add deny assignment azure

• Understanding Azure Deny Assignments

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The purpose of a deny assignment is to attach a set of deny actions to a user, group, or service principal at a particular scope similar to a role assignment, for denying access. The Azure Deny assignments are used to prevent users from doing particular Azure resource operations, even if a role assignment permits them access.

Overview of Azure Deny Assignments

In Azure, “deny assignments” are a type of access control feature that allows you to restrict access to certain resources in your Azure environment. Deny assignments are used to prevent specific users or groups from accessing a particular resource or resource group, even if they have been granted permission to do so through other means, such as an allow assignment.

Deny assignments work by specifying a set of deny rules that apply to a particular resource or resource group. These rules can be based on a variety of criteria, including user or group membership, IP address, or other attributes. When a user or group attempts to access a resource that is covered by a deny rule, the access request is automatically denied, regardless of any other permissions they may have.

Deny assignments can be useful in a variety of scenarios, such as when you need to restrict access to sensitive data or resources, or when you want to enforce compliance with regulatory requirements or company policies. They can also be used in conjunction with allow assignments to create a more fine-grained access control strategy.

One important thing to keep in mind when working with deny assignments is that they can be complex to manage and troubleshoot, particularly when you are dealing with multiple rules or overlapping permissions. It is therefore important to carefully plan your access control strategy and regularly review your deny assignments to ensure that they are still meeting your needs.

Steps to Create Deny Assignments

Here are the steps to create deny assignments in Azure:

• Identify the resource or resource group that you want to restrict access to.
• Navigate to the Access Control (IAM) tab for that resource or resource group in the Azure portal.
• Click the “Add” button to add a new role assignment.
• Select the role that you want to assign. This can be a built-in Azure role or a custom role that you have created.
• In the “Assign access to” section, select the user or group that you want to assign the role to. This can be a specific user or group, or you can use a service principal.
• In the “Add a condition” section, click “Add” to add a new deny assignment.
• Select the type of condition that you want to add. This can include things like IP address range, user or group membership, or specific tags.
• Specify the details of the condition, such as the IP address range or the name of the user or group.
• Click “Add” to add the deny assignment to the role assignment.
• Review the details of the role assignment and click “Create” to save the changes.

Once you have created the deny assignment, it will take effect immediately and users or groups that match the conditions of the deny rule will be prevented from accessing the specified resource or resource group. You can modify or remove the deny assignment at any time by navigating to the Access Control (IAM) tab for the resource or resource group and editing the role assignment.

All Principals

All Principals is a system-defined principal introduced to support deny assignments. The All Principal represents all users, groups, service principals, and managed identities in an Azure AD directory. Therefore, if the principal ID is a zero GUID 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 and the principal type is SystemDefined, then the principal represents all principals. Note, we can combine All Principals with ExcludePrincipals to deny all principals except some users.

Limitation of All Principals –

• Can be used only in Principals and cannot be used in ExcludePrincipals.
• Principals[i].Type must be set to SystemDefined.

Properties of Deny Assignments

AZ-104 Exam Practice Questions

Question: You are a cloud administrator for a company and want to ensure that a specific group of users cannot create new resources in a specific resource group in Azure. Which Azure feature can you use to achieve this?

A) Azure Resource Locks

B) Azure Policy

C) Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) with Deny Assignments

D) Azure Blueprint

Answer: C) Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) with Deny Assignments. Deny Assignments allow you to block specific actions on a specific scope, such as a resource group, which is what is needed in this scenario.

Question: You have an Azure subscription that is used by multiple departments in your organization. You want to ensure that one particular department cannot deploy resources with a specific tag. Which Azure feature can you use to achieve this?

B) Azure Policy with Deny Assignments

C) Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Answer: B) Azure Policy with Deny Assignments. Azure Policy allows you to define and enforce policies that can help you meet organizational or regulatory compliance goals. Deny Assignments can be used in conjunction with policies to prevent certain actions, such as deploying resources with a specific tag.

Question: You are a security analyst for a company and need to ensure that all virtual machines in your Azure environment are encrypted using Azure Disk Encryption. However, you want to make sure that the owner of a virtual machine can still access the disk if necessary. Which Azure feature can you use to achieve this?

D) Azure Deny Assignments

Answer: D) Azure Deny Assignments. Deny Assignments can be used to prevent unauthorized access to virtual machine disks while still allowing the owner to access them. By creating a Deny Assignment that denies the “Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/encrypt/action” action for everyone except the owner of the virtual machine, only the owner can encrypt or decrypt the virtual machine disk, but others are denied access.

Question: You are a cloud administrator for a company and need to ensure that certain users cannot access a particular Azure resource. Which Azure feature can you use to achieve this?

Answer: C) Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) with Deny Assignments. Deny Assignments can be used in conjunction with RBAC to prevent certain users from accessing a particular Azure resource by denying the “Microsoft.Authorization/*/read” action for the group of users.

Question: You have a critical Azure resource that should never be deleted accidentally. Which Azure feature can you use to prevent deletion of this resource?

Answer: A) Azure Resource Locks. Resource Locks allow you to lock a resource to prevent accidental deletion or modification. By applying a lock to the critical Azure resource, it cannot be deleted accidentally, even by authorized users.

Reference:  Microsoft Documentation

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deny assignment

using the blueprint or listing the deny assignements. But this is not a deny assignment , nothing is mentioned about how to create or customize them. Can anyone tell me how to specify the actions to add, or give a template of a working Blueprint with a real deny assignment?

Thank you !

Azure Blueprints An Azure service that provides templates for quick, repeatable creation of fully governed cloud subscriptions. 65 questions Sign in to follow

Azure Role-based access control An Azure service that provides fine-grained access management for Azure resources, enabling you to grant users only the rights they need to perform their jobs. 549 questions Sign in to follow

Microsoft Entra ID A Microsoft Entra identity service that provides identity management and access control capabilities. Replaces Azure Active Directory. 17,392 questions Sign in to follow

Hi @adm_ysmail-ext ,

The only way to create a deny assignment is through Azure blueprints, and this can only be done when the resource is created. The resource locks protecting against other subscription Owners cannot be applied to existing resources, only new ones. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/blueprints/tutorials/protect-new-resources

Deny assignments block users from performing specific Azure resource actions even if a role assignment grants them access. But you need add this protection in the blueprint definitions of resources created by an Azure Resource Manager template artifact, and the Blueprint resource lock is set during blueprint assignment.

Access for Owners can be set to "Read only" or "Do not delete", but not fully restricted. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/blueprints/concepts/resource-locking

Additional reading: Deny Assignments

Let me know if you have further questions. If you have a business justification for greater granularity, you can create a feature request in the Ideas forum: https://feedback.azure.com/

If the information helped you, please Accept the answer . This will help us and other community members as well.

0 additional answers

Granting user access to resources using Azure Portal

• Post author: Manoj Choudhari
• Post published: June 22, 2020
• Post category: Azure
• Post comments: 0 Comments

In last two posts, I have explained how the Azure RBAC works and what are different types of roles available in Azure.

In this short article, I will try to explain how role assignment and deny assignments can be done.

Role vs Deny Assignments

Azure RBAC is fine grained authorization system which is built on Azure Resource Manager. The permissions are grouped as roles.

A role defines set of permissions. A role can be assigned to a security principal (i.e. user, group, service principal, managed identity). The process of assigning role to a security principal is called as role assignment.

The Deny Assignments specify which permissions are not allowed for a security principal.

How access is granted?

Whenever a security principal tries to access any Azure resource, the Azure Resource Manager gets all the assignments associated with the concerned resource. Next the Azure Resource Manager finds out which assignments are related to current security principal.

Then Azure resource manager checks that the requested operation is part of role assignments but it is not part of deny assignments . If both of these conditions are met, then only the access is granted.

Let’s now see how to perform role assignments and deny assignments .

Role Assignments in Azure Portal

Login to Azure Portal and open any resource group which you already have created. Then select Access control (IAM) option from left navigation.

Click the  Role assignments  tab to see the current list of role assignments. If you want to remove any existing role assignment, you can click on Remove button (grayed out in below snapshot) to remove role assignment.

Next, click on Add -> Add role assignment option. On the new panel, select Virtual Machine Contributor role. Then search for user, group or service principal by entering some text in Select text box. Select any from the search result and then click on Save button.

After few moments, the selected security principal would have the virtual machine contributor role in the selected resource group, meaning ability to create and manage virtual machine in this resource group is granted.

Although we have demonstrated role assignment using Azure Portal, it can also be done using Azure CLI or PowerShell.

Deny Assignments in Azure Portal

We just have seen how easy it is to assign a role to a security principal. The next obvious question can be – how can Deny Assignments be created ?

You cannot directly create your own deny assignments .

Deny assignments are created and managed by Azure to protect the resources. Azure Blueprints and Azure managed apps use deny assignments to protect system-managed resources. Azure Blueprints and Azure managed apps are the only way that deny assignments can be created. 

You can view the deny assignments in Azure Portal . If you select Access Control (IAM) and then Deny Assignments tab, you should be able to view deny assignments applicable for selected resource.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Let me know your thoughts.

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Azure Redhat OpenShift - Deny Assignment in Resourcegroup

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Environment

• If Azure Redhat OpenShift (ARO) by default makes a Resource Group "Read Only", is there anyway to modify the "Deny Assignment" so that access to this Resource Group can be given to other Users?
• Can I reboot virtual Machines Manually from the Azure Portal?
• Can I modify the resources e.g. ( Disks,Virtual Machines,Network Interface,Load balancers, Public IP, Storage account and etc ) under the randomly generated resource group (aro-infra-xxxxxxx-clustername / aro-randomXXXXX) after cluster creation as Day-2 operations?

Disclaimer: Links contained herein to external website(s) are provided for convenience only. Red Hat has not reviewed the links and is not responsible for the content or its availability. The inclusion of any link to an external website does not imply endorsement by Red Hat of the website or their entities, products or services. You agree that Red Hat is not responsible or liable for any loss or expenses that may result due to your use of (or reliance on) the external site or content.

• By default it's not allowed to stop/start machines and modify the resources via the Azure Portal or Azure-cli for resources created under that randomly generated resource group for your Azure Redhat OpenShift cluster.
• Currently, it is also not possible to add new users (with viewing roles) to an already existing Azure Redhat OpenShift resource group after creation due to the Deny Assignments placed on the Resource Group. Although it is understandable the Deny Assignment (that is automatically put in place) is a very effective protective measure, it can also be problematic if there is a need to later modify after the Resource Groups initial creation.
• The deny assignment is documented and is the expected behavior. You may also check the ARO Support Policy on which actions are not supported that would violate the policy and void support from Microsoft and Red Hat here .
• You may also refer to Microsoft Official documentation here for Azure Redhat Openshift FAQ .
• For Production deployments the Azure ARO-RP configures a DenyAssignment attached to the auto generated (aro-infra-xxxxxxx-clustername / aro-randomXXXXX) Resource Group .
• The Cluster Service Principal is the only one excluded from the DenyAssignment and the rest are denied.
• More information can be found here .

Diagnostic Steps

You will see this from the Notifications and Activity logs on the Azure Portal.

• User is trying to modify/add a rule on the Network Security Groups and the deny assignment prevented this action.
• The user is trying to modify the worker node virtual machine and the deny assignment prevented this action.

These are just some of the few examples that are given here but there could be more depending on the resource type that is being modified under that resource group.

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