i am implementing CI/CD pipeline that needs to register an AAD Application with permissions to read/write into Site collections, this would mean that the pipeline itself need to have permission to 'Sites.FullControl.All'. I want to understand from the security perspective, if this is desirable, i.e., a pipeline having FullControl access to a SharePoint tenant. What are the recommended practices w.r.t. this, will the application registration in such scenarios be manually done by Ops team?
According to your description, it seems that you want to use the service connection in the Azure CI/CD pipeline.
We can create a service connection with Service principal (automatic) or Service principal (manual).
Use the following parameters to define and secure a connection to a Microsoft Azure subscription using Service Principal Authentication (SPA) or an Azure managed Service Identity.
Automated subscription detection. In this mode, Azure Pipelines
queries Azure for all of the subscriptions and instances to which you
have access. They use the credentials you're currently signed in with
in Azure Pipelines (including Microsoft accounts and School or Work
accounts).
If you don't see the subscription you want to use, sign out of Azure Pipelines and sign in again using the appropriate account credentials.
Manual subscription pipeline. In this mode, you must specify the
service principal you want to use to connect to Azure. The service
principal specifies the resources and the access levels that are
available over the connection.
For more information, you could refer to Azure Resource Manager service connection.
Related
we use a devops artifact feed to store our packed/shaded java binaries inside a private project. Now we would like to allow access to certain artifacts for externals.
We will promote these artifacts to a custom view (#public-releases) and want to allow access to this view for certain customers only (s.t. they can use it in their automation).
Is it possible to have some kind of service-account/service-principal to assign read-permissions in devops?
I know it the other way round (give devops access to azure ressources via service connections), but now I want to permit access to Devops Feeds.
How would I create such a User? We have azure AD connected, so maybe that is an option?
Is it possible to have some kind of service-account/service-principal
to assign read-permissions in devops?
No, no such design.
Service principal of Azure Active Directory concept can not be managed as an account in DevOps side(DevOps doesn't have such account type, only internal service principal, no AAD service principal).
As you know, service principal of AAD can manage access to services in azure portal. This is the usual usage. Another usage is Authenticate with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tokens, this approach can be used to manage PAT of DevOps, but anyway you end up needing to access the feed based on a legitimate account under the DevOps concept.
we have azure devops pipelines to build and deploy various projects.
Rccently, we wanted to use the "azureblog file copy" pipeline to copy some files to a blob storage.
This needs write access to the storage account over in azure.
Our administrator says that the pipeline runs as whoever manually runs the pipeline. If this is true, we would have to give all devs and users read/write access to the blog storage, which would be crazy.
I assume he is wrong, and that pipelines run as a specific designated user no matter how they were kicked off. The question is, how to find out what this user is for a given pipeine?
The "edit pipeline" has a security tab near the top, adn this lists a but of "Azure Devops groups", which are presumably groups who have the ability to run the pipelines.
But where is the pipeline user defined?
which user do Azure devops pipelines run as?
It depends on the context in which you are discussing the question.
If you mean inside a pure DevOps service, then I can tell you that the user that the pipeline runs on is not the one who triggers the pipeline (which is the case with native DevOps services by default, unless you install some weird extension or have a problem with the pipeline special design), but this identity:
<Project Name> Build Service Account
'run as someone' is just a property of pipeline run. Pipeline run as 'Build Service Account'(On the DevOps side), If you need a pipeline to download or upload an artifact, you can clearly feel this. If the account mentioned above has no permission, you can't do anything.
If you mean the user's operations based on the Azure side, then I can tell you that for native DevOps service, the 'user' that the pipeline performs operations on the Azure side is not the person who triggers the pipeline. The pipeline of DevOps service consists of multiple tasks, and tasks generally interact with other services through service connection (you can find this in Project settings).
There are many types of service connections. When interacting with services in Azure, this type is generally used:
Azure Resource Manager -> Service principal
When you create a service connection of this type on the DevOps side, Azure will also create an AAD app related to this service connection, and this ADD app corresponds to a service principal in Azure. In Azure, permissions are assigned based on service principals or users, and your DevOps pipeline's operations to Azure are based on this service principal and have nothing to do with anything else in DevOps. On the Azure side, this service principal can be considered as an Azure-side 'avatar' of the tasks of the DevOps pipeline.
If you are interacting with Azure through pure code/pure script, then please follow the logic of the script/code.
Our administrator says that the pipeline runs as whoever manually runs
the pipeline. If this is true, we would have to give all devs and
users read/write access to the blog storage, which would be crazy.
For native DevOps service, of course not. Unless this pipeline has a special design.
I believe the pipeline runs as the "agent". Who the "agent user" is will depend on, first, whether you've chosen a "Microsoft-hosted" or "self-hosted" agent to run your pipeline.
When running pipelines in Azure DevOps that are directly working with Azure Resources you need an Azure Resource Manager service connection. The credentials used to make the service connection are the credentials the pipeline will use when it runs.
You can have your administrator provide you with an Azure AD account that has the permissions you need and then use that Azure AD account to create the service connection for the pipeline. Once you have created the service connection you can use the ResourceID of that connection in place of you azureSubscription.
Here is the link to the Microsoft documentation on creating a service connection.
Here is the link to the Microsoft documentation on the Azure file copy task. To verify you can use the service connection in place of the azureSubscription.
I see that Service Connection is a link between Azure Pipelines and Azure Subscription to trigger Pipelines.
But can I create a Service Connection and get client id and secret and use that to obtain access token. And with that access token I can run the Azure Pipeline via c# code with REST APIs?
Is this what a service connection used for ?
But can I create a Service Connection and get client id and secret and
use that to obtain access token.
You can generate token via this, but you can't use it in C# code to run the pipeline.
Service connection between 'Azure Pipelines and Azure Subscription' just for you to create an app in AAD, this will also create related Enterprise App(service principal) in Azure portal side.
The service principal can be assigned permissions in the Azure portal to access resources. Once the service principal has access to a resource at the Azure Portal, the devops pipeline using the service connection associated with the service principal will also have the same access.
The original purpose of the above is service connection design is to allow the pipeline to have access to the resources at the portal.
Why we can't use the app's clientid and secret to get an access token to run the pipeline?
It is clearly in this official document:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/integrate/get-started/authentication/authentication-guidance?view=azure-devops
The Azure DevOps API doesn't support non-interactive service access
via service principals.
We've been told by Microsoft support that Azure DevOps Services supports tenant restrictions. While we have tenant restrictions enabled on a number of other services, it does't seem to apply to DevOps. Not only can we still log in to organizations outside of our tenant, we can also log in to our own organization and, if our corp email is added as a user in that org, the organization also shows up. I'd expect that our users would be blocked from logging into or accessing any external orgs.
I'm a little confused about why this isn't just working as expected and despite them saying Azure DevOps Services supports tenant restrictions, I'm not finding much documentation to back that up.
Have you been able to migrate to Azure DevOps Services and ensure that your users are only able to access orgs within your own tenant? How?
Azure DevOps Service supports the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant policy to restrict users from creating an organization in Azure DevOps. This policy is turned off, by default. You must be an Azure DevOps Administrator in Azure AD to manage this policy.
Check following link for more details:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/accounts/azure-ad-tenant-policy-restrict-org-creation?view=azure-devops
Notice:
This policy is supported only for company owned (Azure Active
Directory) organizations. Users creating organization using their
personal account (MSA or GitHub) have no restrictions.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/policy-support-to-restrict-creating-new-azure-devops-organizations/
We finally received a more concrete answer to this question from Premier Support. Sounds like this wasn't entirely clear internally either. Azure DevOps Services supports TRv1 which provides tenant restrictions from client to proxy, but does not support TRv2 tenant restrictions which provides server to server restrictions. TRv1 will prevent you from authenticating against an org outside your tenant directly but does nothing to prevent the background authentication that happens if your account is configured to be able to access a secondary tenant's org. The server to server connection strips off the header information necessary to restrict you from accessing the secondary tenant. While this feature may be on their radar there is no expectation or firm timeline for it's release at this time.
Is it possible to have a service principal account trigger a build pipeline? I have a CMS that whenever a document is published it fires of an event/webhook that's calls an Azure Function. The function then calls Azure DevOps using the API to trigger the correct build pipeline. Up until now we have relied on personal access tokens (PAT) from a "lucky" team member, but obviously that isn't an ideal solution. If the PAT expires or the team member leaves our pipeline breaks down. I was hoping to use the PAT Lifecycle Management API* to generate a PAT on the fly, but as the documentation states; "On-behalf-of application" solutions (such as the “client credential” flow) and any authentication flow that does not issue an Azure AD access token is not valid for use with this API".
This seems like a fairly common scenario, having an external dependency kicking of a build pipleline, so how should I go about doing this without using person-dependent tokens?
https://learn.microsoft.com/nb-no/azure/devops/organizations/accounts/manage-personal-access-tokens-via-api?view=azure-devops
Externally trigger an Azure DevOps Build using a Sevice Principal account
I am afraid it it impossible to use REST API to trigger an Azure DevOps Build using a Sevice Principal account.
That because the Azure DevOps API doesn't support non-interactive service access via service principals.
You could get the info from the document Choose the right authentication mechanism：