At this point I have close to a decade of working with Azure and AWS/GCP and I can confidently say Azure is the worst when it comes to security, objectively.
Performance, "I don't like the portal", service and capacity availability, and such complaints are somewhat subjective or fixable but I deeply believe Microsoft is the most insecure of the cloud giants on a measurable level.
Anyone that is serious about security should just avoid Microsoft, this has honestly been the case since the early '00s at the least.
I think it’s not just the security of the platform itself either that’s measurably worse - it’s also way easier to end up with insane security configurations with the hellscape that is Entra. It all just feels like it’s held together with duct tape.
The deep integration with AD (now Entra) was the strongest selling point for Azure, but it’s also by far the biggest issue with the platform IMO.
There’s also just no consistency in the platform - the CLI for instance has totally different flags and names depending on which sub command you’re using. It’s like this everywhere in Azure.
As someone who is greatly motivated to moving off Azure (to onprem, not to another cloud), do you know of any good collection of Azure security issues I could use as 'ammunition'? Would be greatly appreciated!
Not surprised, given its ancestry. This isn't a critique, so much as an observation.
Microsoft's corporate culture evolved during some two decades under a very different threat model & security posture. A lot of the platform's foundations originate from that era, and although they've made significant strides you still see some of their other products struggle in this aspect as well (eg. good security primitives are there but they're sloppy in their default configuration and intuitability). Compare it to a platform that spent its youth growing up in a more actively hostile environment (like Bitcoin).
Another reason to be worried by Microsoft’s Azure security guidelines which state “Identity is the new perimeter”.
Well, the perimeter is not a gate but a cattle guard, and I am not surprised to see some wolves eating a secret and a cow swaggering into the road.
Azure service APIs have always conflated the principles of “reachability from the public internet” and “anonymous access” into a single concept called “Public Access” which, for Azure KV, has 6 different public/private configuration combinations!
This vulnerability report did not include the Key Vault Networking settings for “Public network access”, so more testing (but not much more) is needed to see if the proxy side door can circumvent a resource ACL or private endpoint or both.
It's not just "identity", but "authorization". Really, what they mean is "defense in depth" minus firewalls (because the "in depth" part makes those less relevant), I think. And... that is a reasonable position... provided you get the "in depth" part right, which includes not having proxies that bypass authorization.
Binary Security found the undocumented APIs for Azure API Connections. In this post we examine the inner workings of the Connections allowing us to escalate privileges and read secrets in backend resources for services ranging from Key Vaults, Storage Blobs, Defender ATP, to Enterprise Jira and SalesForce servers.
>The Connector for Key Vaults is maybe the one with the highest impact.
Yeah, no joke. Considering how well protected Azure Key Vaults typically are, and what's in them (secrets, certificates etc) this is huge way to compromise a lot of other things. It's finding the keys to the doors.
Well at the bottom of the article, they mention that Microsoft first closed the issue as invalid, and on the second attempt they closed it as "cannot be reproduced" (after fixing it).
I'm no security expert, but this seems like a bad take. How are APIs any less secure than any other form of interacting with a program? Nothing here is really a problem with APIs but rather a problem with access control.
> anyone with Reader permissions on the connection is allowed to arbitrarily call any endpoint on the connection
This is not an API issue... It feels like saying we shouldn't allow users to search a database because they might run a SQL injection to drop all the tables. Searching tables isn't the problem, not sanitizing inputs is. This is more like giving all users on your network sudo access or just doing chmod -R 777 /.
My concern here is that a lot of people have the takeaway that APIs shouldn't be exposed because they create security risks. But that's not true. The API exposure isn't the risk, it is the access control. If you don't have proper access control then it really isn't going to matter if you have an API or not. But then again, we have a long history of not taking fairly basic security seriously and with decades of computing and seeing the results, I really can't figure out why. Sure, security is expensive, but bad security is far more expensive. I guess maybe the issue is I'm not much of a gambler.
I think you misunderstood what was meant by "API connections". In azure, they're an entity that is created to represent connectivity to some external service, usually bundled with credentials and the OpenAPI definition of the downstream service. They let you consume an external service from other azure services without having to worry about things like token refresh. The article goes into better detail on this than I can in a comment.
Maybe with enough traction, they'll lose out on huge contracts because of stuff like this. Seems the only way to get stuff fixed is to attach dollars to it.
redrove|11 months ago
Performance, "I don't like the portal", service and capacity availability, and such complaints are somewhat subjective or fixable but I deeply believe Microsoft is the most insecure of the cloud giants on a measurable level.
Anyone that is serious about security should just avoid Microsoft, this has honestly been the case since the early '00s at the least.
noodlesUK|11 months ago
The deep integration with AD (now Entra) was the strongest selling point for Azure, but it’s also by far the biggest issue with the platform IMO.
There’s also just no consistency in the platform - the CLI for instance has totally different flags and names depending on which sub command you’re using. It’s like this everywhere in Azure.
Mossy9|11 months ago
UPD: note to self - this seems like a good resource https://www.cloudvulndb.org/results
christkv|11 months ago
rkagerer|11 months ago
Microsoft's corporate culture evolved during some two decades under a very different threat model & security posture. A lot of the platform's foundations originate from that era, and although they've made significant strides you still see some of their other products struggle in this aspect as well (eg. good security primitives are there but they're sloppy in their default configuration and intuitability). Compare it to a platform that spent its youth growing up in a more actively hostile environment (like Bitcoin).
this_steve_j|11 months ago
Well, the perimeter is not a gate but a cattle guard, and I am not surprised to see some wolves eating a secret and a cow swaggering into the road.
Azure service APIs have always conflated the principles of “reachability from the public internet” and “anonymous access” into a single concept called “Public Access” which, for Azure KV, has 6 different public/private configuration combinations!
This vulnerability report did not include the Key Vault Networking settings for “Public network access”, so more testing (but not much more) is needed to see if the proxy side door can circumvent a resource ACL or private endpoint or both.
cryptonector|11 months ago
hland|11 months ago
SideburnsOfDoom|11 months ago
Yeah, no joke. Considering how well protected Azure Key Vaults typically are, and what's in them (secrets, certificates etc) this is huge way to compromise a lot of other things. It's finding the keys to the doors.
stirlo|11 months ago
Daedren|11 months ago
So from that I can imply there was no payment.
belter|11 months ago
IcyWindows|11 months ago
I'm glad they fixed it, but this doesn't seem too scary??
godelski|11 months ago
My concern here is that a lot of people have the takeaway that APIs shouldn't be exposed because they create security risks. But that's not true. The API exposure isn't the risk, it is the access control. If you don't have proper access control then it really isn't going to matter if you have an API or not. But then again, we have a long history of not taking fairly basic security seriously and with decades of computing and seeing the results, I really can't figure out why. Sure, security is expensive, but bad security is far more expensive. I guess maybe the issue is I'm not much of a gambler.
twisteriffic|11 months ago
486sx33|11 months ago
DoctorOW|11 months ago
guardiangod|11 months ago