Situation: I have an Azure account which has management permissions for various subscriptions in various directories (tenants). I have a GUI tool to do various management tasks whose details are irrelevant, and I'm updating this tool to the latest and supposedly greatest Microsoft auth library. What I want to do initially is to display a list of the subscriptions available, so that I can choose the one I want to administer.

The code below uses console output because I'm working with a minimal framework to test ideas.

Approach 1: "Works" but has appalling UX

using Azure.Core.Pipeline;
using Azure.Identity;
using Azure.ResourceManager;

...

var DeveloperSignOnClientId = "04b07795-8ddb-461a-bbee-02f9e1bf7b46"; // From internal class Azure.Identity.Constants
var loginAuthOpt = new InteractiveBrowserCredentialOptions { TokenCachePersistenceOptions = new TokenCachePersistenceOptions { Name="listsubs" } };
var credential = new InteractiveBrowserCredential(null, DeveloperSignOnClientId, loginAuthOpt);

var options = new ArmClientOptions();
var pipeline = HttpPipelineBuilder.Build(options, new BearerTokenAuthenticationPolicy(credential, options.Scope));
var message = pipeline.CreateMessage();
message.Request.Uri.Reset(new Uri("https://management.azure.com/tenants?api-version=2019-11-01"));
message.Request.Headers.Add("Accept", "application/json");
pipeline.Send(message, default);

var tenantList = message.Response.Content.ToObjectFromJson<MyTenantList>();
foreach (var tenant in tenantList.value)
{
    var newTenantCredential = new InteractiveBrowserCredential(tenant.tenantId, DeveloperSignOnClientId, loginAuthOpt);
    var tenantPipeline = HttpPipelineBuilder.Build(options, new BearerTokenAuthenticationPolicy(newTenantCredential, options.Scope));
    message = tenantPipeline.CreateMessage();
    message.Request.Uri.Reset(new Uri("https://management.azure.com/subscriptions?api-version=2019-11-01"));
    message.Request.Headers.Add("Accept", "application/json");
    tenantPipeline.Send(message, default);
    Console.Write("\t");
    Console.WriteLine(message.Response.Content);
}

This successfully lists the subscriptions, but it pops up an initial authentication dialog to get the list of tenants and then a new authentication dialog per tenant. This would be cumbersome if I only had access to one tenant, but with half a dozen it's unacceptable.

Approach 2: seems like it should work, but doesn't

Based on how the older library worked, I expected that having authenticated I could get access tokens for the other tenants, so I tried an adapter:

public class TenantCredentialAdapter : TokenCredential
{
    private readonly TokenCredential CredentialSource;
    private readonly string TenantId;

    public TenantCredentialAdapter(TokenCredential credentialSource, string tenantId)
    {
        CredentialSource = credentialSource ?? throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(credentialSource));
        TenantId = string.IsNullOrEmpty(tenantId) ? throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(tenantId)) : tenantId;
    }

    public override AccessToken GetToken(TokenRequestContext requestContext, CancellationToken cancellationToken) =>
        CredentialSource.GetToken(new TokenRequestContext(requestContext.Scopes, requestContext.ParentRequestId, requestContext.Claims, TenantId), cancellationToken);

    public override ValueTask<AccessToken> GetTokenAsync(TokenRequestContext requestContext, CancellationToken cancellationToken) =>
        CredentialSource.GetTokenAsync(new TokenRequestContext(requestContext.Scopes, requestContext.ParentRequestId, requestContext.Claims, TenantId), cancellationToken);
}

I then replace newTenantCredential in approach 1 with new TenantCredentialAdapter(credential, tenant.tenantId). Azure doesn't give me any 403s or other errors, but all of the lists of subscriptions are now

{"value":[],"count":{"type":"Total","value":0}}

where before some of them were non-empty.

Approach 3: not yet implemented

The best idea I have at the moment is to do approach 1 but to cache the list of tenants and subscriptions to disk. No authentication would be done until the user has selected the subscription. This would require the addition of a "Refresh" button alongside the list of subscriptions which would do the whole n+1 authentication process.

Surely there's a better way?

posted about 3 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Peter Taylor‭

1302 reputation 7 34 141 7