Azure secrets engine

The Azure secrets engine dynamically generates Azure service principals along with role and group assignments. Vault roles can be mapped to one or more Azure roles, and optionally group assignments, providing a simple, flexible way to manage the permissions granted to generated service principals.

Each service principal is associated with a Vault lease. When the lease expires (either during normal revocation or through early revocation), the service principal is automatically deleted.

If an existing service principal is specified as part of the role configuration, a new password will be dynamically generated instead of a new service principal. The password will be deleted when the lease is revoked.

Setup

Most secrets engines must be configured in advance before they can perform their functions. These steps are usually completed by an operator or configuration management tool.

1. Enable the Azure secrets engine:

   $ vault secrets enable azure
   Success! Enabled the azure secrets engine at: azure/
   

   By default, the secrets engine will mount at the name of the engine. To enable the secrets engine at a different path, use the -path argument.

2. Configure the secrets engine with account credentials:

   $ vault write azure/config \
       subscription_id=$AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID \
       tenant_id=$AZURE_TENANT_ID \
       client_id=$AZURE_CLIENT_ID \
       client_secret=$AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET
   
   Success! Data written to: azure/config
   

   If you are running Vault inside an Azure VM with MSI enabled, client_id and client_secret may be omitted. For more information on authentication, see the authentication section below.

   In some cases, you cannot set sensitive account credentials in your Vault configuration. For example, your organization may require that all security credentials are short-lived or explicitly tied to a machine identity.

   To provide managed identity security credentials to Vault, we recommend using Vault plugin workload identity federation (WIF) as shown below.

3. Alternatively, configure the audience claim value and the Client, Tenant and Subscription IDs for plugin workload identity federation:

   $ vault write azure/config \
       subscription_id=$AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID \
       tenant_id=$AZURE_TENANT_ID \
       client_id=$AZURE_CLIENT_ID \
       identity_token_audience=$TOKEN_AUDIENCE
   

   The Vault identity token provider signs the plugin identity token JWT internally. If a trust relationship exists between Vault and Azure through WIF, the secrets engine can exchange the Vault identity token for a federated access token.

   To configure a trusted relationship between Vault and Azure:

   • You must configure the identity token issuer backend for Vault.
   • Azure must have a federated identity credential configured with information about the fully qualified and network-reachable issuer URL for the Vault plugin identity token provider.

   Establishing a trusted relationship between Vault and Azure ensures that Azure can fetch JWKS public keys and verify the plugin identity token signature.

4. Configure a role. A role may be set up with either an existing service principal, or a set of Azure roles that will be assigned to a dynamically created service principal.

To configure a role called "my-role" with an existing service principal:

$ vault write azure/roles/my-role \
    application_object_id=<existing_app_obj_id> \
    ttl=1h

Alternatively, to configure the role to create a new service principal with Azure roles:

$ vault write azure/roles/my-role ttl=1h azure_roles=-<<EOF
    [
        {
            "role_name": "Contributor",
            "scope":  "/subscriptions/<uuid>/resourceGroups/Website"
        }
    ]
EOF

Roles may also have their own TTL configuration that is separate from the mount's TTL. For more information on roles see the roles section below.

Usage

After the secrets engine is configured and a user/machine has a Vault token with the proper permissions, it can generate credentials. The usage pattern is the same whether an existing or dynamic service principal is used.

To generate a credential using the "my-role" role:

$ vault read azure/creds/my-role

Key                Value
---                -----
lease_id           azure/creds/sp_role/1afd0969-ad23-73e2-f974-962f7ac1c2b4
lease_duration     60m
lease_renewable    true
client_id          408bf248-dd4e-4be5-919a-7f6207a307ab
client_secret      ad06228a-2db9-4e0a-8a5d-e047c7f32594

This endpoint generates a renewable set of credentials. The application can login using the client_id/client_secret and will have access provided by configured service principal or the Azure roles set in the "my-role" configuration.

Root credential rotation

If the mount is configured with credentials directly, the credential's key may be rotated to a Vault-generated value that is not accessible by the operator. This will ensure that only Vault is able to access the "root" user that Vault uses to manipulate dynamic & static credentials.

vault write -f azure/rotate-root

For more details on this operation, please see the Root Credential Rotation API docs.

Roles

Vault roles let you configure either an existing service principal or a set of Azure roles, along with role-specific TTL parameters. If an existing service principal is not provided, the configured Azure roles will be assigned to a newly created service principal. The Vault role may optionally specify role-specific ttl and/or max_ttl values. When the lease is created, the more restrictive of the mount or role TTL value will be used.

Application object IDs

If an existing service principal is to be used, the Application Object ID must be set on the Vault role. This ID can be found by inspecting the desired Application with the az CLI tool, or via the Azure Portal. Note that the Application Object ID must be provided, not the Application ID.

Azure roles

If dynamic service principals are used, Azure roles must be configured on the Vault role. Azure roles are provided as a JSON list, with each element describing an Azure role and scope to be assigned. Azure roles may be specified using the role_name parameter ("Owner"), or role_id ("/subscriptions/.../roleDefinitions/..."). role_id is the definitive ID that's used during Vault operation; role_name is a convenience during role management operations. All roles must exist when the configuration is written or the operation will fail. The role lookup priority is:

1. If role_id is provided, it is validated and the corresponding role_name updated.
2. If only role_name is provided, a case-insensitive search-by-name is made, succeeding only if exactly one matching role is found. The role_id field will updated with the matching role ID.

The scope must be provided for every role assignment.

Azure groups

If dynamic service principals are used, a list of Azure groups may be configured on the Vault role. When the service principal is created, it will be assigned to these groups. Similar to the format used for specifying Azure roles, Azure groups may be referenced by either their group_name or object_id. Group specification by name must yield a single matching group.

Example of role configuration:

$ vault write azure/roles/my-role \
    ttl=1h \
    max_ttl=24h \
    azure_roles=@az_roles.json \
    azure_groups=@az_groups.json

$ cat az_roles.json
[
  {
    "role_name": "Contributor",
    "scope":  "/subscriptions/<uuid>/resourceGroups/Website"
  },
  {
    "role_id": "/subscriptions/<uuid>/providers/Microsoft.Authorization/roleDefinitions/<uuid>",
    "scope":  "/subscriptions/<uuid>"
  },
  {
    "role_name": "This won't matter as it will be overwritten",
    "role_id": "/subscriptions/<uuid>/providers/Microsoft.Authorization/roleDefinitions/<uuid>",
    "scope":  "/subscriptions/<uuid>/resourceGroups/Database"
  }
]

$ cat az_groups.json
[
  {
    "group_name": "foo"
  },
  {
    "group_name": "This won't matter as it will be overwritten",
    "object_id": "a6a834a6-36c3-4575-8e2b-05095963d603"
  }
]

Permanently delete Azure objects

If dynamic service principals are used, the option to permanently delete the applications and service principals created by Vault may be configured on the Vault role. When this option is enabled and a lease is expired or revoked, the application and service principal associated with the lease will be permanently deleted from the Azure Active Directory. As a result, these objects will not count toward the quota of total resources in an Azure tenant. When this option is not enabled and a lease is expired or revoked, the application and service principal associated with the lease will be deleted, but not permanently. These objects will be available to restore for 30 days from deletion.

Example of role configuration:

$ vault write azure/roles/my-role permanently_delete=true ttl=1h azure_roles=-<<EOF
    [
        {
            "role_name": "Contributor",
            "scope":  "/subscriptions/<uuid>/resourceGroups/Website"
        }
    ]
EOF

Authentication

The Azure secrets backend must have sufficient permissions to read Azure role information and manage service principals. The authentication parameters can be set in the backend configuration or as environment variables. Environment variables will take precedence. The individual parameters are described in the configuration section of the API docs.

If the client ID or secret are not present and Vault is running on an Azure VM, Vault will attempt to use Managed Service Identity (MSI) to access Azure. Note that when MSI is used, tenant and subscription IDs must still be explicitly provided in the configuration or environment variables.

MS Graph API permissions

The following MS Graph API permissions must be assigned to the service principal provided to Vault for managing Azure. The permissions differ depending on if you're using dynamic or existing service principals.

Dynamic Service Principals

Existing Service Principals

Role assignments

The following Azure role assignments must be granted in order for the secrets engine to manage role assignments for service principles it creates.

Plugin Workload Identity Federation (WIF)

The Azure secrets engine supports the plugin WIF workflow, and has a source of identity called a plugin identity token. The plugin identity token is a JWT that is signed internally by Vault's plugin identity token issuer.

If there is a trust relationship configured between Vault and Azure through workload identity federation, the secrets engine can exchange its identity token for short-lived access tokens needed to perform its actions.

Exchanging identity tokens for access tokens lets the Azure secrets engine operate without configuring explicit access to sensitive client credentials.

To configure the secrets engine to use plugin WIF:

1. Ensure that Vault openid-configuration and public JWKS APIs are network-reachable by Azure. We recommend using an API proxy or gateway if you need to limit Vault API exposure.

2. Configure a federated identity credential on a dedicated application registration in Azure to establish a trust relationship with Vault.

   1. The issuer URL must point at your Vault plugin identity token issuer with the /.well-known/openid-configuration suffix removed. For example: https://host:port/v1/identity/oidc/plugins.
   2. The subject identifier must match the unique sub claim issued by plugin identity tokens. The subject identifier should have the form plugin-identity:<NAMESPACE>:secret:<AZURE_MOUNT_ACCESSOR>.
   3. The audience should be under 600 characters. The default value in Azure is api://AzureADTokenExchange.

3. Configure the Azure secrets engine with the subscription, client and tenant IDs and the OIDC audience value.

   $ vault write azure/config \
     subscription_id=$AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID \
     tenant_id=$AZURE_TENANT_ID \
     client_id=$AZURE_CLIENT_ID \
     identity_token_audience="vault.example/v1/identity/oidc/plugins"
   

Your secrets engine can now use plugin WIF for its configuration credentials. By default, WIF credentials have a time-to-live of 1 hour and automatically refresh when they expire.

Please see the API documentation for more details on the fields associated with plugin WIF.

Choosing between dynamic or existing service principals

Dynamic service principals are preferred if the desired Azure resources can be provided via the RBAC system and Azure roles defined in the Vault role. This form of credential is completely decoupled from any other clients, is not subject to permission changes after issuance, and offers the best audit granularity.

Access to some Azure services cannot be provided with the RBAC system, however. In these cases, an existing service principal can be set up with the necessary access, and Vault can create new passwords for this service principal. Any changes to the service principal permissions affect all clients. Furthermore, Azure does not provide any logging with regard to which credential was used for an operation.

An important limitation when using an existing service principal is that Azure limits the number of passwords for a single Application. This limit is based on Application object size and isn't firmly specified, but in practice hundreds of passwords can be issued per Application. An error will be returned if the object size is reached. This limit can be managed by reducing the role TTL, or by creating another Vault role against a different Azure service principal configured with the same permissions.

Additional notes

• If a referenced Azure role doesn't exist, a credential will not be generated. Service principals will only be generated if all role assignments are successful. This is important to note if you're using custom Azure role definitions that might be deleted at some point.

• Azure roles are assigned only once, when the service principal is created. If the Vault role changes the list of Azure roles, these changes will not be reflected in any existing service principal, even after token renewal.

• The time required to issue a credential is roughly proportional to the number of Azure roles that must be assigned. This operation make take some time (10s of seconds are common, and over a minute has been seen).

• Service principal credential timeouts are not used. Vault will revoke access by deleting the service principal.

• The Application Name for dynamic service principals will be prefixed with vault-. Similarly the keyId of any passwords added to an existing service principal will begin with ffffff. These may be used to search for Vault-created credentials using the az tool or Portal.

Azure debug logs

The Azure secret engine plugin supports debug logging which includes additional information about requests and responses from the Azure API.

To enable the Azure debug logs, set the AZURE_SDK_GO_LOGGING environment variable to all on your Vault server:

AZURE_SDK_GO_LOGGING=all

Help & support

The Azure secrets engine is written as an external Vault plugin and thus exists outside the main Vault repository. It is automatically bundled with Vault releases, but the code is managed separately.

Please report issues, add feature requests, and submit contributions to the vault-plugin-secrets-azure repo on GitHub.

Tutorial

Refer to the Azure Secrets Engine tutorial to learn how to use the Azure secrets engine to dynamically generate Azure credentials.

API

The Azure secrets engine has a full HTTP API. Please see the Azure secrets engine API docs for more details.