Exploiting Entra ID for Stealthier Persistence and Privilege Escalation using the Federated Authentication’s Secondary Token-signing Certificate feature image

Microsoft Entra ID, formerly Azure AD, features federation enabling authentication delegation to external Identity Providers (IdP). The trust between Entra ID and the external IdP relies on a signed token 🔐

The external IdP signs the token with a private key, with the public key configured in Entra ID. But actually, Entra ID can be configured to accept two token-signing certificates and both are equally accepted as token signers! 💥 This second token-signing certificate may be overlooked by defenders and their security tools! 👀

In this post, I’ll show you where this certificate can be found and how attackers can add it (given the necessary privileges) and use it to forge malicious tokens. Finally, I will provide some recommendations for defense in light of this.

➡️ Find this article on Tenable’s TechBlog: Exploiting Entra ID for Stealthier Persistence and Privilege Escalation using the Federated Authentication’s Secondary Token-signing Certificate