal that will use the self-signed certificate as its credential. Step 2: Click on the New registration button. When you create a Service Principal via PowerShell you do not get a copy of the password displayed, so you need to input a couple of lines of code to retrieve the password, as you can see in the code below. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. If thats not the case the logon will fail. You protect by only allowing those permissions from specific places. A service principal requires application permissions in AAD, which are very strong due to not being linked to a specific identity. Then, assign a role to the identity. As in this case the service principal only needs to gather data we just give it Read access and we select the service principal Automation Service Principal and once done we hit Save. The review includes the owner and an IT partner, and they certify: Deprovision service accounts under the following circumstances: Deprovisioning includes the following tasks: After the associated application or script is deprovisioned: More info about Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge, Create and assign a custom role in Azure Active Directory, How to use managed identities for App Service and Azure Functions, Create an Azure Active Directory application and service principal that can access resources, Get-AzureADServicePrincipalOAuth2PermissionGrant, Script to list all delegated permissions and application permissions in Azure AD, User or group accountable for managing and monitoring the service account. I'm not sure what you mean by "typical Azure user". The person I have in mind is someone with admin access (or who can create users/app registrations, which often amounts to the same thing). This as the App Registration is simply a different object in your Azure AD, however both objects belong to the same application in Azure AD as you can see. Resource access from external applications. The code below creates the self-signed password in the personal certificate store with the name CN=VSE3_SUB_OWNER. Service principals and managed identities can use OAuth 2.0 scopes in a delegated context impersonating a signed-on user, or as service account in the application context. Application permissions are used when the application itself is connecting, i.e. The biggest difference between a service account and a service principal is that it cant be used for regular web based sign-ins. Lastly when using a SA account, i.e. I did this kind of research myself and came to the same conclusion: currently service accounts are much secure option than service principals. Now that you have the password string, the next step is to create the Microsoft.Azure.Commands.ActiveDirectory.PSADPasswordCredential object. But whats the alternative? How to retrieve these object Ids via powershell? New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. This is especially useful if the password must meet a complexity requirement. Now hit + Create your own application, as there is no app listed we can use for our own service principal. We get it. Stack Exchange network consists of 181 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. A multi-tenant web application or API requires a service principal in each tenant. Like, provisioning storage accounts or starting and stopping virtual machines at a schedule. Get many of our tutorials packaged as an ATA Guidebook. A service principal is created when a user from that tenant consents to use of the application or API. An Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) service principal is the local representation of an application object in a tenant or directory. The official Microsoft docs strongly discourage the practice of user accounts employed as service accounts. Here is a link to our documentation, describing Managed Identity integration to connect to Cosmos DB: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/managed-identities-azure-resources/tutorial-windows-vm-access-cosmos-db. Azure Service Principals can have a password, secret key, or certificate-based credentials. The terms application and service principal are used interchangeably, when referring to an application in authentication tasks. Navigate to Azure AD, then select App registrations. They shouldnt have more permissions than they need. Want to support the writer? However, the value of the Secret is shown as System.Security.SecureString. For example, in the image below, you can see that the AzVM_Reader service principal now has Reader access to the AzVM1 virtual machine. It all starts with a name, and an Azure service principal must have a name. read. Some might say that service principals are service accounts for the cloud. When you create service accounts for automated use, they're granted permissions to access resources in Azure and Azure AD. It is not uncommon for some to just create a new service account, slap it with all the admin roles you want, and exclude it from MFA. Once done hit Add Permissions. Yeah, if people are going to the trouble of hacking the memory of my machines, then all bets are off, lol. For example, access to a resource. To log in via Azure CLI, its a one line command: The username is the Application ID, this would have been listed when you created the Service Principal, if you didnt take a note of it you can find this within the Azure Portal. Keep on reading and lets get started! Once created, you will see that we have created an Enterprise Application within the Azure AD Portal and this can be referred to as a Service Principal, as explained earlier. Copy the code below and run it in your Azure PowerShell session. Most software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications accommodate multi-tenancy. How to make Service Principals synchronise with Active Directory Domain Services (AADDS)? What do you mean by "pass the hash on the service account to get an interactive shell"? It would be best if youre working on a test tenant. Apart from password credentials, an Azure service principal can also have a certificate-based credential. Each of these types of credentials has its advantage and applicable usage scenarios. In this blog I will explain to you what a service principal is and how you can easily make use of them when running (automated) scripts. Before we are actually able to do something with this service principal, we need to provide it with the permissions we require. In this example, a new service principal will be created with these values: As you can see, the scope of this new service principal is only for the virtual machine named AzVM1. Storage Blob Data Contributor (Preview) Storage Blob Data Reader (Preview) Then, if you want to use the AzureCLI to access the Blob Storage with a Service Principal . Because certificates are more secure, it's recommended you use them, when possible. They're typically used interchangeably. Youll learn how to create service principals with different types of credentials, such as passwords, secret keys, and certificates. This name is displayed as well in the logs so make sure its recognizable for others as well. Check out the next generation of ARM. Always make sure to save the service principals password because there is no way to recover it if you were not able to save or have forgotten it. Next is to get the Base64 encoded value of the self-signed certificate and save it to the $keyValue variable. Running the code above in PowerShell will in turn store the credential object to the $PasswordCredential variable. The tool that will be the focus of this article is the Azure PowerShell. Yes, they can login via the GUI with the service account if they really want to (which might actually be a useful thing sometimes). After you understand the purpose, scope, and permissions, create your service account, use the instructions in the following articles. We are now able to connect with PowerShell and the service principal to this log analytics workspace. Resources can include Microsoft 365 services, software as a service (SaaS) applications, custom applications, databases, HR systems, and so on. Most relevant to Service Principal, is the Enterprise apps; according to the formal definition, a service principal is An application whose tokens can be used to authenticate and grant access to specific Azure resources from a user-app, service or automation tool, when an organization is using Azure Active Directory. You protect with minimum necessary permissions. A multi-tenant application is homed in a tenant and has instances in other tenants. Each application you see in the Enterprise Applications overview in Azure AD can therefore be referred to as a service principal. The Service Principals access can be restricted by assigning Azure RBAC roles so that they can access the specific set of resources only. Its still better than a regular service account (cant be used for web-based sign ins) but only exists of things you need to know, hence the reason to use cert based auth where possible. For that, go to the Azure Portal, open the Azure Active Directory blade and go to the Enterprise Applications section. Access to a computer that is running on Windows 10 with PowerShell 5.1. What screws can be used with Aluminum windows? Now youve created the service principal with a certificate-based credential. In this case, one could create a read KV Managed Identity, and link it to the web app, storage account, function, logic app, all belonging to the same application architecture. So, this is something to be aware of, when using Azure CLI. Like, provisioning storage accounts or starting and stopping virtual machines at a schedule. I have a small script that creates my Service Principal and it generates a random password to go with the Service Principal so that I have it for those password-based authentication occasions. Think of it as a user identity without a user, but rather an identity for an application. A Service Principal could be looked at as similar to a service account-alike in a more traditional on-premises application or service scenario. Otherwise, register and sign in. Using an improved and simplified MFA enrollment Experience. Still interested? Even though I created Managed Identity for function there was no option to connect to the database :/, Hi, thanks for the feedback. This means that you can use it to connect to Azure without using a password. Principals synchronise with Active Directory ( Azure AD, then all bets are,! Working on a test tenant working on a test tenant a test tenant will use the in... Case the logon will fail in other tenants you mean by `` pass the hash on the service! Also have a password if thats not the case the logon will fail sp variable next step is get. Ad, then all bets are off, lol service principals synchronise with Active Directory Domain Services AADDS... 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