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Introduction:
Modern cloud security is no longer solely about guarding admin accounts or patching critical vulnerabilities. In platforms like Microsoft Entra ID, the entire attack surface has shifted to the intricate web of identity, permissions, and trust relationships. A sophisticated attacker can achieve tenant-wide compromise without triggering a single malware alert by abusing perfectly designed permission logic, chaining together low-privileged access, delegated permissions, and service principals. This article dissects the methodology of cloud identity pentesting, moving beyond simple inventory to map and sever these invisible attack paths.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand why identity is the primary control plane in modern cloud environments like Entra ID.
- Learn to enumerate and assess the risk of Entra ID objects beyond admin accounts, including users, app registrations, and service principals.
- Gain practical steps to identify, exploit, and mitigate common identity attack paths involving delegated permissions, application consent, and role assignment chains.
You Should Know:
1. Initial Reconnaissance: Enumerating the Identity Landscape
The first step in any identity attack is understanding the environment. Attackers use seemingly benign APIs and features to map users, groups, applications, and their relationships. This “living off the land” technique leaves minimal traces.
Step‑by‑step guide:
Objective: Gather a comprehensive list of users, groups, service principals, and app registrations.
Tool: Microsoft Graph API (via PowerShell or Azure CLI).
Commands:
Connect to Graph API with appropriate scopes (e.g., User.Read.All, Application.Read.All)
Connect-MgGraph -Scopes "User.Read.All", "Application.Read.All", "Directory.Read.All"
Enumerate all users
Get-MgUser -All | Select-Object UserPrincipalName, Id, AccountEnabled
Enumerate all service principals (enterprise applications)
Get-MgServicePrincipal -All | Select-Object DisplayName, AppId, ServicePrincipalType
Enumerate all app registrations
Get-MgApplication -All | Select-Object DisplayName, AppId, PublisherDomain
List directory roles and their members
Get-MgDirectoryRole -All | ForEach-Object { Get-MgDirectoryRoleMember -DirectoryRoleId $_.Id }
Why it matters: This data forms the map for constructing attack paths. A stale service principal or an app registration from an untrusted publisher can be the initial foothold.
2. Abusing Delegated Permissions and OAuth Consent
Delegated permissions allow an application to act as a signed-in user. If a user grants excessive permissions to a malicious or compromised app, the app can perform actions on behalf of that user. The “consent phishing” attack vector is prevalent here.
Step‑by‑step guide:
Objective: Identify app registrations with high-risk delegated permissions and assess consent grants.
Tool: Azure Portal, Graph API, or tools like ROADtools.
Commands/Actions:
- In Azure Portal, navigate to Entra ID > Enterprise applications. Review permissions for each application, especially those with
Mail.ReadWrite,Files.ReadWrite.All, or `Directory.Read.All` delegated permissions. - Use Graph to find applications with high-privilege grants:
Requires Policy.ReadWrite.PermissionGrant permission Get-MgPolicyPermissionGrantPolicyInclude | Fl
- Check for admin consent grants at the tenant level, which are particularly dangerous.
Mitigation: Enforce admin consent for all permissions, regularly audit consented applications (under User settings > Enterprise applications), and use Conditional Access policies to restrict access for non-compliant or risky applications.
3. Pivoting Through Service Principals and Managed Identities
Service principals (the instance of an app in a tenant) and managed identities can have permissions assigned directly via Azure RBAC. Their credentials (certificates, secrets, managed identity tokens) are prime targets.
Step‑by‑step guide:
Objective: Locate service principals with privileged Azure RBAC assignments and check for credential exposure.
Tool: Azure CLI, `MicroBurst`, or `Stormspotter`.
Commands:
Use Azure CLI to list role assignments for all service principals
az role assignment list --all --query "[?principalType=='ServicePrincipal'].{SP:principalName, Role:roleDefinitionName, Scope:scope}" --output table
Check for expired or soon-to-expire secrets/certificates (PowerShell)
Get-MgServicePrincipal -All | ForEach-Object {
$sp = $_
Get-MgServicePrincipalOwnedObject -ServicePrincipalId $sp.Id | Where-Object { $_.KeyCredentials -ne $null }
}
Exploitation: An attacker with a stolen service principal secret can authenticate directly and assume its RBAC roles, potentially bypassing MFA. Regularly rotate credentials and use federated identity credentials where possible.
4. Exploiting Role Assignment and Privilege Escalation Chains
The core of the attack path. In Entra ID, a user may not have admin rights but can manage a service principal that has the `User.Read.All` Graph permission. That service principal can read user attributes, perhaps finding a user eligible for a privileged role, which can then be activated.
Step‑by‑step guide:
Objective: Use tools to automatically discover these chained relationships.
Tool: BloodHound for Azure (AzureHound/BloodHound Enterprise) is the industry standard.
1. Collect data: Use the `AzureHound` collector to ingest Entra ID and Azure RBAC data.
azurehound --tenant <TENANT-ID> --username <USER> --password <PASSWORD> list
2. Ingest into BloodHound: Upload the generated JSON files into BloodHound.
3. Analyze paths: Run pre-built queries like “Find Shortest Paths to High Value Targets” or “Find Principals with DANGEROUS Permissions.”
Mitigation: BloodHound’s analysis will reveal specific dangerous configurations, such as users who can add credentials to service principals or who can grant admin consent. Remediate these paths by removing unnecessary permissions and enforcing tiering models.
5. Hardening the Identity Control Plane: Defensive Configuration
Prevention is rooted in robust configuration and continuous monitoring.
Step‑by‑step guide:
Objective: Implement critical security baselines for Entra ID.
Actions:
- Enable Privileged Identity Management (PIM): Enforce Just-In-Time (JIT) and time-bound access for all eligible Azure AD and Azure resource roles. Require approval and MFA for activation.
- Configure Conditional Access: Implement policies requiring compliant devices, trusted locations, and continuous access evaluation for accessing cloud apps and administrative portals. Block legacy authentication protocols.
- Enable Identity Protection: Turn on risk-based policies to require password change or block sign-in for users with leaked credentials or risky sign-in behavior.
- Audit Logging and Retention: Ensure Audit and Sign-in logs are enabled and exported to a SIEM (e.g., Sentinel) for long-term retention and analysis. Hunt for anomalous token issuance and consent events.
What Undercode Say:
- Identity is the New Network Perimeter: The attack surface has fundamentally shifted. Perimeter firewalls are irrelevant against attacks that use valid credentials and sanctioned APIs. Security efforts must pivot to mapping and securing identity trust relationships with the same rigor once applied to network segmentation.
- The “Clean” Compromise is the Most Dangerous: Because identity attacks operate within the boundaries of designed functionality, they produce low-fidelity, “clean” logs. Defenders must move beyond alerting on “exploits” to behavioral analytics that detect abnormal sequences of otherwise normal actions, like a user reading directory data, then triggering a role eligibility request.
Prediction:
The evolution of AI will catalyze identity-based attacks and defenses simultaneously. Offensively, AI will be used to automate the discovery of complex, multi-hop attack paths in real-time and generate highly persuasive, personalized phishing lures to obtain initial identity footholds. Defensively, AI-powered Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) platforms will become non-negotiable, capable of modeling normal identity behavior at scale and instantly flagging deviations that indicate permission abuse chains. The future battleground of cloud security will be a silent, algorithmic war over identity graphs, where the side with the superior modeling and response automation will prevail.
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Reported By: Obrien David – Hackers Feeds
Extra Hub: Undercode MoN
Basic Verification: Pass ✅
