Authenticate to Azure

• 1: Authenticating to Azure
• 2: How to: Use workload identity federation
• 3: How to: Generate a new Microsoft Entra ID application and Service Principal
• 4: How to: Use managed identities

1 - Authenticating to Azure

About authentication with Microsoft Entra ID

Microsoft Entra ID is Azure’s identity and access management (IAM) solution, which is used to authenticate and authorize users and services. It’s built on top of open standards such OAuth 2.0, which allows services (applications) to obtain access tokens to make requests to Azure services, including Azure Storage, Azure Service Bus, Azure Key Vault, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Database for Postgres, Azure SQL, etc.

Options to authenticate

Applications can authenticate with Microsoft Entra ID and obtain an access token to make requests to Azure services through several methods:

• Workload identity federation - The recommended way to configure your Microsoft Entra ID tenant to trust an external identity provider. This includes service accounts from Kubernetes or AKS clusters. Learn more about workload identity federation.
• System and user assigned managed identities - Less granular than workload identity federation, but retains some of the benefits. Learn more about system and user assigned managed identities.
• [Client ID and secret]({{ < ref howto-aad.md >}}) - Not recommended as it requires you to maintian and associate credentials at the application level.
• Pod Identities - Deprecated approach for authenticating applications running on Kubernetes pods at a pod level. This should no longer be used.

If you are just getting started, it is recommended to use workload identity federation.

Managed identities and workload identity federation

With Managed Identities (MI), your application can authenticate with Microsoft Entra ID and obtain an access token to make requests to Azure services. When your application is running on a supported Azure service (such as Azure VMs, Azure Container Apps, Azure Web Apps, etc), an identity for your application can be assigned at the infrastructure level. You can also setup Microsoft Entra ID to federate trust to your Dapr application identity directly by using a Federated Identity Credential. This allows you to configure access to your Microsoft resources even when not running on Microsoft infrastructure. To see how to configure Dapr to use a federated identity, see the section on Authenticating with a Federated Identity Credential. This is done through system or user assigned managed identities, or workload identity federation.

Once using managed identities, your code doesn’t have to deal with credentials, which:

• Removes the challenge of managing credentials safely
• Allows greater separation of concerns between development and operations teams
• Reduces the number of people with access to credentials
• Simplifies operational aspects–especially when multiple environments are used

While some Dapr Azure components offer alternative authentication methods, such as systems based on “shared keys” or “access tokens”, you should always try to authenticate your Dapr components using Microsoft Entra ID whenever possible. This offers many benefits, including:

• Role-Based Access Control
• Auditing
• (Optional) Authentication using certificates

It’s recommended that applications running on Azure Kubernetes Service leverage workload identity federation to automatically provide an identity to individual pods.

Role-Based Access Control

When using Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) with supported services, permissions given to an application can be fine-tuned. For example, you can restrict access to a subset of data or make the access read-only.

Auditing

Using Microsoft Entra ID provides an improved auditing experience for access. Tenant administrators can consult audit logs to track authentication requests.

(Optional) Authentication using certificates

While Microsoft Entra ID allows you to use MI, you still have the option to authenticate using certificates.

Support for other Azure environments

By default, Dapr components are configured to interact with Azure resources in the “public cloud”. If your application is deployed to another cloud, such as Azure China or Azure Government (“sovereign clouds”), you can enable that for supported components by setting the azureEnvironment metadata property to one of the supported values:

• Azure public cloud (default): "AzurePublicCloud"
• Azure China: "AzureChinaCloud"
• Azure Government: "AzureUSGovernmentCloud"

Support for sovereign clouds is experimental.

Credentials metadata fields

To authenticate with Microsoft Entra ID, you will need to add the following credentials as values in the metadata for your Dapr component.

Metadata options

Depending on how you’ve passed credentials to your Dapr services, you have multiple metadata options.

• Using client credentials
• Using a certificate
• Using Managed Identities (MI)
• Using Workload Identity on AKS
• Using Azure CLI credentials (development-only)

Authenticating using client credentials

When running on Kubernetes, you can also use references to Kubernetes secrets for any or all of the values above.

Authenticating using a certificate

When running on Kubernetes, you can also use references to Kubernetes secrets for any or all of the values above.

Authenticating with Managed Identities (MI)

Using Managed Identities, the azureClientId field is generally recommended. The field is optional when using a system-assigned identity, but may be required when using user-assigned identities.

Authenticating with Workload Identity on AKS

When running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), you can authenticate components using Workload Identity. Refer to the Azure AKS documentation on enabling Workload Identity for your Kubernetes resources.

Authenticating with a Federated Identity Credential

You can use a Federated Identity Credential in Microsoft Entra ID to federate trust directly to your Dapr installation regardless of where it is running. This allows you to easily configure access rules against your Dapr application’s SPIFFE ID consistently across different clouds.

In order to federate trust, you must be running Dapr Sentry with JWT issuing and OIDC discovery enabled. These can be configured using the following Dapr Sentry helm values:

jwt:
  # Enable JWT token issuance by Sentry
  enabled: true
  # Issuer value for JWT tokens
  issuer: "<your-issuer-domain>"

oidc:
  enabled: true
  server:
    # Port for the OIDC HTTP server
    port: 9080
  tls:
    # Enable TLS for the OIDC HTTP server
    enabled: true
    # TLS certificate file for the OIDC HTTP server
    certFile: "<path-to-tls-cert.pem>"
    # TLS certificate file for the OIDC HTTP server
    keyFile: "<path-to-tls-key.pem>"

Providing these settings exposes the following endpoints on your Dapr Sentry installation on the provided OIDC HTTP port:

/.well-known/openid-configuration
/jwks.json

You also need to provide the Dapr runtime configuration to request a JWT token with the Azure audience api://AzureADTokenExchange. When running in standalone mode, this can be provided using the flag --sentry-request-jwt-audiences=api://AzureADTokenExchange. When running in Kubernetes, this can be provided by decorating the application Kubernetes manifest with the annotations "dapr.io/sentry-request-jwt-audiences": "api://AzureADTokenExchange". This ensures Sentry service issues a JWT token with the correct audience, which is required for Microsoft Entra ID to validate the token.

In order for Microsoft Entra ID to be able to access the OIDC endpoints, you must expose them on a public address. You must ensure that the domain that you are serving these endpoints via is the same as the issuer you provided when configuration Dapr Sentry.

You can now create your federated credential in Microsoft Entra ID.

cat > creds.json <<EOF
{ 
  "name": "DaprAppIDSpiffe",
  "issuer": "https://<your-issuer-domain>",
  "subject": spiffe://public/ns/<dapr-app-id-namespace>/<dapr-app-id>",
  "audiences": ["api://AzureADTokenExchange"],
  "description": "Credential for Dapr App ID"
}
EOF

export APP_ID=$(az ad app create --display-name my-dapr-app --enable-access-token-issuance --enable-id-token-issuance | jq .id)
az ad sp create --id $APP_ID
az ad app federated-credential create --id $APP_ID --parameters ./creds.json

Now that you have a federated credential for your Microsoft Entra ID Application Registration, you can assign the desired roles to it’s service principal.

An example of assigning “Storage Blob Data Owner” role is below.

az role assignment create --assignee-object-id $APP_ID --assignee-principal-type ServicePrincipal --role "Storage Blob Data Owner" --scope "/subscriptions/$SUBSCRIPTION/resourceGroups/$GROUP/providers/Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/$ACCOUNT_NAME"

To configure a Dapr Component to access an Azure resource using the federated credentail, you first need to fetch your clientId and tenantId:

CLIENT_ID=$(az ad app show --id $APP_ID --query appId --output tsv)
TENANT_ID=$(az account show --query tenantId --output tsv)

Then you can create your Azure Dapr Component and simply provide these value:

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: azureblob
spec:
  type: state.azure.blobstorage
  version: v2
  initTimeout: 10s # Increase the init timeout to allow enough time for Azure to perform the token exchange
  metadata:
  - name: clientId
    value: $CLIENT_ID
  - name: tenantId
    value:  $TENANT_ID
  - name: accountName
    value: $ACCOUNT_NAME
  - name: containerName
    value: $CONTAINER_NAME

The Dapr runtime uses these details to authenticate with Microsoft Entra ID, using the Dapr Sentry issued JWT token to exchange for an access token to access the Azure resource.

Authenticating using Azure CLI credentials (development-only)

Important: This authentication method is recommended for development only.

This authentication method can be useful while developing on a local machine. You will need:

• The Azure CLI installed
• Have successfully authenticated using the az login command

When Dapr is running on a host where there are credentials available for the Azure CLI, components can use those to authenticate automatically if no other authentication method is configuration.

Using this authentication method does not require setting any metadata option.

Example usage in a Dapr component

In this example, you will set up an Azure Key Vault secret store component that uses Microsoft Entra ID to authenticate.

• Self-Hosted
• Kubernetes

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: azurekeyvault
  namespace: default
spec:
  type: secretstores.azure.keyvault
  version: v1
  metadata:
  - name: vaultName
    value: "[your_keyvault_name]"
  - name: azureTenantId
    value: "[your_tenant_id]"
  - name: azureClientId
    value: "[your_client_id]"
  - name: azureClientSecret
    value : "[your_client_secret]"

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: azurekeyvault
  namespace: default
spec:
  type: secretstores.azure.keyvault
  version: v1
  metadata:
  - name: vaultName
    value: "[your_keyvault_name]"
  - name: azureTenantId
    value: "[your_tenant_id]"
  - name: azureClientId
    value: "[your_client_id]"
  - name: azureCertificateFile
    value : "[pfx_certificate_file_fully_qualified_local_path]"

Next steps

References

• Microsoft Entra ID app credential: Azure CLI reference
• Azure Managed Service Identity (MSI) overview
• Secrets building block
• How-To: Retrieve a secret
• How-To: Reference secrets in Dapr components
• Secrets API reference

2 - How to: Use workload identity federation

This guide will help you configure your Kubernetes cluster to run Dapr with Azure workload identity federation.

What is it?

Workload identity federation is a way for your applications to authenticate to Azure without having to store or manage credentials as part of your releases.

By using workload identity federation, any Dapr components running on Kubernetes and AKS that target Azure can authenticate transparently with no extra configuration.

Guide

We’ll show how to configure an Azure Key Vault resource against your AKS cluster. You can adapt this guide for different Dapr Azure components by substituting component definitions as necessary.

For this How To, we’ll use this Dapr AKS secrets sample app.

Prerequisites

• AKS cluster with workload identity enabled
• Microsoft Entra ID tenant

1 - Enable workload identity federation

Follow the Azure documentation for enabling workload identity federation on your AKS cluster.

The HowTo walks through configuring your Azure Entra ID tenant to trust an identity that originates from your AKS cluster issuer. It also guides you in setting up a Kubernetes service account which is associated with an Azure managed identity you create.

Once completed, return here to continue with step 2.

2 - Add a secret to Azure Key Vault

In the Azure Key Vault you created and add a secret called dapr with the value of Hello Dapr!.

3 - Configure the Azure Key Vault dapr component

By this point, you should have a Kubernetes service account with a name similar to workload-identity-sa0a1b2c.

Apply the following to your Kubernetes cluster, remembering to update your-key-vault with the name of your key vault:

---
apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: demo-secret-store # Be sure not to change this, as our app will be looking for it.
spec:
  type: secretstores.azure.keyvault
  version: v1
  metadata:
  - name: vaultName
    value: your-key-vault # Replace

You’ll notice that we have not provided any details specific to authentication in the component definition. This is intentional, as Dapr is able to leverage the Kubernetes service account to transparently authenticate to Azure.

4 - Deploy the test application

Go to the workload identity federation sample application and prepare a build of the image.

Make sure the image is pushed up to a registry that your AKS cluster has visibility and permission to pull from.

Next, create a deployment for our sample AKS secrets app container along with a Dapr sidecar.

Remember to update dapr-wif-k8s-service-account with your service account name and dapraksworkloadidentityfederation with an image your cluster can resolve:

---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: aks-dapr-wif-secrets
  labels:
    app: aks-dapr-wif-secrets
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: aks-dapr-wif-secrets
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: aks-dapr-wif-secrets
        azure.workload.identity/use: "true" # Important
      annotations:
        dapr.io/enabled: "true" # Enable Dapr
        dapr.io/app-id: "aks-dapr-wif-secrets"
    spec:
      serviceAccountName: dapr-wif-k8s-service-account # Remember to replace
      containers:
        - name: workload-id-demo
          image: dapraksworkloadidentityfederation # Remember to replace
          imagePullPolicy: Always

Once the application is up and running, it should output the following:

Fetched Secret: Hello dapr!

3 - How to: Generate a new Microsoft Entra ID application and Service Principal

Prerequisites

• An Azure subscription
• Azure CLI
• jq
• OpenSSL (included by default on all Linux and macOS systems, as well as on WSL)
• Make sure you’re using a bash or zsh shell

Log into Azure using the Azure CLI

In a new terminal, run the following command:

az login
az account set -s [your subscription id]

Create an Microsoft Entra ID application

Create the Microsoft Entra ID application with:

# Friendly name for the application / Service Principal
APP_NAME="dapr-application"

# Create the app
APP_ID=$(az ad app create --display-name "${APP_NAME}"  | jq -r .appId)

Select how you’d prefer to pass credentials.

• Client secret
• PFX certificate

az ad app credential reset \
  --id "${APP_ID}" \
  --years 2

{
  "appId": "<your-app-id>",
  "password": "<your-password>",
  "tenant": "<your-azure-tenant>"
}

az ad app credential reset \
  --id "${APP_ID}" \
  --create-cert

{
  "appId": "<your-app-id>",
  "fileWithCertAndPrivateKey": "<file-path>",
  "password": null,
  "tenant": "<your-azure-tenant>"
}

Create a Service Principal

Once you have created an Microsoft Entra ID application, create a Service Principal for that application. With this Service Principal, you can grant it access to Azure resources.

To create the Service Principal, run the following command:

SERVICE_PRINCIPAL_ID=$(az ad sp create \
  --id "${APP_ID}" \
  | jq -r .id)
echo "Service Principal ID: ${SERVICE_PRINCIPAL_ID}"

Expected output:

Service Principal ID: 1d0ccf05-5427-4b5e-8eb4-005ac5f9f163

The returned value above is the Service Principal ID, which is different from the Microsoft Entra ID application ID (client ID). The Service Principal ID is defined within an Azure tenant and used to grant access to Azure resources to an application
You’ll use the Service Principal ID to grant permissions to an application to access Azure resources.

Meanwhile, the client ID is used by your application to authenticate. You’ll use the client ID in Dapr manifests to configure authentication with Azure services.

Keep in mind that the Service Principal that was just created does not have access to any Azure resource by default. Access will need to be granted to each resource as needed, as documented in the docs for the components.

Next steps

4 - How to: Use managed identities

Using managed identities, authentication happens automatically by virtue of your application running on top of an Azure service that has either a system-managed or a user-assigned identity.

To get started, you need to enable a managed identity as a service option/functionality in various Azure services, independent of Dapr. Enabling this creates an identity (or application) under the hood for Microsoft Entra ID (previously Azure Active Directory ID) purposes.

Your Dapr services can then leverage that identity to authenticate with Microsoft Entra ID, transparently and without you having to specify any credentials.

In this guide, you learn how to:

• Grant your identity to the Azure service you’re using via official Azure documentation
• Set up either a system-managed or user-assigned identity in your component

That’s about all there is to it.

Grant access to the service

Set the requisite Microsoft Entra ID role assignments or custom permissions to your system-managed or user-assigned identity for a particular Azure resource (as identified by the resource scope).

You can set up a managed identity to a new or existing Azure resource. The instructions depend on the service use. Check the following official documentation for the most appropriate instructions:

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
• Azure Container Apps (ACA)
• Azure App Service (including Azure Web Apps and Azure Functions)
• Azure Virtual Machines (VM)
• Azure Virtual Machines Scale Sets (VMSS)
• Azure Container Instance (ACI)

After assigning a system-managed identity to your Azure resource, you’ll have credentials like the following:

{
    "principalId": "<object-id>",
    "tenantId": "<tenant-id>",
    "type": "SystemAssigned",
    "userAssignedIdentities": null
}

From the returned values, take note of the principalId value, which is the Service Principal ID created for your identity. Use that to grant access permissions for your Azure resources component to access the identity.

Set up identities in your component

By default, Dapr Azure components look up the system-managed identity of the environment they run in and authenticate as that. Generally, for a given component, there are no required properties to use system-managed identity other than the service name, storage account name, and any other properites required by the Azure service (listed in the documentation).

For user-assigned idenitities, in addition to the basic properties required by the service you’re using, you need to specify the azureClientId (user-assigned identity ID) in the component. Make sure the user-assigned identity is attached to the Azure service Dapr is running on, or else you won’t be able to use that identity.

The following examples demonstrate setting up either a system-managed or user-assigned identity in an Azure KeyVault secrets component.

• System-managed
• User-assigned
• Kubernetes

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: azurekeyvault
spec:
  type: secretstores.azure.keyvault
  version: v1
  metadata:
  - name: vaultName
    value: mykeyvault

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: azurekeyvault
spec:
  type: secretstores.azure.keyvault
  version: v1
  metadata:
  - name: vaultName
    value: mykeyvault
  - name: azureClientId
    value: someAzureIdentityClientIDHere

Troubleshooting

If you receive an error or your managed identity doesn’t work as expected, check if the following items are true:

• The system-managed identity or user-assigned identity don’t have the required permissions on the target resource.

• The user-assigned identity isn’t attached to the Azure service (container app or pod) from which you’re loading the component. This can especially happen if:

  • You have an unscoped component (a component loaded by all container apps in an environment, or all deployments in your AKS cluster).
  • You attached the user-assigned identity to only one container app or one deployment in AKS (using Azure Workload Identity).

  In this scenario, since the identity isn’t attached to every other container app or deployment in AKS, the component referencing the user-assigned identity via azureClientId fails.

Best practice: When using user-assigned identities, make sure to scope your components to specific apps!

Next steps