Azure firewall policy VS service principal, azure managed identity, service principal

Azure Managed Identity VS Service Principal

BySanjeev Digital

Azure managed identity VS Service principal – The difference between service principal and Azure-managed identity has been a common point of discussion in many IT firms. As part of any regular Azure deployment or architecture, we have to deal with them. Let us explore the difference between the two.

SERVICE PRINCIPAL

The most relevant part of the Service Principal is the Enterprise Apps section under Azure Active Directory. This application will allow users to authenticate and access Azure resources based on role-based access control.

It is the ID of an application that needs to access Azure resources. In more straightforward language, if a team member needs to be assigned special access, for example, so that they can access Azure resources and perform the necessary tasks, then a senior in the team can use the subordinate’s email ID to authenticate the user.

From the above, it follows that by using a Service Principal, you can avoid creating ‘fake users’ in the Azure ID to manage the authentication when access to Azure resources is needed.

Additionally, there may be cases when a third party or a user application needs to access Azure resources. How would they be granted permission to? This is where the Service principal comes into play. Let us have a look at a few possible scenarios:

  • If you are running IAC deployments such as Terraform from its cloud.
  • Third-party monitoring applications such as Grafana or Prometheus need to access Azure data. We can create a service principal and use principal service properties such as object id, secret or tenant id. The third-party applications can be integrated with the subscription with the help of RBAC.
  • Azure DevOps is being used to deploy resources on Azure.

CHALLENGES INVOLVED IN THE USE OF SERVICE PRINCIPALS

  • First of all, someone needs to create the objects which will be used in the Service principal. This could become a security risk.
  • Client ID and Secret are exposed or known to the user who creates the Service Principal.
  • Client ID and Secret are known or exposed to the consumer of the Service Principal.
  • Object validity is usually 1 or 2 years. Sometimes, an application stops working after one year.

While the Service principal is instrumental and essential when security is considered, its most significant drawbacks are the potential security risk and administrative overhead. This is where managed identities prove to be more robust.

MANAGED IDENTITIES

We can say that azure managed identities are like service principals, in the purpose they serve and in their functionality. However, there is one distinct difference. Unlike an application or a third-party connecting agent, a managed identity is always linked to an Azure Resource. They are created automatically, with the added benefit that nobody can know the credentials.

There are two types of managed identities:

  1. User-assigned managed identity means that a stand-alone Azure resource must be created, which can be linked to multiple Azure resources. For example, in an integration of a key vault, different workload services belonging to the same application stack need to decipher information from the key vault. One could create a “read KV” managed identity and link it to the application or storage account of the same application architecture.
  2. In the case of a system-assigned identity, the identity is linked to a single Azure resource- a virtual machine, an application etc. They also ‘live’ with the resource, which means they get deleted when the Azure resource gets deleted.

In an identity section of the resource, we have an option to choose system-assigned or user assigned. Then, the system-assigned identity can be given any permission the user wants, like reading out a key vault or an Azure storage access account.

CONCLUSION

As the above description shows about azure managed identity vs service principal, a Service Principal can be regarded as a service account in a more traditional on-premises application. Managed identities make up for the security challenges in Service Principals. Managed identities link an SP security object to an Azure resource.

Continuum Innovations is a team of cloud technology experts and Azure-managed services. With a firm grasp of your organization’s requirements, we create tailor-made security solutions for your enterprise, making your organization’s software security more robust and advanced. Reach out to us to book a consultation at www.continuuminnovations.com.