Identity based security for LogicApp to LogicApp communication

Introduction

For today’s post we’ll go through a simple (yet powerful!) example that shows you how to securely communicate between two LogicApps. For this we will leverage the concept of managed system identity on the sender and access token validation on the receiver.

Conceptual

To get a bit of an idea of the flow, let us take a look at the drawing below…

The sender (LogicApp on the top left) is foreseen of a Managed System Identity in AAD. It will leverage this capability to get an access token from AAD. In addition, we will include a specific audience in the scope. This refers to an application object inside of the AAD tenant.
This token will then be included in the authorization header (as a JWT token) towards the receiver (LogicApp on the top right). The receiver will validate the JWT token by checking the public keys of the issues (AAD). Next up, it will check if the Issuer and Audience provided match the defined policy. If all is okay, then it will accept the request.

Azure Active Directory : Group integration for daemon / server applications (aka Service Principals)

Introduction

Today’s blog post will be how you can leverage the authentication scenario of a Daemon, Service User or Server Application when our application/API is using Azure Active Directory for its authentication flows.

“An example of a daemon application is a batch job, or an operating system service running in the background. This type of application requests an access token by using its application identity and presenting its Application ID, credential (password or certificate), and application ID URI to Azure AD. After successful authentication, the daemon receives an access token from Azure AD, which is then used to call the web API.”

In essence, a “daemon application” will do a “clients credentials grant” whilst using an Azure Active Directory Service Principal. The “application id” of the service principal will serve as the “client_id” and a generated “secret” will service as the “client_secret”.

In addition to this, we want our application to grant permissions (authorization & identification) based on the group memberships of Azure Active Directory. Where this is pretty straightforward for our basic user objects. This requires a bit of attention when wanting to achieve the same for our service principal.