If there is single post I’ve been delaying for a good while, then it’s gotta be this one. This blog details a common oversight in MFA enforcement regarding federation implementations where MFA is invoked and required in the 3rd party IDP only. This oversight become effective when several by- design features, and implementation decisions align in ”wrong” way
Well how actionable it is? I’ve been exploiting this oversight in Red Teaming assignments, so in my experience its been really popular in deployments where the MFA is not checked on cloud side.
The reason of the delay is advisory 1. I’ve been discussing the ramifications with a major vendor providing Federation solutions about mitigating the configuration risks with WS-Trust when used in conjunction with Azure AD
Advisory 1 is related to how WS-Trust protocol is used in conjunction with Azure AD where clear text username and password are forwarded in TLS protected transport using the active endpoints to provide access for so-called non modern clients (Rich /Active endpoint consuming clients)
The scope is protocol implementation related, not vendor related! List of third 3rd party vendors providing WS-Federation/Trust support for Azure AD is long (some 15 last time I checked), so I am not highlighting any vendors here. I am assuming this affects most of the vendors implementing the WS-Trust with Azure AD without knowledge of the Azure AD OAuth2 Grant Types. Obviously I can’t say anything on any of the vendors behalf.
Microsoft’s AD FS can be also considered applicable in this context. Especially advisory 2
Advisory 2 is already documented, but not well communicated, and the existing documentation is AD FS specific. How is advisory 2 related to advisory 1? The existence of advisory 2 makes advisory 1 possible in the described scope.
Scope
Scope of this advisory are primarily customers who use WS /* -Protocols for federated domains in Azure AD, and utilize access policies to enforce and bypass MFA only in the IDP side. Not checking the status of MFA in Conditional Access, or using the -SupportsMFA option for the Microsoft MFA enabled users.
I won’t be providing any PoC’s, since all of the below advisories rely on by-design implementation, and can be replicated in few minutes, given you have understanding of both sides of the equation (Azure AD and WS-protocols)
Advisory 1 – Pivoting from legacy to modern auth
Background
UserName endpoints on WS-Trust are usually associated with legacy clients, thus they are often excluded from MFA. These endpoints are usually associated with legacy clients requesting access to Azure AD relying Party (Office 365 services often) – This is only true by association, as WS-Specification doesn’t define any difference between the so-called modern and legacy clients, the concept of difference only exists within Azure AD /Office 365 context, which the federation service is not aware of.
Accessing ”modern” API’s unprotected by the IDP
SAML assertion can extracted from the IDP, if the IDP is thinking it’s ActiveSync client. Once the token is received in response, it is then converted to OAuth2 Access Token with “saml1_1-bearer” OAuth2 Grant. This can be done by using many of the existing public clients.
Effectively the SAML token destined to legacy endpoint in Azure AD is converted to “Modern Auth” OAuth2 Access Token, and not being just used for legacy protocols anymore.
Root of this problem is related to the fact, that for SAML response from WS-Trust endpoint there is no ”validFor” context, which would dictate, that this request is valid for only let’s say https://graph.microsoft.com – not entire Azure AD Federation (Conditional Access solves this issue, as it binds access in cloud to different API’s)
But wait, I have disabled legacy protocols in Office 365?
Disabling legacy protocols doesn’t help in this case, as the attacker is only consuming “modern API’s” (Microsoft OAuth2 parlance).
Attack in practice – On-prem MFA bypass
Example: The deployment only allows native ActiveSync to access WS-Trust’s Username bindings without MFA
What attacker does: Attacker uses ‘X-MS-Application’ header to spoof client to fetch SAML token using WS-Trust’s ’UserNameWSTrustBinding’.
The attacker then exchanges the SAML token in Azure AD to access the OAuth2 SPN (Audience). The exchange of the token is possible due to explicit support of “saml1_1-bearer” oAuth2 Grant Type, which cant be disabled on any of the ServicePrincipals in AzureAD
Documentation regarding the flow type
Advisory 2 – Client Header Based Access Policies (Applies to WS-Federate as well)
This advisory is well documented, and is here only as reminder because it allows the first advisory to exist.
Don’t use user spoof-able headers as an basis for access policies at IDP’s controlling access to Azure AD.
Access Policies
Some vendors might implement additional checks here, but the protocol itself doesn’t dictate those to be done. This is basically where different products provide access policies to be enforced claims pipeline, to produce authorization result.
Business policy claims?
Some of the claims presented in the following category should be only implemented to support business policies, not security policies, as advised in the Microsoft’s article
Client Spoof-able headers (Examples from AD FS)
Multiple claims exist which clients can modify, or set. Below are the most common ones. Read the article if you’re curious to see the list of claims in AD FS
- X-MS-FORWARDED-CLIENT-IP
- X-MS-CLIENT-APPLICATION
The documentation exist for AD FS 2012 R2, but it’s applicable to similar implementations including subsequent AD FS versions at least as up to 2016. Be sure to read the article as it lists very clear reasons,
Mitigations
- a. Use Conditional Access to check whether MFA was actually performed at the 3rd party IDP for the requested API, or if there is valid reason to explicitly bypass the API
- b. If you don’t have Conditional Access, don’t allow UserNameMixed to be used with spoof-able headers. Basically you wouldn’t allow native clients anymore for ActiveSync, as there isn’t safe header available for this decision to be made in the authorization pipeline
About spoof-able headers
- X-MS-ADFS-Proxy-Client-IP seems to be based on the actual client IP with WAP, and should be more reliable, than the client writable header X-MS-FORWARDED-CLIENT-IP, which is advised to be used in many scenarios.
- X-MS-FORWARDED-CLIENT-IP is often advised to be used in many guides because MS Exchange Online Connections pass multiple IP’s in headers, and thus the actual client IP hitting ADFS includes both Exchange and the Client IP’s in the header
- as the documentation says, is best effort style header, and shouldn’t be used outside of business logic use scenarios
- X-MS-CLIENT-APPLICATION here isn’t reliable way to inspect ActiveSync header for a legitimate client at the IDP’s side, The only way to allow it without MFA is Conditional Access
Also its worth noting that Basic Auth for Exchange, which is key reason why MFA bypasses on the WS-Trust endpoint are still used is going to be deprecated very soon
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The idea of the post seems to be good, but feels uncompleted. What are the real world scenarios and recommendations for mitigations? Are those to be mentioned in part 2?
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Hi, the real world scenarios are ones where ADFS is allowed to emit tokens from the UserNameMixed endpoint on spoofable claims. Also if a secure claim (MultipleAuthn, or InsideCorpNet) is added to a similar request, the attack will also bypass MFA controls set in the Azure AD. In most of the cases best mitigation is having conditional access, and if you dont have one, then not allowing spoofable claims on UserNameMixed, or disabling the endpoint altogether.
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