Cluster access control with AKS-managed Azure Active Directory integration

Article
04/24/2023

When you integrate Azure AD with your AKS cluster, you can use Conditional Access or Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for just-in-time requests to control access to your cluster. This article shows you how to enable Conditional Access and PIM on your AKS clusters.

Note

Azure AD Conditional Access and Privileged Identity Management are Azure AD Premium capabilities requiring a Premium P2 SKU. For more on Azure AD SKUs, see the pricing guide.

Before you begin

See AKS-managed Azure Active Directory integration for an overview and setup instructions.

Use Conditional Access with Azure AD and AKS

In the Azure portal, go to the Azure Active Directory page and select Enterprise applications.
Select Conditional Access > Policies > New policy.
Enter a name for the policy, such as aks-policy.
Under Assignments, select Users and groups. Choose the users and groups you want to apply the policy to. In this example, choose the same Azure AD group that has administrator access to your cluster.
Under Cloud apps or actions > Include, select Select apps. Search for Azure Kubernetes Service and select Azure Kubernetes Service AAD Server.
Under Access controls > Grant, select Grant access, Require device to be marked as compliant, and Require all the selected controls.
Confirm your settings, set Enable policy to On, and then select Create.

Verify your Conditional Access policy has been successfully listed

Get the user credentials to access the cluster using the az aks get-credentials command.
```
 az aks get-credentials --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myManagedCluster
```
Follow the instructions to sign in.
View the nodes in the cluster using the kubectl get nodes command.
```
kubectl get nodes
```
In the Azure portal, navigate to Azure Active Directory and select Enterprise applications > Activity > Sign-ins.
Under the Conditional Access column you should see a status of Success. Select the event and then select the Conditional Access tab. Your Conditional Access policy will be listed.

Configure just-in-time cluster access with Azure AD and AKS

In the Azure portal, go to Azure Active Directory and select Properties.
Note the value listed under Tenant ID. It will be referenced in a later step as <tenant-id>.
Select Groups > New group.
Verify the group type Security is selected and specify a group name, such as myJITGroup. Under the option Azure AD roles can be assigned to this group (Preview), select Yes and then select Create.
On the Groups page, select the group you just created and note the Object ID. It will be referenced in a later step as <object-id>.
Create the AKS cluster with AKS-managed Azure AD integration using the az aks create command with the --aad-admin-group-objects-ids and --aad-tenant-id parameters and include the values noted in the steps earlier.
```
az aks create -g myResourceGroup -n myManagedCluster --enable-aad --aad-admin-group-object-ids <object-id> --aad-tenant-id <tenant-id>
```
In the Azure portal, select Activity > Privileged Access (Preview) > Enable Privileged Access.
To grant access, select Add assignments.
From the Select role drop-down list, select the users and groups you want to grant cluster access. These assignments can be modified at any time by a group administrator. Then select Next.
Under Assignment type, select Active and then specify the desired duration. Provide a justification and then select Assign.

For more information about assignment types, see Assign eligibility for a privileged access group (preview) in Privileged Identity Management.

Verify just-in-time access is working by accessing the cluster

Get the user credentials to access the cluster using the az aks get-credentials command.
```
az aks get-credentials --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myManagedCluster
```
Follow the steps to sign in.
Use the kubectl get nodes command to view the nodes in the cluster.
```
kubectl get nodes
```

Note the authentication requirement and follow the steps to authenticate. If successful, you should see an output similar to the following example output:

To sign in, use a web browser to open the page https://microsoft.com/devicelogin and enter the code AAAAAAAAA to authenticate.
NAME                                STATUS   ROLES   AGE     VERSION
aks-nodepool1-61156405-vmss000000   Ready    agent   6m36s   v1.18.14
aks-nodepool1-61156405-vmss000001   Ready    agent   6m42s   v1.18.14
aks-nodepool1-61156405-vmss000002   Ready    agent   6m33s   v1.18.14

Apply just-in-time access at the namespace level

Integrate your AKS cluster with Azure RBAC.

Associate the group you want to integrate with just-in-time access with a namespace in the cluster using the az role assignment create command.

az role assignment create --role "Azure Kubernetes Service RBAC Reader" --assignee <AAD-ENTITY-ID> --scope $AKS_ID/namespaces/<namespace-name>

Associate the group you configured at the namespace level with PIM to complete the configuration.

Troubleshooting

If kubectl get nodes returns an error similar to the following:

Error from server (Forbidden): nodes is forbidden: User "aaaa11111-11aa-aa11-a1a1-111111aaaaa" cannot list resource "nodes" in API group "" at the cluster scope

Make sure the admin of the security group has given your account an Active assignment.

Next steps

Use kubelogin to access features for Azure authentication that aren't available in kubectl.