Tag: Claims

Start using Claims X-Ray with Azure AD

Dusting this thing off to share a quick tip for Single Sign-On work. For a while now I’ve been a proponent of using Claims X-Ray for interrogating/troubleshooting AD FS Claims. The tool is created by the AD FS / Azure AD team, and I have always found it to be a massive help. However, I had never tried using it with Azure AD, and it isn’t really presented as a tool that you would use with Azure AD. Ultimately there is no reason you can’t though, and I am finding it just as useful as I do with AD FS (if not more so). When I say “more so”, consider that many attributes are not easily discoverable in the interface, in PowerShell, or with Graph queries. Even attributes as important as user.onPremisesSamAccountName are quite hard to find unless you know the Graph syntax, so in some cases it may be simplest to add an unknown Claim to Claims X-Ray and interrogate away.

Here’s a view of my configuration. It will literally take two minutes (by which I mean 4 minutes and 24 seconds in the first empirical data to arrive) to deploy in your labs, and there is no reason not to target it at All Users, since it only unveils their own data.

Navigate to Enterprise Applications in Azure AD

Add a Non-Gallery Application, and name it “Claims X-Ray”, or whatever you like.

Configure Single Sign-On

Configure SAML

Extract the Redirect URL and Identifier from the Claims X-Ray site

Open the Basic SAML configuration options

Paste in the Identifier from Claims X-Ray as Identifier (Entity ID). Paste in the Redirect URL as Reply URL (Assertion Consumer Service URL)

When this is Saved successfully, do not choose the testing option yet, as the application hasn’t been assigned.

Add All Users (or whichever Group you would like to target). Personally, I see little reason to target this narrowly in a test environment.

Test the application from the My Apps portal.

That’s it! You will see a response like this in the default configuration.

And you can even view the Raw token data if you need to look at things like the token format, etc.

Hope this helps! In my view this should become a standard part of anyone’s Azure AD test environment.

Creating an InsideCorporateNetwork Claim for AD FS 2.x

AD FS 2012 R2 ships with the InsideCorporateNetwork Claim. It evaluates to “True” when a request is received directly at AD FS, or “False”, if a request is received at the WAP. This Claim doesn’t exist in AD FS 2.0/2.1, and it’s fair to say this is one of the more poorly understood differences in behaviour across the versions.

I’ve recently been asked to find out if it’s possible to create an InsideCorporateNetwork Claim in AD FS 2.0/2.1. The benefit of creating it for the older versions is that InsideCorporateNetwork would be usable in exactly the same way that we use it in AD FS 2012 R2 and later, which opens up the following options: Continue reading “Creating an InsideCorporateNetwork Claim for AD FS 2.x”

The Rules of AD FS Claims Rules

Many people think of AD FS as merely a federated authentication service. And with a name like Active Directory Federation Services, it’s easy to see why. However, it also has the capacity to make authorisation decisions within its Claims Engine. This may be most familiar as the Office 365 Client Access Policies, but those policies are basically just a flavour of AD FS Issuance Authorisation Rules. An AD FS Issuance Authorisation rule provides a gate at AD FS, where permissions can be granted or denied to authentic users, per-Relying Party, before giving the user Claims for the requested Relying Party. In most cases we will think about these rules as coarse controls, to block a wide category of requests, such as those originating from outside the network, for members of a group, or for any combination of request-based, device-based and user attribute-based Claims. We can even create authorisation rules based on the user’s Identity Provider, or from additional factors of authentication. We will typically still implement most of our authorisation logic within the Relying Parties we are authenticating to, but in some cases it’s very useful to control access at this intermediary tier – especially if a large class of users, devices or networks should be treated as higher risk.

These concepts are not new, and the TechNet documentation I reference here dates back to the earliest wave of AD FS 2.0 RTW content:

Ultimately, I think these articles do answer the question of how to create an AD FS Issuance Authorisation rule, but I can’t point very clearly to the place on these pages that spells it out, and I do think there is a lot of confusing information about this in other places which may lead people astray. Namely, there is a lot of information that only concerns itself with the default Active Directory Claims Provider Rules and the Claims that come from request headers. Also, some of the most referenced AD FS + SharePoint content seems to have been written without authorisation rules in-mind. I want to try to clear some of that up in this post.

UPDATE 24/2/2015
I’ve added a fairly significant update regarding the new MFA stage in the pipeline half-way down this post.

Continue reading “The Rules of AD FS Claims Rules”

Significant Identity and Access Management Improvements in Windows Server 2012 R2

Last week, Microsoft released Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview. Some information about new features like the Web Application Proxy role began to emerge from recent industry events, but there isn’t an awful lot to absorb at the moment. Having played around with the preview for a few days, I’m pleased to report that the new features look good. While there are always niggles and unsupported scenarios, the features themselves are bringing Microsoft’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) offerings nearer to parity with the industry leaders. These changes should be of particular interest for SharePoint on-premises and Office 365 customers, as a number of scenarios that were on the bleeding edge of ADFS/UAG capabilities have been brought into the fold with some important enhancements to ADFS, which isn’t just for federation anymore.

In short, we get a new Claims-Aware Reverse Proxy, Device Claims in and outside of the network, Multiple-Factor Authentication and other enhancements for making access control decisions on more than just a username and password. I’ve discussed all of these topics routinely over the last couple of years in SharePoint on-premises and Office 365 contexts, but the current provisions in ADFS and UAG are not as elegant as what we find in the preview, so I’m keenly exploring the new functionality and will try to keep the content flowing. In this post I will focus on the features themselves, as there’s a lot of new stuff and the implementation of this functionality will only be clear with a bit more information than what you’ll find online today. I’m kind of rushing this out after limited use because I know there’s a big appetite for knowledge about the Microsoft Reverse Proxy roadmap, so apologies for the incompleteness in advance.

Continue reading “Significant Identity and Access Management Improvements in Windows Server 2012 R2”

Office 365 Single Sign Out with ISA or TMG as the ADFS Proxy

Over the last year I’ve spent a decent chunk of my time shaping and delivering Identity and Access Management workshops for Office 365 projects at Content and Code. This is generally underpinned by Active Directory Federation Services v2.0 (ADFS). In fact I don’t think we’ve done a single Office 365 project without it. Along the way I’ve become acquainted with many of the nuances of the sign on and sign out experiences as they differ across Office 365 services, client applications and different (valid) network perimeter technologies. In this post I will mainly focus on the security implications of publishing ADFS through ISA or TMG Reverse Proxies in the place of ADFS Proxy servers. In the majority of our engagements we’ve considered this option (potentially allowing our clients to consolidate infrastructure) since ISA, TMG or similar Reverse Proxies are commonly deployed. Yet we need to evaluate with full awareness of how ADFS operates without a Claims-aware Reverse Proxy such as the ADFS Proxy. This gets pretty technical, so I’m assuming some high-level familiarity with ADFS, Reverse Proxies and Office 365.

Contents

Continue reading “Office 365 Single Sign Out with ISA or TMG as the ADFS Proxy”