About security, authentication, and authorization

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TFS 2018

Azure DevOps employs many security concepts to ensure only those users who should have access to features, functions, and data have access. Accounts get access to Azure DevOps through authentication of their security credentials and authorization of their account entitlements to access a feature or function.

This article builds on the information provided in Get started with permissions, access, and security groups. Administrators benefit from understanding the account types, authentication methods, authorization methods, and policies used to secure Azure DevOps.

Account types

  • Users
  • Service accounts
  • Service principals or managed identities
  • Job agents

Authentication

  • User credentials
  • Windows authentication
  • Two-factor authentication (2FA)
  • SSH key authentication
  • Personal access tokens
  • Oauth configuration
  • Active Directory authentication library

Authorization

  • Security group membership
  • Role-based permissions
  • Access levels
  • Feature flags
  • Security namespaces & permissions

Policies

  • Git repository and branch policies

Important

Azure DevOps no longer supports Alternate Credentials authentication since the beginning of March 2, 2020. If you're still using Alternate Credentials, we strongly encourage you to switch to a more secure authentication method (for example, personal access tokens). Learn more.

Both our cloud service, Azure DevOps Services, and on-premises server, Azure DevOps Server, support software development projects, from planning through deployment. Azure DevOps uses Microsoft Azure's Platform as a Service infrastructure and many of Azure's services, including Azure SQL databases, to deliver a reliable, globally available service for your development projects.

Accounts

While the main types of accounts of interest are the human user accounts that you add to your organization or project, Azure DevOps supports other types of accounts to perform various operations. These include the following account types.

  • Service accounts: Internal Azure DevOps accounts used to support a specific service, such as Agent Pool Service, PipelinesSDK. For descriptions of service accounts, see Security groups, service accounts, and permissions.
  • Service principals or managed identities: Microsoft Entra applications or managed identities that have been added to your organization to perform actions on behalf of a third-party application. Some service principals refer to internal Azure DevOps accounts to support internal operations.
  • Job agents: Internal accounts used to run specific jobs on a regular schedule.
  • Third party accounts: Accounts that require access to support Web hooks, service connections, or other third-party applications.

The most effective means for managing accounts is by adding them to security groups.

Note

The organization owner and members of the Project Collection Administrators group are granted full access to most all features and functions.

Authentication

Authentication verifies an account identity based on the credentials provided when they sign into Azure DevOps. These systems integrate with and rely upon the security features provided by these other systems:

  • Microsoft Entra ID
  • Microsoft account (MSA)
  • Active Directory (AD)

Microsoft Entra ID and MSA support cloud authentication. We recommend Microsoft Entra ID when you need to manage a large group of users. Otherwise, if you have a small user base accessing your organization in Azure DevOps, you can use Microsoft accounts. For more information, see About accessing Azure DevOps with Microsoft Entra ID.

For on-premises deployments, AD is recommended when managing a large group of users. For more information, see Set up groups for use in on-premises deployments.

Authentication methods, integrating with other services and apps

Other applications and services can integrate with services and resources in Azure DevOps. To access your account without asking for user credentials multiple times, apps can use the following authentication methods.

  • Personal access tokens to generate tokens on behalf of yourself for:

    • Accessing specific resources or activities, like builds or work items
    • Clients like Xcode and NuGet that require usernames and passwords as basic credentials and don't support Microsoft account and Microsoft Entra features like multi-factor authentication
    • Accessing Azure DevOps REST APIs

  • Azure DevOps OAuth to generate tokens on behalf of users for accessing REST APIs. The Accounts and Profiles APIs support only OAuth.

  • SSH authentication to generate encryption keys for yourself when you use Linux, macOS, or Windows running Git for Windows and can't use Git credential managers or personal access tokens for HTTPS authentication.

  • Service principals or managed identities to generate Microsoft Entra tokens on behalf of an application or service, that typically automates some workflow that needs to access Azure DevOps resources. Most actions traditionally done by a service account and a PAT can be done using a service principal or managed identity.

By default, your account or collection allows access for all authentication methods. You can limit access, but you must specifically restrict access for each method. When you deny access to an authentication method, no app can use that method to access your account. Any app that previously had access gets an authentication error and can't access your account.

For more information about how we store your credentials, see Credential storage for Azure DevOps.

For more information about how to choose the right authentication mechanism, see Guidance for authentication.

Authorization

Authorization verifies that the identity that is attempting to connect has the necessary permissions to access a service, feature, function, object, or method. Authorization always occurs after successful authentication. If a connection isn't authenticated, it fails before any authorization checking is performed. If authentication of a connection succeeds, a specific action might still be disallowed because the user or group didn't have authorization to perform that action.

Authorization depends on the permissions assigned to the account. Permissions are granted either directly to an account, or through membership in a security group or security role. Access levels and feature flags can also grant or restrict access to a feature. For more information about these authorization methods, see Get started with permissions, access, and security groups.

Security namespaces and permissions

Security namespaces store data that determines the level of access that Azure DevOps accounts have to perform a specific action on a specific resource. Each family of resources, such as work items or Git repositories, is secured through a unique namespace. Each security namespace contains zero or more access control lists (ACLs). Each ACL contains a token, an inherit flag, and a set of zero or more access control entries (ACEs). Each ACE contains an identity descriptor, an allowed permissions bitmask, and a denied permissions bitmask.

For more information, see Security namespaces and permission reference.

Security policies

To secure your code, you can set many Git repository and branch policies. For more information, see the following articles.

Azure Repos and Azure Pipelines security

Since repositories and build and release pipelines pose unique security challenges, other features beyond the features discussed in this article are employed. For more information, see the following articles.

Next steps

Permissions and groups reference