Automate NSG auditing with Azure Network Watcher security group view

Article
03/07/2024

Note

The security group view API is no longer being maintained and will be deprecated soon. Please use the Effective security rules feature which provides the same functionality.

Customers are often faced with the challenge of verifying the security posture of their infrastructure. This challenge is no different for their VMs in Azure. It's important to have a similar security profile based on the Network Security Group (NSG) rules applied. Using the Security Group View, you can now get the list of rules applied to a VM within an NSG. You can define a golden NSG security profile and initiate Security Group View on a weekly cadence and compare the output to the golden profile and create a report. This way you can identify with ease all the VMs that don't conform to the prescribed security profile.

To learn more about network security groups, see Network security groups overview.

Prerequisites

If you don't have an Azure account with an active subscription, create one for free.
A virtual machine (VM).

Scenario

In this scenario, you compare a known good baseline to the security group view results returned for a virtual machine.

In this scenario, you will:

Retrieve a known good rule set
Retrieve a virtual machine with REST API
Get security group view for virtual machine
Evaluate Response

Retrieve rule set

The first step in this example is to work with an existing baseline. The following example is some json extracted from an existing Network Security Group using the Get-AzNetworkSecurityGroup cmdlet that is used as the baseline for this example.

[
    {
        "Description":  null,
        "Protocol":  "TCP",
        "SourcePortRange":  "*",
        "DestinationPortRange":  "3389",
        "SourceAddressPrefix":  "*",
        "DestinationAddressPrefix":  "*",
        "Access":  "Allow",
        "Priority":  1000,
        "Direction":  "Inbound",
        "ProvisioningState":  "Succeeded",
        "Name":  "default-allow-rdp",
        "Etag":  "W/\"d8859256-1c4c-4b93-ba7d-73d9bf67c4f1\"",
        "Id":  "/subscriptions/aaaa0a0a-bb1b-cc2c-dd3d-eeeeee4e4e4e/resourceGroups/testrg/providers/Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/testvm1-nsg/securityRules/default-allow-rdp"
    },
    {
        "Description":  null,
        "Protocol":  "*",
        "SourcePortRange":  "*",
        "DestinationPortRange":  "111",
        "SourceAddressPrefix":  "*",
        "DestinationAddressPrefix":  "*",
        "Access":  "Allow",
        "Priority":  1010,
        "Direction":  "Inbound",
        "ProvisioningState":  "Succeeded",
        "Name":  "MyRuleDoNotDelete",
        "Etag":  "W/\"d8859256-1c4c-4b93-ba7d-73d9bf67c4f1\"",
        "Id":  "/subscriptions/aaaa0a0a-bb1b-cc2c-dd3d-eeeeee4e4e4e/resourceGroups/testrg/providers/Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/testvm1-nsg/securityRules/MyRuleDoNotDelete"
    },
    {
        "Description":  null,
        "Protocol":  "*",
        "SourcePortRange":  "*",
        "DestinationPortRange":  "112",
        "SourceAddressPrefix":  "*",
        "DestinationAddressPrefix":  "*",
        "Access":  "Allow",
        "Priority":  1020,
        "Direction":  "Inbound",
        "ProvisioningState":  "Succeeded",
        "Name":  "My2ndRuleDoNotDelete",
        "Etag":  "W/\"d8859256-1c4c-4b93-ba7d-73d9bf67c4f1\"",
        "Id":  "/subscriptions/aaaa0a0a-bb1b-cc2c-dd3d-eeeeee4e4e4e/resourceGroups/testrg/providers/Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/testvm1-nsg/securityRules/My2ndRuleDoNotDelete"
    },
    {
        "Description":  null,
        "Protocol":  "TCP",
        "SourcePortRange":  "*",
        "DestinationPortRange":  "5672",
        "SourceAddressPrefix":  "*",
        "DestinationAddressPrefix":  "*",
        "Access":  "Deny",
        "Priority":  1030,
        "Direction":  "Inbound",
        "ProvisioningState":  "Succeeded",
        "Name":  "ThisRuleNeedsToStay",
        "Etag":  "W/\"d8859256-1c4c-4b93-ba7d-73d9bf67c4f1\"",
        "Id":  "/subscriptions/aaaa0a0a-bb1b-cc2c-dd3d-eeeeee4e4e4e/resourceGroups/testrg/providers/Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/testvm1-nsg/securityRules/ThisRuleNeedsToStay"
    }
]

Convert rule set to PowerShell objects

In this step, we're reading a json file that was created earlier with the rules that are expected to be on the Network Security Group for this example.

$nsgbaserules = Get-Content -Path C:\temp\testvm1-nsg.json | ConvertFrom-Json

Retrieve Network Watcher

The next step is to retrieve the Network Watcher instance. The $networkWatcher variable is passed to the AzNetworkWatcherSecurityGroupView cmdlet.

$networkWatcher = Get-AzResource | Where {$_.ResourceType -eq "Microsoft.Network/networkWatchers" -and $_.Location -eq "WestCentralUS" }

Retrieve virtual machine configuration

A virtual machine is required to run the Get-AzNetworkWatcherSecurityGroupView cmdlet against. The following example gets a VM object.

$VM = Get-AzVM -ResourceGroupName "testrg" -Name "testvm1"

Retrieve security group view

The next step is to retrieve the security group view result. This result is compared to the "baseline" json that was shown earlier.

$secgroup = Get-AzNetworkWatcherSecurityGroupView -NetworkWatcher $networkWatcher -TargetVirtualMachineId $VM.Id

Analyze the results

The response is grouped by Network interfaces. The different types of rules returned are effective and default security rules. The result is further broken down by how it's applied, either on a subnet or a virtual NIC.

The following PowerShell script compares the results of the Security Group View to an existing output of an NSG. The following example is a simple example of how the results can be compared with Compare-Object cmdlet.

Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $nsgbaserules `
-DifferenceObject $secgroup.NetworkInterfaces[0].NetworkInterfaceSecurityRules `
-Property Name,Description,Protocol,SourcePortRange,DestinationPortRange,SourceAddressPrefix,DestinationAddressPrefix,Access,Priority,Direction

The following example is the result. You can see two of the rules that were in the first rule set weren't present in the comparison.

Name                     : My2ndRuleDoNotDelete
Description              : 
Protocol                 : *
SourcePortRange          : *
DestinationPortRange     : 112
SourceAddressPrefix      : *
DestinationAddressPrefix : *
Access                   : Allow
Priority                 : 1020
Direction                : Inbound
SideIndicator            : <=

Name                     : ThisRuleNeedsToStay
Description              : 
Protocol                 : TCP
SourcePortRange          : *
DestinationPortRange     : 5672
SourceAddressPrefix      : *
DestinationAddressPrefix : *
Access                   : Deny
Priority                 : 1030
Direction                : Inbound
SideIndicator            : <=

Next steps

See Create, change, or delete a network security group to track down the network security group and security rules that are in question.

Share via