This is where service principals and OAuth’s client credentials grant type comes into play. MSI handles certificate rotations. Service principles are non-interactive Azure accounts. If you plan on deploying IaC to the Azure Cloud using IaC Tools such as ARM, Ansible, or Terraform, you may want to consider using Certificate Based Authentication for your Service Principals as an alternative to standard Password Authentication. This service principal would be used by our .NET Core web application to access key vault. Service Principals can be created to use a certificate versus a password. We are going to perform below steps: Register web application which will create service principal for the application; Add certificate which can be used for app authentication; Add access policy in key vault, which will allow access to newly created service principal; Modify . If you plan on deploying IaC to the Azure Cloud using IaC Tools such as ARM, Ansible, or Terraform, you may want to consider using Certificate Based Authentication for your Service Principals as an alternative to standard Password Authentication. This can be done using the Azure Portal. I have created a service principal, and put had the key vault create the certificate. You still need to find a way to keep the certificate secure, though. (e.g. Alternatively, you can use the code sample in the blog, Azure AD Service Principal authentication to SQL DB - Code Sample. Application ID of the Service Principal (SP) clientId = ""; // Application ID of the SP. # ##### Step 1: Create certificate for Azure AD Service Principal # ##### # Define certificate start and end dates $currentDate = Get-Date $endDate = $currentDate.AddYears (1) $notAfter = $endDate.AddYears (1) # Generate new self-signed certificate from "Run as Administrator" PowerShell session $certName = Read-Host-Prompt " Enter FQDN Subject Name for certificate " Modify the script to execute a DDL statement CREATE USER [myapp] FROM EXTERNAL PROVIDER. The same script can be used to create a regular Azure AD user a group in SQL Database. a. To authenticate with a Service Principal, you will need to create an Application object within Azure Active Directory, which you will use as a means of authentication, either using a Client Secret or a Client Certificate (which is documented in this guide). Using Service Principal we can control which resources can be accessed. Authenticating to Azure Functions using a service principal (part 1) There are situations where we need to secure a function app and also need to allow other services to call it. Would be a great addition to Terraform to be able to authenticate a Service Principal using the … The certificate can even be generated by Key Vault and renewed periodically based on the policy it was created with. string clientId = "xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx";) b. While you can authenticate a Service Principal using a password (client secret), it might be better to use an X509 certificate as an alternative. Applications use Azure services should always have restricted permissions. I am trying to authenticate a local hadoop cluster to Azure using a service principal and certificate authentication. We never see the certificate. # Create the Service Principal and connect it to the Application $sp = New-AzureADServicePrincipal-AppId $application. It is often useful to create Azure Active Directory Service Principal objects for authenticating applications and automating tasks in Azure. MSI is simpler and safer. Remember this: the safest secret is the secret you never see. Add-AzureADDirectoryRoleMember-ObjectId 4867b045-b3a6-4b0b-8df6-f8eba8c1c397-RefObjectId $sp. AppId # Give the Service Principal Reader access to the current tenant (Get-AzureADDirectoryRole) - the GUID will be different in your tenant. When it comes to using Service Principal in Azure, I always advise using Managed System Identity (MSI). Copy the “Display Name” of your application which will be used in step 3) (e.g.”debugapp” as a “Display Name” for the app above) c. Azure AD tenant ID. Azure offers Service principals allow applications to login with restricted permission Instead of having full privilege in a non-interactive way. 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