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About security, authentication, and authorization

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Azure DevOps Services | Azure DevOps Server 2022 - Azure DevOps Server 2019

Azure DevOps employs various security concepts to ensure that only authorized users can access features, functions, and data. Users gain access to Azure DevOps through the authentication of their security credentials and the authorization of their account entitlements to access specific features or functions.

This article builds on the information provided in Get started with permissions, access, and security groups. Administrators can benefit from understanding the account types, authentication methods, authorization methods, and policies used to secure Azure DevOps.

Account types

  • Users
  • Organization owner
  • Service accounts
  • Service principals or managed identities
  • Job agents

Authentication

  • User credentials
  • Windows authentication
  • Two-factor authentication (2FA)
  • SSH key authentication
  • Personal access tokens
  • Oauth configuration
  • Active Directory authentication library

Authorization

  • Security group membership
  • Role-based access control
  • Access levels
  • Feature flags
  • Security namespaces & permissions

Policies

  • Privacy policy URL
  • Application connection and security policies
  • User policies
  • Git repository and branch policies

Account types

  • Users
  • Service accounts
  • Service principals or managed identities
  • Job agents

Authentication

  • User credentials
  • Windows authentication
  • Two-factor authentication (2FA)
  • SSH key authentication
  • Personal access tokens
  • Oauth configuration
  • Active Directory authentication library

Authorization

  • Security group membership
  • Role-based permissions
  • Access levels
  • Feature flags
  • Security namespaces & permissions

Policies

  • Git repository and branch policies

Important

Azure DevOps doesn't support Alternate Credentials authentication. If you're still using Alternate Credentials, we strongly encourage you to switch to a more secure authentication method.

Both Azure DevOps Services (cloud) and Azure DevOps Server (on-premises) support software development from planning to deployment. They leverage Microsoft Azure's Platform as a Service infrastructure and services, including Azure SQL databases, to provide a reliable, globally available service for your projects.

For more information about how Microsoft ensures your Azure DevOps Services projects are safe, available, secure, and private, see the Azure DevOps Services data protection overview.

Accounts

While human user accounts are the primary focus, Azure DevOps also supports various other account types for different operations. These include the following account types:

  • Organization owner: The creator of an Azure DevOps Services organization or assigned owner. To find the owner for your organization, see Look up the organization owner.
  • Service accounts: Internal Azure DevOps organization used to support a specific service, such as Agent Pool Service, PipelinesSDK. For descriptions of service accounts, see Security groups, service accounts, and permissions.
  • Service principals or managed identities: Microsoft Entra applications or managed identities added to your organization to perform actions on behalf of a third-party application. Some service principals refer to internal Azure DevOps organization to support internal operations.
  • Job agents: Internal accounts used to run specific jobs on a regular schedule.
  • Third party accounts: Accounts that require access to support Web hooks, service connections, or other third-party applications.

Throughout our security-related articles, "users" refers to all identities added to the Users Hub, which can include human users and service principals.

  • Service accounts: Internal Azure DevOps organization used to support a specific service, such as Agent Pool Service, PipelinesSDK. For descriptions of service accounts, see Security groups, service accounts, and permissions.
  • Service principals or managed identities: Microsoft Entra applications or managed identities added to your organization to perform actions on behalf of a third-party application. Some service principals refer to internal Azure DevOps organization to support internal operations.
  • Job agents: Internal accounts used to run specific jobs on a regular schedule.
  • Third party accounts: Accounts that require access to support Web hooks, service connections, or other third-party applications.

The most effective way to manage accounts is by adding them to security groups.

Note

The organization owner and members of the Project Collection Administrators group are granted full access to nearly all features and functions.

Authentication

Authentication verifies an account's identity based on the credentials provided during sign-in to Azure DevOps. These systems integrate with and rely on the security features of the following other systems:

  • Microsoft Entra ID
  • Microsoft account (MSA)
  • Active Directory (AD)

Microsoft Entra ID and MSA support cloud authentication. We recommend using Microsoft Entra ID for managing a large group of users. For a small user base accessing your Azure DevOps organization, Microsoft accounts are sufficient. For more information, see About accessing Azure DevOps with Microsoft Entra ID.

For on-premises deployments, AD is recommended for managing a large group of users. For more information, see Set up groups for use in on-premises deployments.

Authentication methods, integrating with other services and apps

Other applications and services can integrate with Azure DevOps. To access your account without repeatedly asking for user credentials, apps can use the following authentication methods:

  • Personal access tokens (PATs) to generate tokens on your behalf for:

    • Accessing specific resources or activities, like builds or work items
    • Clients like Xcode and NuGet that require usernames and passwords as basic credentials and don't support Microsoft account and Microsoft Entra features like multifactor authentication
    • Accessing Azure DevOps REST APIs

  • Azure DevOps OAuth to generate tokens on users' behalf for accessing REST APIs. The Accounts and Profiles APIs support only OAuth.

  • SSH authentication to generate encryption keys for yourself when you use Linux, macOS, or Windows running Git for Windows and can't use Git credential managers or PATs for HTTPS authentication.

  • Service principals or managed identities to generate Microsoft Entra tokens on behalf of an application or service, typically automating workflows that need to access Azure DevOps resources. Most actions traditionally performed by a service account and a PAT can be done using a service principal or managed identity.

By default, your account or collection allows access for all authentication methods. You can limit access by specifically restricting each method. When you deny access to an authentication method, no app can use that method to access your account. Any app that previously had access receives an authentication error and can't access your account.

For more information, see the following articles:

Authorization

Authorization verifies that the identity attempting to connect has the necessary permissions to access a service, feature, function, object, or method. Authorization always occurs after successful authentication. If a connection isn't authenticated, it fails before any authorization checks are performed. Even if authentication succeeds, a specific action might still be disallowed if the user or group lacks authorization.

Authorization depends on the permissions assigned to the user, either directly or through membership in a security group or security role. Access levels and feature flags can also manage access to specific features. For more information about these authorization methods, see Get started with permissions, access, and security groups.

Security namespaces and permissions

Security namespaces determine user access levels for specific actions on resources.

  • Each resource family, such as work items or Git repositories, has a unique namespace.
  • Each namespace contains zero or more access control lists (ACLs).
    • Each ACL includes a token, an inherit flag, and access control entries (ACEs).
    • Each ACE has an identity descriptor, an allowed permissions bitmask, and a denied permissions bitmask.

For more information, see Security namespaces and permission reference.

Security policies

To secure your organization and code, you can set various policies. Specifically, you can enable or disable the following policies:

General

Application connection and security policies

Use the Microsoft Entra tenant policy to restrict creating new organizations to desired users only. This policy is turned off by default and only valid when the organization is connected to Microsoft Entra ID. For more information, see Restrict organization creation.

The following policies determine the access granted to users and applications within your organizations:

User policies

  • External guest access (Only valid when the organization is connected to Microsoft Entra ID.): When enabled, invitations can be sent to email accounts of users who aren't members of the tenant's Microsoft Entra ID via the Users page. For more information, see Add external users to your organization.
  • Allow team and project administrators to invite new users: Only valid when the organization is connected to Microsoft Entra ID. When enabled, team and project administrators can add users via the Users page. For more information, see Restrict new user invitations from Project and Team Administrators.
  • Request access: Only valid when the organization is connected to Microsoft Entra ID. When enabled, users can request access to a resource. A request results in an email notification to the administrators asking for review and access, as needed. For more information, see Add external users to your organization.
  • Invite GitHub users: Only valid when the organization isn't connected to Microsoft Entra ID. When enabled, administrators can add users based on their GitHub user accounts from the Users page. For more information, see Connect to GitHub/FAQs.

Project-Scoped Users group

By default, users added to an organization can view all organization and project information and settings, including user lists, project lists, billing details, usage data, and more.

Important

  • The limited visibility features described in this section apply only to interactions through the web portal. With the REST APIs or azure devops CLI commands, project members can access the restricted data.
  • Guest users who are members in the limited group with default access in Microsoft Entra ID, can't search for users with the people picker. When the preview feature's turned off for the organization, or when guest users aren't members of the limited group, guest users can search all Microsoft Entra users, as expected.

To restrict certain users, such as Stakeholders, Microsoft Entra guest users, or members of a specific security group, you can enable the Limit user visibility and collaboration to specific projects preview feature for the organization. Once that's enabled, any user or group added to the Project-Scoped Users group, are restricted in the following ways:

  • Can only access the Overview and Projects pages of Organization settings.
  • Can only connect and view those projects to which they've been added to explicitly.
  • Can only select user and group identities added explicitly to the project they're connected to.

For more information, see Manage your organization, Limit user visibility for projects and more and Manage preview features.

Warning

Enabling the Limit user visibility and collaboration to specific projects preview feature prevents project-scoped users from searching for users added to the organization through Microsoft Entra group membership, rather than through an explicit user invitation. This is an unexpected behavior, and a resolution is in progress. To resolve this issue, disable the Limit user visibility and collaboration to specific projects preview feature for the organization.

Git repository and branch policies

To secure your code, you can set various Git repository and branch policies. For more information, see the following articles.

Azure Repos and Azure Pipelines security

Since repositories and build and release pipelines pose unique security challenges, additional features beyond the features discussed in this article are employed. For more information, see the following articles.

Next steps

Permissions and groups reference