Azure AD Quickstart

Prerequisites

You will need:

Features

The following provisioning features are supported:

Overview

Step By Step Instructions

Step 1. Create Groups

You'll grant access to your hosts via Active Directory Groups. If you don't already have groups set up, you'll want to create a group for each kind of user access to your servers. For example, you might have a group for ssh users, and one for sudo users.

In the Azure portal, start at the Groups blade.

When creating your groups, give them names and accept the defaults on all other settings.

Step 2. Tell us your directory's Tenant ID

Step 3. Add the Smallstep SSH Azure Enterprise Application

Sign in to Smallstep SSH

🤦‍♂️ If you encounter "The username may be incorrect", you'll need to use a different account to accept the application into your tenant. Specifically, you cannot use a Microsoft Account or a Guest account; the account must be an Azure AD account.

Assign groups to your application

In the Azure Portal Enterprise Applications blade, you should now see Smallstep SSH. Open it.

Choose Users and Groups on the left:

Your Users and Groups list should now look something like this:

Step 4. Enable user provisioning (SCIM) in Azure

Alternative userName Attribute Mappings

The userName attribute determines the name of the POSIX account that will be created when users connect to a host. By default, the expression returns the everything before the @ in the UPN, converted to lowercase:

ToLower(Replace([userPrincipalName], , "(?<Suffix>@(.)*)", "Suffix", "", , ), )

Here are some alternative UPN expressions that have been useful to customers:

Remove dots . from usernames

Some users have dotted UPNs, and POSIX usernames without dots. Linux usernames with . in them are POSIX-compliant (IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, section 3.437) and in practice dotted usernames work fine on many systems. If your UPNs contain dots, you can configure the userName attribute mapping to remove them. Use the following expression for your userName attribute:

ToLower(Replace(Replace([userPrincipalName], , "(?<Suffix>@(.)*)", "Suffix", "", , ), ".", , ,"", , ))

Convert bill.gates@microsoft.com to bgates:

ToLower(Replace(Replace([userPrincipalName], , "(?<=^.{1}).\w+.\.", "", "", , ), , "(@(.)*)","","" , ,))

Turn on Provisioning

🤦‍♂️ There's a quirk in Microsoft's UI here, and you may see an error when saving after turning provisioning on. If so, wait 60 seconds and try Save again.

Step 5. Confirm the directory connection

Return to the Smallstep dashboard.

Don't see your users and groups? Microsoft's SCIM service may add a 40-minute delay after you set it up. You can force an update by clicking Restart provisioning in the Provisioning panel. Even then, it may take a minute to sync with Smallstep.

Azure AD Configuration Complete

Troubleshooting Tips