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Concepts

The following describes a few core concepts in Azure AD referred to throughout this documentation.

Tenants

A tenant represents an organization in Azure AD. Each tenant will have their own set of applications, users and groups. In order to log in to a tenant, you must use an account specific to that tenant.

NAV has two tenants in Azure AD:

  • nav.no - available in all clusters, default tenant for production clusters
  • trygdeetaten.no - only available in dev-*-clusters, default tenant for development clusters

Warning

If your use case requires you to use nav.no in the dev-*-clusters, then you must explicitly configure this. Note that you cannot interact with clients or applications across different tenants.

The same application in different clusters will result in unique Azure AD clients, with each having their own client IDs and access policies. For instance, the following applications in the same nav.no tenant will result in separate, unique clients in Azure AD:

  • app-a in dev-gcp
  • app-a in prod-gcp

Naming format

An Azure AD client has an associated name within a tenant. NAIS uses this name for lookups and identification.

All clients provisioned through NAIS will be registered in Azure AD using the following naming scheme:

<cluster>:<namespace>:<app-name>
Example 
dev-gcp:aura:nais-testapp

Scopes

A scope is a parameter that is set during authorization flows of an end-user to Azure AD (where scope=openid <scope1> <scope2> and so on), or when requesting a token using the on-behalf-of (OBO) or client credentials flows. The term scope in this case is synonymous with permission.

Generally, we will use it to indicate the intended audience (the expected target resource) for the requested token, which is found in the aud claim in the JWT returned from Azure AD.

Default scope

The /.default scope is a static scope which indicates to Azure AD that your application is requesting all available permissions that have been granted to your application.

When performing either the on-behalf-of (OBO) or client credentials flows, the ./default scope must be used.

When consuming a downstream API that expects an Azure AD token, you must therefore set the correct scope to fetch a token that your API provider accepts.

The scope has the following format:

api://<cluster>.<namespace>.<app-name>/.default

For example:

api://dev-gcp.aura.nais-testapp/.default

Client ID

An Azure AD client has its own ID that uniquely identifies the client within a tenant, and is used in authentication requests to Azure AD.

Your application's Azure AD client ID is available at multiple locations:

  1. The environment variable AZURE_APP_CLIENT_ID, available inside your application at runtime
  2. In the Kubernetes resource - kubectl get azureapp <app-name>

Groups

A group in Azure AD is a collection of users. The group itself can be assigned permissions that allows access to applications, data, and resources. Members of the group will inherit all permissions that the group has been granted.

Group Management

There are primarily two ways to create and manage groups in Azure AD:

  1. Self-service through Microsoft at https://mygroups.microsoft.com, or
  2. "Identrutina" - consult the #identrutina Slack channel for assistance. You will also have to ask for the group to be synchronized to Azure AD.

Group Identifier

Each group is identified by its object ID, which is immutable and unique.

The group name is not unique and should never be used by itself for authorization purposes.

In other words, two groups within the same tenant with the exact same name will have different object IDs. Groups with the same name will also have different IDs across different tenants.

Finding the group identifier

You can find the object ID for a given group in two ways.

First, make sure that you're logged in with an account with a domain that matches one of the tenants. Then, do one of the following:

  1. If you either own or are a direct member of the group, visit https://mygroups.microsoft.com and find the desired group.

    Browsing the detailed view for the group should reveal the ID in the address bar within the query parameter objectId.

  2. Otherwise, visit the Groups view in the Azure AD Portal: https://portal.azure.com/#view/Microsoft_AAD_IAM/GroupsManagementMenuBlade/~/AllGroups

    You should be able to search and filter the list of groups.

    Consult the #tech-azure Slack channel for assistance if you do not have access to this page. Check the pinned/bookmarked posts first.

Last update: 2023-05-24
Created: 2021-07-08