The Azure Identity library provides Azure Active Directory token authentication support across the Azure SDK. It provides a set of TokenCredential implementations which can be used to construct Azure SDK clients which support AAD token authentication.
This library is in preview and currently supports:
- Service principal authentication
- Managed identity authentication
- Device code authentication
- Interactive browser authentication, based on OAuth2 authentication code
Source code | API reference documentation (Coming Soon) | Azure Active Directory documentation
Maven dependency for Azure Secret Client library. Add it to your project's pom file.
<dependency>
<groupId>com.azure</groupId>
<artifactId>azure-identity</artifactId>
<version>1.0.0-preview.2</version>
</dependency>- An Azure subscription.
- An existing Azure Active Directory service principal. If you need to create a service principal, you can use the Azure Portal or Azure CLI.
Use the Azure CLI snippet below to create/get client secret credentials.
- Create a service principal and configure its access to Azure resources:
Output:
az ad sp create-for-rbac -n <your-application-name> --skip-assignment
{ "appId": "generated-app-ID", "displayName": "dummy-app-name", "name": "http://dummy-app-name", "password": "random-password", "tenant": "tenant-ID" } - Use the returned credentials above to set AZURE_CLIENT_ID(appId), AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET(password) and AZURE_TENANT_ID(tenant) environment variables.
In order to authenticate a user through device code flow, you need to go to Azure Active Directory on Azure Portal and find you app registration and enable the following 2 configurations:
This will let the application authenticate, but the application still doesn't have permission to log you into Active Directory, or access resources on your behalf. Open API Permissions, and enable Microsoft Graph, and the resources you want to access, e.g., Azure Service Management, Key Vault, etc:
Note that you also need to be the admin of your tenant to grant consent to your application when you login for the first time. Also note after 2018 your Active Directory may require your application to be multi-tenant. Select "Accounts in any organizational directory" under Authentication panel (where you enabled Device Code) to make your application a multi-tenant app.
You need to register an application in Azure Active Directory with permissions to login on behalf of a user to use InteractiveBrowserCredential. Follow all the steps above for device code flow to register your application to support logging you into Active Directory and access certain resources. Note the same limitations apply that an admin of your tenant must grant consent to your application before any user account can login.
You may notice in InteractiveBrowserCredentialBuilder, a port number is required, and you need to add the redirect URI on this page too:
In this case, the port number is 8765.
A credential is a class which contains or can obtain the data needed for a service client to authenticate requests. Service clients across Azure SDK accept credentials when they are constructed and use those credentials to authenticate requests to the service.Azure Identity offers a variety of credential classes in the azure-identity package capable of acquiring an AAD token. All of these credential classes are implementations of the TokenCredential abstract class in Azure Core, and can be used by any service client which can be constructed with a TokenCredential.
The credential types in Azure Identity differ in the types of AAD identities they can authenticate and how they are configured:
| credential class | identity | configuration |
|---|---|---|
DefaultAzureCredential |
service principal or managed identity | none for managed identity; environment variables for service principal |
ManagedIdentityCredential |
managed identity | ManagedIdentityCredentialBuilder |
EnvironmentCredential |
service principal | environment variables |
ClientSecretCredential |
service principal | ClientSecretCredentialBuilder |
ClientCertificateCredential |
service principal | ClientCertificateCredentialBuilder |
DeviceCodeCredential |
user account | DeviceCodeCredentialBuilder |
InteractiveBrowserCredential |
user account | InteractiveBrowserCredentialBuilder |
UsernamePasswordCredential |
user account | UsernamePasswordCredentialBuilder |
Credentials can be chained together to be tried in turn until one succeeds using the ChainedTokenCredential; see chaining credentials for details.
DefaultAzureCredential is appropriate for most scenarios where the application is intended to run in the Azure Cloud. This is because the DefaultAzureCredential determines the appropriate credential type based of the environment it is executing in. It supports authenticating both as a service principal or managed identity, and can be configured so that it will work both in a local development environment or when deployed to the cloud.
The DefaultAzureCredential will first attempt to authenticate using credentials provided in the environment. In a development environment you can authenticate as a service principal with the DefaultAzureCredential by providing configuration in environment variables as described in the next section.
If the environment configuration is not present or incomplete, the DefaultAzureCredential will then determine if a managed identity is available in the current environment. Authenticating as a managed identity requires no configuration, but does
require platform support. See the
managed identity documentation for more details on this.
DefaultAzureCredential and EnvironmentCredential are configured for service
principal authentication with these environment variables:
| variable name | value |
|---|---|
AZURE_CLIENT_ID |
service principal's app id |
AZURE_TENANT_ID |
id of the principal's Azure Active Directory tenant |
AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET |
one of the service principal's client secrets |
This example demonstrates authenticating the SecretClient from the azure-keyvault-secrets client library using the DefaultAzureCredential.
// The default credential first checks environment variables for configuration as described above.
// If environment configuration is incomplete, it will try managed identity.
import com.azure.identity.credential.DefaultAzureCredential;
import com.azure.identity.credential.DefaultAzureCredentialBuilder;
import com.azure.security.keyvault.secrets.SecretClient;
DefaultAzureCredential defaultCredential = new DefaultAzureCredentialBuilder().build();
// Azure SDK client builders accept the credential as a parameter
SecretClient client = SecretClient.builder()
.endpoint("https://{YOUR_VAULT_NAME}.vault.azure.net")
.credential(credential)
.build();When executing this in a development machine you need to first configure the environment setting the variables AZURE_CLIENT_ID, AZURE_TENANT_ID and AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET to the appropriate values for your service principal.
This example demonstrates authenticating the KeyClient from the azure-keyvault-keys client library using the ClientSecretCredential.
// using a client secret
import com.azure.identity.credential.ClientSecretCredential;
import com.azure.identity.credential.ClientSecretCredentialBuilder;
import com.azure.security.keyvault.keys.KeyClient;
// authenticate with client secret,
ClientSecretCredential clientSecretCredential = new ClientSecretCredentialBuilder()
.clientId("<YOUR_CLIENT_ID>")
.clientSecret("<YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET>")
.tenantId("<YOUR_TENANT_ID>")
.build();
KeyClient client = KeyClient.builder()
.endpoint("https://{YOUR_VAULT_NAME}.vault.azure.net")
.credential(clientSecretCredential)
.build();This example demonstrates authenticating the KeyClient from the azure-keyvault-keys client library using the DeviceCodeCredential on an IoT device.
// using a client secret
import com.azure.identity.credential.DeviceCodeCredential;
import com.azure.identity.credential.DeviceCodeCredentialBuilder;
import com.azure.security.keyvault.keys.KeyClient;
// authenticate with client secret,
DeviceCodeCredential deviceCodeCredential = new DeviceCodeCredentialBuilder()
.deviceCodeChallengeConsumer(challenge -> {
// lets user know of the challenge, e.g., display the message on an IoT device
displayMessage(challenge.message());
})
.build();
KeyClient client = KeyClient.builder()
.endpoint("https://{YOUR_VAULT_NAME}.vault.azure.net")
.credential(deviceCodeCredential)
.build();When the challenge is displayed on the IoT device, it will contain the message "Please open the browser to {url} and type in code XXXXXXXX". When the user follows the directions and logs in on another computer, the credential will return the token to the KeyClient.
The ChainedTokenCredential class provides the ability to link together multiple credential instances to be tried sequentially when authenticating. The following example demonstrates creating a credential which will attempt to authenticate using managed identity, and fall back to certificate authentication if a managed identity is unavailable in the current environment. This example authenticates an EventHubClient from the azure-eventhubs client library using the ChainedTokenCredential.
ManagedIdentityCredential managedIdentityCredential = new ManagedIdentityCredentialBuilder()
.clientId("<YOUR_CLIENT_ID>")
.build();
ClientSecretcredential secondServicePrincipal = new ClientSecretCredentialBuilder()
.clientId("<YOUR_CLIENT_ID>")
.clientSecret("<YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET>")
.tenantId("<YOUR_TENANT_ID>")
.build();
// when an access token is requested, the chain will try each
// credential in order, stopping when one provides a token
ChainedTokenCredential credentialChain = new ChainedTokenCredentialBuilder()
.addLast(managedIdentityCredential)
.addLast(secondServicePrincipal)
.build();
// the chain can be used anywhere a credential is required
// The fully qualified host name for the Event Hubs namespace. This is likely to be similar to:
// {your-namespace}.servicebus.windows.net
String host = "<< EVENT HUBS HOST >>"
String eventHubPath = "<< NAME OF THE EVENT HUB >>";
EventHubClient client = new EventHubClientBuilder()
.credential(host, eventHubPath, credentialChain)
.buildAsyncClient();Credentials raise exceptions when they fail to authenticate. ClientAuthenticationException has a message attribute which
describes why authentication failed. When raised by ChainedTokenCredential, the message collects error messages from each credential in the chain.
Currently the following client libraries support authenticating with TokenCredential and the Azure Identity library. You can learn more about their use, and find additional documentation on use of these client libraries along samples with can be found in the links below.
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