Conditional Access

Conditional Access Baseline Policies Out, Security Defaults In for Azure Active Directory

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Something I stumbled across today – it appears that Microsoft has decided to abandon Baseline Protection Policies, and replace them with a single ‘on/off’ switch called ‘Security Defaults’

Baseline Protection policies (also called Baseline Policies, it seems both terms have been used) were in preview, and were a pre-canned set of policies based on Microsoft recommendations on standard security settings that should be in place – such as forcing any administrator account to use MFA at each sign in, and blocking legacy authentication.

Here’s what the Conditional Access page currently shows. There might be something wrong with the detection though, as I clearly have a Baseline Policy enabled:

Baseline Protection policies are a legacy experience which is being deprecated. It looks like you haven’t enabled any Baseline Protection policies, so they will be removed from your tenant. This will not impact your existing workflows. If you’re looking to enable a security policy for your organization, we recommend enabling Security defaults or configuring Conditional Access policies.

It’s not difficult to recreate the Baseline policies, so I’d suggest migrating off of them now while they’re still functional – you don’t want to be left in a state where you didn’t realise MFA for admins was now not being forced.

The replacement Security Defaults option can be found by going to Azure Active Directory > Manage – Properties > Manage Security Defaults (it’s not in the Conditional Access area):

Before flipping this switch to ‘On’, you’ll need to have a really good read of the documentation. There’s a lot this option does, and may break many environments who aren’t ready for this – such as making sure you have no Legacy Authentication requirements, and that all users will register for MFA within 14 days or be blocked from sign-in until they register.

Although I can see this option being turned on by an uninformed administrator and causing some chaos, I like the idea of this. It means a new tenant can now have a single option to start with to implement several critical aspects to protect the tenant against attacks – right now there’s a lot you need to go through to lock it down, and especially for a small business who doesn’t have the time or resources to do this as well as a larger one, a single on/off switch solves a lot of security problems.

Security Defaults is also available to all customers on all tiers – Azure AD Free tier, which means those who have basic needs can now be protected in several ways they weren’t able to do via Conditional Access before.

Security Defaults isn’t listed as being in Preview as far as I can tell, so it may be an option that’s just rolled out and a ready to go. I am guessing there’ll be a bit of kickback around this being a single option that has no other configurable options in it, so we’ll have to wait and see if the product changes, or Microsoft’s vision of a security toggle stays as their goal.

Blocking ActiveSync with Conditional Access

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Microsoft has announced that they’re continuing the path away from Legacy Authentication, with the decommission of legacy auth to EWS on Exchange Online on October 13th 2020. Instead of waiting for that looming date, there’s a bunch of security reasons to only have Modern Authentication for Microsoft 365.

I’ve already written up on Protect Your Office 365 Accounts By Disabling Basic Authentication and Blocking Legacy Authentication – Conditional Access vs Authentication Policies – but when I migrated from Authentication Policies to Conditional Access, I didn’t realise ActiveSync wasn’t included as part of blocking Legacy Authentication, even though it connects without MFA.

The guide from Microsoft on how to block Legacy Authentication doesn’t actually mention ActiveSync, so it’s easy to miss like I initially did! You’ll need to block ActiveSync altogether as far as I know, as it doesn’t support MFA.

Although I still think Conditional Access is easier to manage than Authentication Policies, there is one caveat; even with an ActiveSync block in place via Conditional Access, too many attempts by a user will lock their account briefly. This might cause problems or require work to get those users to clean up whatever device is trying to log in. With an Authentication Policy I don’t believe this happens because it’s blocked earlier in the sign-in process – you won’t see logs, and the account can’t get locked.

There is of course, a checkbox around ActiveSync, and a way to block it using Conditional Access, but I had mixed results in blocking it successfully until I did it exactly this way:

Create a new Conditional Access Policy and set these options:

Users and groups > All Users
Cloud apps or actions > Select Apps > Office 365 Exchange Online
Conditions > Client apps > Tick both ‘Mobile apps and desktop clients’ + ‘Exchange ActiveSync Clients’
Grant > Block Access

In the Users and Groups section, you can narrow this down from ‘All Users’ for testing or for a gradual rollout.

The user experience is interesting on this one – they can still sort of authenticate, but instead of getting their emails, they will see a single email advising that their access has been blocked:

On top of this, you can use Azure AD to audit who might be using ActiveSync before you put any sort of block in place. As per usual, there’s a good Microsoft article on Discovering and blocking legacy authentication which can walk you through this, but in short:

Via the Azure Portal, go to Azure Active Directory > Users. Under Activity, go to Sign-ins. Click Add filters, and choose Client App > Tick the three ‘Exchange ActiveSync’ options and press ‘Apply’. You’ll see the last 7 days of sign in attempts using ActiveSync, which should give you an idea of how many users are using it, and who.

Blocking Legacy Authentication, plus blocking ActiveSync will give you a much more secure environment, protecting from account attacks.

Blocking Legacy Authentication – Conditional Access vs Authentication Policies

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I’ve already written a post on why Legacy Authentication (Basic) is bad, and Modern Authentication is good. At the time of writing, Authentication Policies were the way to go to block Legacy Authentication methods. Of course, things change and there’s now a better* option to look at – Conditional Access.

I’ve also covered Conditional Access before, and it’s really hard to fault the solution. There are now Baseline policies deployed by default (still in preview though) to Azure AD tenants with recommended best practices:

Conditional Access Baseline Policies

One of these is for blocking legacy authentication – but I’m not going to recommend you turn this on (at least for starters, it’s good at the end when you know you have full modern authentication support), as it’s a tenant wide setting that has no exceptions if you need to allow legacy authentication for an account (unlike Require MFA for admins, which does allow exceptions).

Instead, you can create your own policy that does the same. This means you can gradually roll it out, and put exceptions in place until you either work around them, or live with them. If you have a requirement for an account that requires legacy auth, then you need to consider how else you’ll protect that account – can you use other Conditional Access policies to restrict it to a certain region/locations, certain apps, platforms etc – lock it down as much as you can, and make sure the account has a long unique password.

The single important setting to block legacy auth via a Conditional Access Policy is blocking access to ‘Other clients’ via Client apps:

Microsoft have a full guide on how to set this up on docs.microsoft.com.

So, why is this better than using Authentication Policies? Two main reasons:

If an account has their access or signin blocked due to an Authentication Policy, it’s not logged. You can look at the user in Azure AD and check the sign-ins, but you won’t see anything. However, if it blocked via Conditional Access, you’ll have a nice log entry showing you it was blocked:

Side note: Although in this example I was logging in from Australia, I was trying to connect to Exchange Online via PowerShell. That seems to often be detected as being in the US, so be careful with region blocking.

The other reason is that Authentication Policies can take up to 4 (!) hours to apply, although it’s often more like an hour. That is a long time to wait, and you just have to keep waiting and trying until it works – except if you did it wrong, you won’t know and you’ll keep waiting. Or, if you need to unblock access while rolling out, it’s a long time to roll back.

Authentication Policies do have their place though, they give more granular control over what you want to block or not – say you know you want to block POP3 access company wide, but not IMAP – that’s possible in there, but not via Conditional Access.

Unless you have a good reason to use Authentication Policies, just use Conditional Access (and assuming you have Azure AD Premium P1 or P2 licensing to actually let you use Conditional Access, and if you are using Azure AD you should be on that licensing anyway). It’ll make your life easier!

Microsoft DOESN’T admit expiring-password rules are useless

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Update 5th August 2019: Another great blog post from Alex Weinert at Microsoft on real world data from Azure AD, common password attacks and where passwords do and don’t matter: Your Pa$$word doesn’t matter

Update 6th June 2019: The final version of the Security Baseline has been released by Microsoft, and explains the password recommendations very clearly. Here’s one paragraph quoted, bold is my emphasis, but please go and read the whole article:

Periodic password expiration is an ancient and obsolete mitigation of very low value, and we don’t believe it’s worthwhile for our baseline to enforce any specific value. By removing it from our baseline rather than recommending a particular value or no expiration, organizations can choose whatever best suits their perceived needs without contradicting our guidance. At the same time, we must reiterate that we strongly recommend additional protections even though they cannot be expressed in our baselines.

Original blogpost:

CNET has an article titled “Microsoft admits expiring-password rules are useless” which I strongly disagree with, and thought it was worth explaining why.

Beyond the actual blog post from Aaron Margosis at Microsoft not actually containing the word ‘useless’, it’s an inaccurate summary of what is a well written and clear write-up from where I sit.

This all came out of publishing the draft of the Security Baseline recommendations for Windows 10 1903, which details out what settings Microsoft recommend and why. If you’re managing a Windows environment, these are a must read, and should be reviewed with each version of Windows 10 you plan to move to.

The general take of the CNET article was that password changes have been useless for years, suggests Microsoft should completely ‘yank’ the ability to force passwords to expire, and if your IT staff don’t remove password expiry immediately, they’re living in a ‘security Stone Age’. It’s rather insulting and coming from someone in my opinion, who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. They might say the same about me, of course :)

On the other hand, Microsoft’s blog post tells a different story. Yes, passwords are problematic and forcing them to change frequently causes other issues where people just change the number on the end by ‘1’, but they aren’t saying password changes are useless.

Microsoft used to recommend 90 day expiries, then to 60 days. The idea there was that if a credential is leaked somehow, the smaller window that the password is known by third parties, the better. But, if your password M0nkey34! is now M0nkey35!, that’s probably going to be the first thing a targeted attacker tries if the password they had for you didn’t work.

Although all this is true, it works on the assumption that someone is actively targeting you. It happens, but it’s much more common for attackers to just do spray attacks based on millions of credentials they have. Why are they going to pick your account and try a bunch of combinations of passwords, when they could just go through stupid amounts of records with no effort and find weaknesses there?

Say you are a target for some reason; it’s likely that the password leaked from somewhere isn’t new – it’s probably months or years old. If you’d never changed your password because your company never forced it to change, then the attacker now has a valid password for you.

It’s also much more likely your password was stolen from a 3rd party service, nothing to do with your corporate systems. You might have signed up with your work email address, but the password ‘should’ be unique to the service signed up for. We all know users don’t work that way, and use the same password all over the place. Having a password they know will change frequently, may mean that they use something at least unique, even if it does increment.

All of this is moot of course, if you have multi-factor authentication (MFA) in place, because the requirement of something else (a phone, bio-metrics etc) means a username and password by themselves are actually useless. However, most companies do have systems in place that have no options around MFA, so what do they do?

To re-iterate, I agree with everything said in Microsoft’s blog post. This is where one paragraph in the blog post sums it up nicely:

Periodic password expiration is an ancient and obsolete mitigation of very low value, and we don’t believe it’s worthwhile for our baseline to enforce any specific value. By removing it from our baseline rather than recommending a particular value or no expiration, organizations can choose whatever best suits their perceived needs without contradicting our guidance. At the same time, we must reiterate that we strongly recommend additional protections even though they cannot be expressed in our baselines.

Work out your risks, your userbase, what systems might be impacted, what extra protection you have in place and make an informed decision around what frequency works for you.

The focus shouldn’t be on password changes, but should be on implementing those other protections in all scenarios – but before that happens (which for many companies can easily take several years), you’ll need to work out what policy you do. There is no single best-fit recommendation on what that is when using pure passwords, because they’re inherently bad however you look at them.

Look at Conditional Access, Password Protection and Azure AD Identity Protection for starters on adding in these extra protections!

The answer isn’t a pure ‘password changes are useless’, and it’s irresponsible to say so.

Protect Your Office 365 Accounts By Disabling Basic Authentication

Posted on by Adam Fowler

(AKA Legacy Authentication)

This had been on my to-do list for a little while since I heard about it (mostly from Daniel Streefkerk who quite rightly has been drawing attention to this via Twitter, thanks!)– and it should be on yours too.

By default, Basic Authentication is allowed as an authentication method in Exchange Online. This is because that’s the ‘standard’ way things have worked for a very long time – you want to get your emails, you provide a username and password and you’re done.

In our modern world, that doesn’t work too well anymore. It’s too risky in that many ways, and things like 2FA and Conditional Access add an extra layer of security when logging in. That’s great, but many systems weren’t built or haven’t been updated to support this – they’ll just fail when logging in.

What this leaves us with, is an internet exposed authentication system that accepts username and password logins without any other layers of authentication, even if you have 2FA and conditional access turned on.

As per Microsoft’s documentation around disabling basic authentication covers, this lets attackers use brute force or spray attacks to try different credentials to get into your tenant. With the amount of leaks we see these days (register on Troy Hunt’s https://haveibeenpwned.com/ if you haven’t already), it’s likely attackers are hitting Microsoft servers with correct accounts of your staff members. If they manage to get the right password – which is very possible if people end up using an old password they used years ago, or password changes were disabled because you thought you were covered with 2FA – they now have valid credentials to get in and pretend to be that staff member, often to then send emails to all their contacts with a malicious link or some other scam.

If you want to see what’s going on for your tenant, go to the Azure portal and into Azure Active Directory > Monitoring – Sign-ins. Set the Status to ‘failure’ and apply, and see what’s there.

Here’s an example, where you can see the client app is ‘Other clients, IMAP’. This account is disabled, and if you look in the device info there’s no data.

Once you have a look here, you might start to get worried – so it’s time to see if you can disable basic auth!

Only certain email clients will work without basic auth, so your first step is to work out what people are using, and get approval to force the usage of only these:

  • Outlook 2013 or later (Outlook 2013 requires a registry key change)
  • Outlook 2016 for Mac or later
  • Outlook for iOS and Android
  • Mail for iOS 11.3.1 or later

That can be a tough ask, and you’ll need to weigh up the risk of leaving basic authentication in place (to me this is an easy choice, but can still be difficult to get approved and implement).

Again, the Microsoft documentation explains how to do this quite easily – create a new Authentication Profile which has Basic Auth disabled by default, and apply it to test users:

New-AuthenticationPolicy -Name “Block Basic Auth”

Set-User -Identity [email protected] -AuthenticationPolicy “Block Basic Auth”

Set-User -Identity [email protected] -STSRefreshTokensValidFrom $([System.DateTime]::UtcNow)

That’s all you need to do to test. The third command forces an immediate refresh on the test user.

I would recommend leaving this in place for a while, and get as many test users on as possible as you might find certain systems using basic authentication that you weren’t aware of.

If you need to drop the policy off of a user, use this command:

Set-User -Identity [email protected] -AuthenticationPolicy $null

If you’re then ready to apply this policy to all accounts company wide, these three commands will do it:

$users = Get-User -ResultSize unlimited
$usersid = $users.MicrosoftOnlineServicesID
$usersid | foreach {Set-User -Identity $_ -AuthenticationPolicy “Block Basic Auth”}

You’ll also want any new accounts to get your new policy by default, which can be done with this command:

Set-OrganizationConfig -DefaultAuthenticationPolicy “Block Basic Auth”

And with that, you’ll have all existing and future accounts protected from the risks of leaving Basic Auth enabled. Of course if you have a special requirement where a few accounts do need Basic Auth, create another policy, enable basic auth on it, and apply it to those accounts. Your attack surface will still be greatly decreased, and hopefully you’ll eventually be able to disable basic auth on those too.

Note: There’s also an option for OneDrive for Business around this same setting, more details here: https://www.adamfowlerit.com/2019/03/onedrive-for-business-rollout-considerations/

Update 26th April 2019:

There’s also now a Conditional Access option that supports ‘other clients’ –
“This includes older office clients, other mail protocols(POP, IMAP, SMTP, etc), and ACS”. This might help you if you either want to block those older clients, or allow them through in certain circumstances: