As both organizations and developers adapt to the new reality of working and collaborating in a remote environment, it’s more important than ever to ensure that their experiences are secure and trusted. As part of this week’s Build virtual event, we’re introducing new Identity innovation to help foster a secure and trustworthy app ecosystem, as well as announcing a number of new capabilities in Azure to help secure customers.
New Identity capabilities to help foster a secure apps ecosystem
As organizations continue to adapt to the new requirements of remote work, we’ve seen an increase in the deployment and usage of cloud applications. These cloud applications often need access to user or company data, which has increased the need to provide strong security not just for users but applications themselves. Today we are announcing several capabilities for developers, admins, and end-users that help foster a secure and trustworthy app ecosystem:
- Publisher Verification allows developers to demonstrate to customers, with a verified checkmark, that the application they’re using comes from a trusted and authentic source. Applications marked as publisher verified means that the publisher has verified their identity through the verification process with the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) and has associated their MPN account with their application registration.
- Application consent policies allow admins to configure policies that determine which applications users can consent to. Admins can allow users to consent to applications that have been Publisher Verified, helping developers unlock user-driven adoption of their apps.
- Microsoft authentication libraries (MSAL) for Angular is generally available and our web library identity.web for ASP.NET Core is in public preview. MSAL make it easy to implement the right authentication patterns, security features, and integration points that support any Microsoft identity—from Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) accounts to Microsoft accounts.
In addition, we’re making it easier for organizations and developers to secure, manage and build apps that connect with different types of users outside an organization with Azure AD External Identities now in preview. With Azure AD External Identities, developers can build flexible, user-centric experiences that enable self-service sign-up and sign-in and allow continuous customization without duplicating coding effort.
You can learn even more about our Identity-based solutions and additional announcements by heading over to the Azure Active Directory Tech Community blog and reading Alex Simons’ post.
Azure Security Center innovations
Azure Security Center is a unified infrastructure security management system for both Azure and hybrid cloud resources on-premises or in other clouds. We’re pleased to announce two new innovations for Azure Security Center, both of which will help secure our customers:
First, we’re announcing that the Azure Secure Score API is now available to customers, bringing even more innovation to Secure Score, which is a central component of security posture management in Azure Security Center. The recent enhancements to Secure Score (in preview) gives customers an easier to understand and more effective way to assess risk in their environment and prioritize which action to take first in order to reduce it. It also simplifies the long list of findings by grouping the recommendations into a set of Security Controls, each representing an attack surface and scored accordingly.
Second, we’re announcing that suppression rules for Azure Security Center alerts are now publicly available. Customers can use suppression rules to reduce alerts fatigue and focus on the most relevant threats by hiding alerts that are known to be innocuous or related to normal activities in their organization. Suppressed alerts will be hidden in Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel but will still be available with ‘dismissed’ state. You can learn more about suppression rules by visiting Suppressing alerts from Azure Security Center’s threat protection.
Azure Disk Encryption and encryption & key management updates
We continue to invest in encryption options for our customers. Here are our most recent updates:
- Fifty more Azure services now support customer-managed keys for encryption at rest. This helps customers control their encryption keys to meet their compliance or regulatory requirements. The full list of services is here. We have now made this capability part of the Azure Security Benchmark, so that our customers can govern use of all your Azure services in a consistent manner.
- Azure Disk Encryption helps protect data on disks that are used with VM and VM Scale sets, and we have now added the ability to use Azure Disk Encryption to secure Red Hat Enterprise Linux BYOS Gold Images. The subscription must be registered before Azure Disk Encryption can be enabled.
Azure Key Vault innovation
Azure Key Vault is a unified service for secret management, certificate management, and encryption key management, backed by FIPS-validated hardware security modules (HSMs). Here are some of the new capabilities we are bringing for our customers:
- Enhanced security with Private Link—This is an optional control that enables customers to access their Azure Key Vault over a private endpoint in their virtual network. Traffic between their virtual network and Azure Key Vault flows over the Microsoft backbone network, thus providing additional assurance.
- More choices for BYOK—Some of our customers generate encryption keys outside Azure and import them into Azure Key Vault, in order to meet their regulatory needs or to centralize where their keys are generated. Now, in addition to nCipher nShield HSMs, they can also use SafeNet Luna HSMs or Fortanix SDKMS to generate their keys. These additions are in preview.
- Make it easier to rotate secrets—Earlier we released a public preview of notifications for keys, secrets, and certificates. This allows customers to receive events at each point of the lifecycle of these objects and define custom actions. A common action is rotating secrets on a schedule so that they can limit the impact of credential exposure. You can see the new tutorial here.
Platform security innovation
Platform security for customers’ data recently took a big step forward with the General Availability of Azure Confidential Computing. Using the latest Intel SGX CPU hardware backed by attestation, Azure provides a new class of VMs that protects the confidentiality and integrity of customer data while in memory (or “in-use”), ensuring that cloud administrators and datacenter operators with physical access to the servers cannot access the customer’s data.
Customer Lockbox for Microsoft Azure provides an interface for customers to review and approve or reject customer data access requests. It is used in cases where a Microsoft engineer needs to access customer data during a support request. In addition to expanded coverage of services in Customer Lockbox for Microsoft Azure, this feature is now available in preview for our customers in Azure Government cloud.
You can learn more about our Azure security offerings by heading to the Azure Security Center Tech Community.
