Friday, December 1, 2017

2 approaches to enable MFA for Azure AD B2B guest accounts

Element of Azure AD B2B SharePoint External Sharing, is to enforce multi-factor authentication for the external guest accounts. Documentation how-to enable is a bit difficult to find. Also in my search I encountered that there are actually 2 approaches to enable MFA condition for guest accounts.

Option 1: Direct enable on Azure AD user level

This is the option I first trembled into, due (my) inability to find proper documentation how to enforce the MFA rule. Approach here is to open Azure AD Admin, open 'All Users', click 'multi-factor authentication' in the top bar, and select the (guest) user accounts for which to enable MFA. Frankly I have the suspicion that this approach is there by accident. Motivation for that thought is that I only could enable MFA for guest users via a trick: selecting only guest users does not offer the enable/disable MFA option. However if you also select a regular account, the menu option becomes visible and the execution is applied to all selected accounts, including the guests. Not direct logical, may very well be a functional bug.



Option 2: Indirect enable via Azure AD Conditional Access

This approach appears to be the more structural, with management on higher level as individual guest users. Approach consists of following steps:
  • Create in Azure AD 'groups and users' a new group with dynamic membership, and rule equal to "userType Equals Guest"
  • Create in Azure AD Conditional Access a new policy, as membership include the just created group (of external accounts), as App select Office 365 SharePoint Online, and as Control select 'Grant Access under condition of Conditional Access.
These 2 configuration steps ensure that MFA is immediate applied for all guest accounts, without need to maintain this on the individual user account.



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