Foreign Entra Workload Identities: A Security Boundary Risk?

Foreign Entra Workload Identities

A Security Boundary Risk?

Marius Elmiger
by Marius Elmiger
on April 04, 2024
time to read: 16 minutes

Keypoints

The potential risks posed by foreign workload identities

  • A security boundary should separate IT environments from one another
  • The boundary is the forest in Active Directory, and the tenant in Entra ID
  • By introducing dependencies on other IT solutions, boundaries can be extended
  • It is important to understand the security boundary of a given solution
  • Foreign Entra Workload Identities can pose risks depending on the permissions granted
  • Workload Identities and their capabilities are often not fully understood

Security boundaries should separate IT environments or solutions. However, often security boundaries are not static. They can be extended, intentionally or unintentionally. Unintended extensions can create vulnerabilities, potentially exposing sensitive data or systems. Therefore, managing these boundaries requires a dynamic approach, continuously monitoring and adjusting to ensure optimal security.

This article explores an example of how Microsoft Entra workload identities can inadvertently extend the security boundary of a Entra tenant to a foreign tenant.

What is a Security Boundary?

A security boundary is the definition of a logical or physical boundary that should separate IT environments or solutions. For a fresh Active Directory installation, the security perimeter is the forest. For Entra ID, it would be the tenant. Security boundaries can be intentionally or unintentionally extended by introducing relationships with other IT solutions that are not part of the initial implementation. Regular audits, robust protocols, and security tools can help maintain the integrity of these boundaries. Ultimately, the goal is to find a balance between accessibility and security, ensuring that the right entity has the right access at the right time. For more examples of relationships that can extend security boundaries, see the following article Attack Path Analysis.

What are Entra Workload Identities?

Entra Workload identities in the Microsoft Cloud describe non-personal accounts assigned to a workload, such as an application, service, virtual machines, script, or container, to authenticate and access other services and resources. Microsoft describes three three types of workload identities in there workload identites article.

Entra Service Principal Access Management

Access for service principals to resources can be assigned with delegation or application API permissions and requires administrator or user consent.

Entra API Permissions

API permissions authorize the service principal from the application to call other public APIs if consented by users or administrators. API permissions often come in the Resource.Operation.Constraint scope format. For example, Directory.Read.All means that the principal granted this permission can read data in the tenant, such as users, groups and apps.

Entra App Roles

App roles define access definitions to the local application. One role can grant multiple permissions. For example, the Microsoft Graph application has several application roles defined. Directory.Read.All is one of them. The easiest way to verify the detailed API permissions granted by, for example, the Directory.Read.All app role is to visit Merill Fernando’s Microsoft Graph Permission Explorer website.

Example of a Security Boundary Violation

After a brief introduction to what Security Boundaries, Entra Applications and Entra Service Principals are, the next chapter uses a very practical example to show how a multi-tenant application can introduce a Security Boundary risk. If the explanations above were too brief, the article by Thomas Naunheim explains Entra Workload Identities in detail. Andy Robbins from SpecterOps has also published an article on the recent Microsoft breach What happened? What should Azure Admins do? in which he explains in great detail how external multi-tenant applications were used during the breach. Both articles are highly recommended reading.

Setting the stage

The mytenant.onmicrosoft.com tenant administrator registers a multitenant application from the foreigntenant.onmicrosoft.com tenant. The application promises smooth Entra role management. After the global administrator accepted the application with the scopes RoleManagement.ReadWrite.Directory and Directory.Read.All, a service principal is automatically created in the mytenant.onmicrosoft.com tenant as a local representation of the application. This action inadvertently extended the security boundary to the untrusted foreigntenant.onmicrosoft.com tenant.

How quickly a multi-tenant application can inadvertently cross a security boundary

The following step-by-step POC explores in detail the implications shown in the figure above.

Prerequisits

Step 0 (Foreign Tenant): Create an application in the portal

With step 0 completed we are ready to register the foreignApp application in the mytenant.onmicrosoft.com. The setup could be improved by creating a web application and adding a reply address. However, this is optional for the POC.

Step 1 (My Tenant): Register the foreignapp application

Ok, the stage is set, now for the fun part.

Step 2 (Foreign Tenant): Login with the service principal

The next steps are scripted, as this is the only way to log in with a service principal. The script is called consentIsTheMindkiller.ps1 and can be found in the gist repository.

$myTenantId = "cdfdd915-..." # The tenant registering the foreign application (Source: My Tenant)
$foreignTenantId = "d2a16643-37f9-..." # The tenant who is hosting the application (Source: Foreign Tenant)
$spPassword = "1N98Q~qo7oKGhA3L~t~OgQKVDPL.iasdas32" # The client secret from the app (Source: Foreign Tenant)
$appName = "foreignApp" # The app name (Source: Foreign Tenant)

$foreignApp = Get-MgServicePrincipal -All -Filter $appFilter

$spPwd= ConvertTo-SecureString $spPassword -AsPlainText -Force
$psCred = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential($foreignApp.AppId, $spPwd)
Connect-MgGraph -TenantId $myTenantId -ClientSecretCredential $psCred -NoWelcome

Successful login with the credentials from the foreigntenant to the mytenant with the service principal 

$globalAdmin = Get-MgDirectoryRole | Where-Object { $_.DisplayName -eq "Global Administrator" }
New-MgDirectoryRoleMemberByRef -DirectoryRoleId $globalAdmin.Id -BodyParameter @{"@odata.id" = "https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/directoryObjects/$($foreignsp.id)"}

Service principal successfully added to the Global Administrator role

Granting privileged application permissions to a foreign application effectively extends the security perimeter to the foreign application tenant. After all, this is how SaaS works. However, we haven’t found a way for the foreign tenant to know who has signed up to the multi-tenant application over the Azure portal or the Graph API. This would be possible, of course, if the third party hosted a website that directed people to register and ultimately use the application. But if you end up in a tenant and find many foreign multi-tenant apps, it would not be trivial to find a victim tenant to abuse the scenario described above. Unless it is a known application.

What can we do about it? Firstly, it is critical to vet any foreign SaaS application before agreeing to any application permissions or delegations. After that, the following step 3 helps to review already existing foreign service principals in a tenant.

Step 3 (My Tenant): Find foreign service principals with application permissions

In this step, we are the administrator of the mytenant.onmicrosoft.com tenant that previously accepted the application permissions. 

$foreignsp = Get-MgServicePrincipal -All | Where-Object { $_.AppOwnerOrganizationId -ne $myTenantId -and $_.AppOwnerOrganizationId -ne $null }

Foreign service principal result

In a production tenant, Step 3 is an important audit task to check the permissions of foreign service principals. Step 3 is also available as a separate script. The script is called checkForForeignServicePrincipals.ps1 and can be found in the gist repository.

Conclusion

One of the many challenges in any IT environment, and especially in the cloud, is not inadvertently extending the security boundary to an unknown, untrusted entity. In a Microsoft cloud tenant, there are several ways to extend the security boundary, for example with Azure Lighthouse, granular delegated admin privileges (GDAP), multi-tenant applications, third-party solutions that only support cloud-only accounts, third-party agents on IaaS workloads, or DevOps solutions. In an Active Directory environment, we have similar challenges, although the cloud has a more dangerous attack surface. As the example above shows, it only takes one click from a privileged administrator to introduce a security boundary violation to an unknown tenant. This makes it all the more important to know what the security boundary of a given tenant really is, and to test new functionality in a non-production tenant. IT administrators should be adequately trained to have the knowledge to operate a cloud environment. We often find that Workload Identities and their capabilities are not fully understood during our assessments, which is why they are listed in our Top 10 Riskiest Cloud Configurations. Microsoft also does not make it easy to manage and audit Workload Identities and their permissions. Tools such as ROADTools, BloodHound, scripts like Export-MsIdAppConsentGrantReport or automated monitoring of Workload Identities permissions and changes as described in Hunting Service Principals with Microsoft Sentinal can help to get Workload Identities under control.

About the Author

Marius Elmiger

Marius Elmiger is a security professional since the early 2000’s. He worked in various IT roles such as an administrator, engineer, architect, and consultant. His main activities included the implementation of complex IT infrastructure projects, implementation of security hardening concepts, and compromise recoveries. Later he transitioned to the offensive side. As a foundation, in addition to numerous IT certificates, Marius graduated with an MSc in Advanced Security & Digital Forensics at Edinburgh Napier University. (ORCID 0000-0002-2580-5636)

Links

Tags

Active Directory AD API Assessment Azure Block Cloud Exchange GitHub HTTP Identity Microsoft Microsoft Teams OAuth Password Phishing Powershell Risk SECO Standard Tool Trust Word

You want to test the awareness of your users?

Let our Red Team conduct a professional social engineering test!

×
Credential Tiering

Credential Tiering

Marius Elmiger

Credential Tiering

Credential Tiering

Marius Elmiger

Hardware-Keylogger

Hardware-Keylogger

Marius Elmiger

Outsmarting the Watchdog

Outsmarting the Watchdog

Marius Elmiger

You want more?

Further articles available here

You need support in such a project?

Our experts will get in contact with you!

You want more?

Further articles available here