microsoft-identity-broker memory leak on Linux

Question

microsoft-identity-broker memory leak on Linux

Mats Engström 15

When installing the Intune Portal on Linux (in our case Ubuntu 22.04 LTS), microsoft-identity-broker also is installed. I have a users reporting memory leaks with the broker. It will consume all memory until the service is restarted.
At Github https://github.com/recolic/microsoft-intune-archlinux/blob/master/README.md#known-bugs I found information that memory leaks in microsoft-identity-broker is a known bug. We use the latest version 2.0.1 from November 15 2024.

Will there be any updated version in the nearby future?

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4 answers

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Answer 1

It turns out the interaction between microsoft-identity-broker and intune-portal is still broken. This AWS Workspace machine running Ubuntu that was supposedly "fixed" by the 2.0.2 discussed above has apparently been failing to "check in" with Intune since this memory issue started, and it's still happening to this day. The only reason I've been able to use SSO in the meantime is because we relaxed the requirement to "check in". Today, our policy was updated to require check-in, and that broke access to all SSO-reliant services.

So there is still no real fix.

Over the past year since the original incident, I've had to update my apt sources due to changes in the microsoft apt source repo, so now this machine is currently running these versions:

Package: microsoft-identity-broker
Version: 3.0.2-jammy
APT-Sources: https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/22.04/prod jammy/main amd64 Packages

Package: intune-portal
Version: 1.2604.19-jammy
APT-Sources: https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/22.04/prod jammy/main amd64 Packages

Answer 2

Joseph Leiba 0

I'm seeing the memory leak here too, in my AWS Workspace which is running Ubuntu 22.04.1.

It is occupying 1.8GB, or 10% of my total RAM. This is ridiculous.

What's the best way to restart this service without losing functionality?

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Joseph Leiba 0 Reputation points

2025-10-13T17:10:02.59+00:00

There are actually two java memory-hogging processes related to microsoft-identity-broker. This morning one of them was back up to 1.7GB. Immediately after restarting, they are already way too big for doing very little:

There are no updates available for microsoft-identity-broker from repo packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/22.04/prod. Version 2.0.1 is the latest from there.
Jonny 5 Reputation points

2025-10-13T17:18:00.2366667+00:00

I've restarted it and it's been fine but it does eventually grow to that size again, this memory leak really needs looking at... crazy how much it'll chew.

Joseph Leiba 0

There does appear to be a patch update from packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/22.04/prod/dists/insiders-fast/main.

I wonder if it fixes the issue.

Package: microsoft-identity-broker
Version: 2.0.2
Architecture: amd64
Section: utils
Priority: optional
Installed-Size: 7061
Maintainer: Identity Client Linux Team <IdentityClientLinux@microsoft.com>
Description: Microsoft Authentication Library cross platform
 This is the Microsoft Linux Broker Package that will be used to install the broker
Homepage: https://github.com/AzureAD/microsoft-authentication-library-for-cpp
Depends: systemd, libatk1.0-0 (>= 1.12.4), libc6 (>= 2.34), libcairo-gobject2 (>= 1.10.0), libcairo2 (>= 1.2.4), libcurl4 (>= 7.16.2), libdbus-1-3 (>= 1.9.14), libgcc-s1 (>= 3.0), libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.70.0), libgtk-3-0 (>= 3.13.7), libharfbuzz0b (>= 0.6.0), libjavascriptcoregtk-4.1-0, libp11-kit0 (>= 0.23.18.1), libpango-1.0-0 (>= 1.14.0), libpangocairo-1.0-0 (>= 1.14.0), libsecret-1-0 (>= 0.7), libsoup-3.0-0 (>= 2.4.0), libssl3 (>= 3.0.0~~alpha1), libstdc++6 (>= 12), libuuid1 (>= 2.16), libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 (>= 2.39.90), libx11-6
SHA256: 03f6eb9605b22813f640f8d18248e96cc721fd0f50d958f255601efbb8707cf6
Size: 2227064
Filename: pool/main/m/microsoft-identity-broker/microsoft-identity-broker_2.0.2_amd64.deb

Joseph Leiba 0 Reputation points

2025-10-13T17:52:39.58+00:00

After temporarily switching my microsoft repo in my apt sources to "insiders-fast" instead of "jammy", I upgraded microsoft-identity-broker to 2.0.2. After rebooting and restarting MS Edge and logging into Microsoft, I don't see any java processes related to identity broker. What were those Java processes doing, anyway?
Jonny 5 Reputation points

2025-10-13T18:11:53.4566667+00:00

Far as I could tell they were doing the authentication signing for the device and the logged in user.

Wonder if they've changed from using Java to another language, which I agree would be better solution, as Java isn't very lightweight.

Edit: I'm using EL9 repos and sadly nothing in the insiders-fast for that distro running 2.0.1 though. EL10 or Fedora 42 would be nice to have, but EL9 repo does work on Fedora just fine.

Looking inside the Debian package, looks like it's been completely rewritten, I'd say it more a 3.0 release not a 2.0.2 😅
Joseph Leiba 0 Reputation points

2025-10-13T20:19:53.95+00:00
I'd say it more a 3.0

That's exactly what I said! This is a huge change for a patch. Still, a welcome change away from Java. This needs to be made a part of the regular release for Ubuntu 22.04.

Now, the only processes running with "identity" in them are dotnet processes:

$ ps -ef | grep -i identity root 2158 1786 0 10:44 ? 00:00:03 dotnet Syncfusion.Server.IdentityProvider.Core.dll --urls=http://localhost:6500 root 4836 1786 0 10:45 ? 00:00:11 dotnet Syncfusion.Server.IdentityProvider.API.Core.dll --urls=http://localhost:6501

I don't know if those processes were there before or not.

Answer 3

Still having a memory leak issue here.

Starts with about 80M in use, if the intune-portal then does a checkin, it'll raise to 229M, never comes back down, after many hours of using the device it'll reach near 1G, probably goes over if I left my device on 24/7. Seems like garbage collection isn't happening, or maybe a memory cache is growing in size and not being cleared down. Effectively showing as a memory leak to us.

intune-portal 1.2508.17-1.el9
microsoft-identity-broker 2.0.1-1

Could this please be looked at, it's crazy that Intune it taking over 10% of the memory on a 8GB system, sometimes uses more than the browser, depending how many tabs you have open.

Answer 4

@Mats Engström, Thanks for posting in Q&A. It appears that the memory leak issue with the microsoft-identity-broker is a known problem. As for upcoming updates, after doing a lot of researching, I don't find there is any specific information available about a new version that addresses this memory leak issue. You can open case to see if you can get any update information from Product team.

Thanks for your understanding.

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