Inside Azure, am doing all authentication to my Azure SQL database over Managed identity.
However, by authenticating PowerBI on Azure SQL database, there are only "Organization Account" and "Basic Authentication". How can i make the authentication from PowerBI on AzureSQL over Azure AD in order to be safe against theft (e.g. Managed Identity...)?
When using an Organization Account Power BI never sees your password. Power BI gets and stores an Access Token and a Refresh Token from AAD.
Furthermore, if you are using a Gateway any credentials are encrypted with the Gateway's public key, and can only be decrypted by the Gateway, which is a server you control.
In the future Power BI may add managed identity auth, but the current options are not insecure, just sometimes inconvenient.
Also you can run a script to update the Access Token for a data source using an access token generated for a Service Prinicpal or Managed Identity, but you have to run the script on a schedule so the Access Token doesn't expire, which I think is like 55min.
And for Azure SQL you can force SSO so the end user's identity is used to access the database, not the identity configured in the data source.
Related
I have created a service account on Google Cloud Platform. I am using a standalone Java program which uses GCP Java Client API to get the Authentication Token ID by taking service account JSON file. By using the Token ID, I can create a compute instance.
I don't want to use Java API or gcloud tool, is there a REST API exists which takes required details and return Token ID?
I went through the GCP documentation and could not find any details for the authentication and authorization through REST using Service Account.
I have created a service account on Google Cloud Platform. I am using
a standalone Java program which uses GCP Java Client API to get the
Authentication Token ID by taking service account JSON file. By using
the Token ID, I can create a compute instance.
Using a service account is the correct and recommended method to authenticate and authorize software applications.
Note. The assumption here is that the software application is running on your systems under your control. If instead you are installing software on a user's desktop or system not under your control, then you would use Google OAuth 2.0 (Google Accounts) to obtain User Credentials to authorize your application.
Another method is to issue short-lived temporary credentials from a service account credential that are time limited. These short-lived credentials are created on your server and then handed to the client.
I don't want to use Java API or gcloud tool, is there a REST API
exists which takes required details and return Token ID?
You have the classic "Chicken or Egg" situation. You need credentials to authenticate and authorize otherwise anyone could create credentials. Google Service Account credentials provides this. To create service account credentials, use the Google Cloud Console or gcloud CLI to download the service account Json file.
I went through the GCP documentation and could not find any details
for the authentication and authorization through REST using Service
Account.
This question is confusing. Do you want to use Service Account credentials to authorize your Google API calls OR do you want to call a Google API to obtain credentials?
In the first case, once you create service account credentials, they are used to authorize your API calls. You add the Access Token to the HTTP header when making API calls.
For the second case, use Google OAuth 2.0 to obtain credentials. Google OAuth 2.0 uses Google Accounts for authentication. This method provides you with an Access Token (just like a service account) and a Refresh Token and Client ID token. You will need to add the Google Accounts user identity to your Google Cloud IAM which provides for authorization (privileges).
I have certain reports that auto refresh at some specific time. I have used my corporate ID and using that ID, I have install Power BI Gateway for refreshing on-premise data. I have then configured my reports using the gateway that I have installed on my Windows Server.
Now, we have setup a new SA account that has its own Corporate email address, power BI pro license and its own username/password. Now I want my reports to use the SA account for setting up Gateway as well as reports will be refreshed using SA Accounts' Gateway setting.
What changes I need to make? The server where both the gateways are installed is a common single server.
Steps that I have taken so far:
Sign in with SA Acccount in the Gateway installer
Enter recovery key in the Gateway installer
Gateway is installed succesfully using SA's account corporate email ID and password
Thanks!
Refresh can be configured via API, using the
POST https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{group_id}/datasets/{dataset_id}/refreshes
REST call.
See this for more info:
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-data-refresh-apis-in-the-power-bi-service/
My goal is to periodically push data to a Power BI dataset using their REST API without user intervention.
It seems like the only way that's currently possible is to configure user credentials into the application and authenticate that way. All examples of the 'App Owns Data' strategy require some sort of user/password credentials.
I wrote an Azure WebJob that uses the credentials of a service account we created to authenticate with Azure AD and it's successfully pushing data to Power BI, but I'd like to do avoid having a service account just for this as it has cost and security implications.
Is there a way to use the Power BI REST API without user intervention and without logging in using Azure AD credentials?
I have a backend that is serving android clients, authenticating them with IdToken sent from the android app.
Now, I need to authenticate a service running on aws that is using my apis. So I figured a service account would do the trick, using the private pem file to create a IdToken and send it along just as the android clients do. But I find no way of obtaining an IdToken with these credentials. Is this possible (preferrably in nodejs).
Or am I on the wrong path here?
I know this is older, but I found this question and it didn't lead me to the answer I ended up with.
I followed the guide in https://cloud.google.com/endpoints/docs/openapi/service-account-authentication#using_a_google_id_token with some mix of https://cloud.google.com/iap/docs/authentication-howto, which mentioned that the key to this was to include a target_audience claim in the generated JWT.
So, essentially I made a JWT that looked like:
{
"exp": 1547576771,
"iat": 1547575906,
"aud":"https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v4/token",
"target_audience": "https://example.com/",
"iss": EMAIL OF SERVICE ACCOUNT
}
and posted that to https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v4/token with params grant_type=urn:ietf:params:oauth:grant-type:jwt-bearer and assertion=<THE JWT>
Without target_audience the endpoint gave me an access token, but with it I got an id_token instead.
Grettings since 2020
I had problems in Java for take ID_TOKEN of a Google Service Account. My project had two years and i were using GoogleCredentials, fromStream method and a JSON credential, but this class didn't gave me ID_TOKEN, only access_token on a not JWT format.
I solved because on this years Google updated here java code for authentication, for take ID_TOKEN you must use this library https://github.com/googleapis/google-auth-library-java
<dependency>
<groupId>com.google.auth</groupId>
<artifactId>google-auth-library-credentials</artifactId>
<version>0.20.0</version>
</dependency>
And then use ServiceAccountCredential
String credPath = "/path/to/svc_account.json";
ServiceAccountCredentials sourceCredentials = ServiceAccountCredentials
.fromStream(new FileInputStream(credPath));
When you create this class, itself will authenticate with google and have a access_token,refreshToken...
For extract ID_TOKEN you must use this function:
String audience = "http://localhost"; //Your server domain
IdToken idToken = credential.idTokenWithAudience(audience, new ArrayList<IdTokenProvider.Option>());
String id_token = idToken.getTokenValue();
And with this you have a JWT token.
I hope this help people like me,that are trying get ID_TOKEN.
You cannot use service accounts generated for Google Cloud APIs to directly authenticate against your own APIs. How will you know which service account private keys are valid and which have been revoked? Google does not expose this information.
Service accounts are rather meant for delegation of credentials. When you access Google Cloud platform service, you will be authenticating with your google account credentials. You will not want to provision the very same credentials everywhere your running code needs to access any of the Google cloud services (i.e. Cloud APIs). Instead you create service accounts whose scope can be reduced to a subset of the scope of your google account credentials. This way a particular piece of code can be limited to only a few set of APIs.
Service Accounts
A service account is a special account that can be used by services
and applications running on your Google Compute Engine instance to
interact with other Google Cloud Platform APIs. Applications can use
service account credentials to authorize themselves to a set of APIs
and perform actions within the permissions granted to the service
account and virtual machine instance.
What are service accounts?
Service accounts authenticate applications running on your virtual
machine instances to other Google Cloud Platform services. For
example, if you write an application that reads and writes files on
Google Cloud Storage, it must first authenticate to the Google Cloud
Storage API. You can create a service account and grant the service
account access to the Cloud Storage API. Then, you would update your
application code to pass the service account credentials to the Cloud
Storage API. In this way, your application authenticates seamlessly to
the API without embedding any secret keys or user credentials in your
instance, image, or application code.
I know where your confusion stems, it is because service account also have the same OAuth model you are used to.
You can use service accounts to get access tokens and refresh them as needed, but the scope of authentication is at the very maximum limited to the surface of the Google Cloud APIs. You will not be able to mix and match your APIs with that.
Alternative is to either build your own authentication model (which is not so clear from your question when you say authenticating them with IdToken sent from the android app) or rely on something like Cloud endpoints which you create and manage APIs along with API keys for authentication.
As you already mentioned in one of your comments, you can follow the Service-to-Service authentication guide which describes how you can use Google Cloud Service accounts to authenticate with your APIs running on Google Cloud Endpoint.
It supports using Google ID JWT tokens. The caller will have to send the JWT to Google Token endpoints to obtain a Google ID token and then use this Google ID token in all of your requests. This approach also has the advantage that you only have to whitelist the Google ID token server in your API configuration.
So since parse is shutting down we are moving our website / mobile app that we've been developing to AWS. We are primarily going to use the following services:
SNS, SES, Dynamo, S3, Lambda.
Now I am still a bit confused on:
what cognito is used for? Do we really need cognito to authenticate users and use DynamoDB, S3, SNS ? Or can we just use specific APIs for each of these services and connect directly (using Js SDK)?
If we do have to use cognito how do we save local data i.e logged in user/ identity? is that what cognito sync is for or do we have to use cookies ?
In summary why do I need cognito when I can directly connect to DynamoDB using the JavaScript SDK?!
Thank you in Advance.
Amazon Cognito can be decomposed in two sub-services: Amazon Cognito Identity and Amazon Cognito Sync.
Think of the former as an authentication service and a credentials provider. The latter is just a service to store user data and keep it synchronized between multiple devices.
What is the purpose of Amazon Cognito Identity?
Suppose that you have a table in DynamoDB. Let's say that you have a web application that will store an item on that table.
You can create an user in IAM, embed the credential information on the web application, and then put the item on the table using the AWS SDK.
There are three things going on here:
The credentials are embedded in the application
The credentials do not expire.
Every user in your application has the same access rights on your table
This may be fine for some applications, but Amazon Cognito Identity offers a solution to these common problems.
Let me explain Cognito Identity's workflow:
An user registers an account on your application, sending all the information (username, password, other data...) to your server.
The server stores the user in some back-end database (it could be a DynamoDB table) and creates a new identity on the Cognito service. This identity is then mapped to this user.
The user can now login into your application. The user logins and sends username and password to your server. (This process could be done automatically after account registration)
The server checks the username and password against your back-end database. If everything is right, then the server makes a request to Amazon Cognito for a temporary access token.
The web application receives the token and makes a request to Amazon Cognito (using that access token) to get the user credentials. These credentials are basically a temporary IAM user that was created specifically for this user. It will have an expiration (usually an hour).
The web application uses these credentials to make operations on AWS, such as putting an item on a DynamoDB table, or calling a Lambda.
When the credentials expire, the user must re-login into the application. This might be done automatically or not, depending on your application's requirements.
On the Amazon Cognito dashboard, you can configure roles and policies for your "identities" (an user in Cognito). This way you can specify which services it can access. It even allows you to create access roles for your users (Admin users may be able to access some services that normal users should not).
I should also note that Amazon Cognito can be easily adapted to support Facebook / Google+ / Amazon accounts, which will be mapped to the same identity, so the user can login via multiple sources.
What is the purpose of Amazon Cognito Sync?
Consider it like a DynamoDB table where you store information for a specific user. These information is shared between multiple devices and is always synchronized. This means that when a web application updates an user value, then the mobile application will automatically reflect this change.
There is a limit on how much user data you can store (I don't remember now), so it's not something you would use to persist information (such as an user password), but rather a mean to share information.