Steve Spencer's Blog

Following on from my previous blog post (http://blogs.recneps.net/post/Setting-up-Azure-Key-Vault-with-Audit-logging) which explains how to set up Azure key vault with logging enabled, this post explains how to access the details of these logs and also to create an alert so you can see if someone is accessing the key vault from an unknown ip address (for example)

Open the Azure portal and navigate to the Resource Groups section and pick the resource group that we configured last time which contains the key vault and log analytics resources

Click your log analytics item, to open Log Analytics.

You can then select Log Search

This screen allows you to create your own query or select from existing ones.

Selecting “All Collected Logs” will show you the logs for the last day. I’ve highlighted the areas where you can change the time period, see the query and also click on Advanced Analytics to give a richer environment for analysing your logs.

If you want to query just for the Key Vault Audit logs then you can use the following query:

search * | where Category=="AuditEvent"

This will default to a list view, but clicking the Table button will format the data in an easier to read table.

You can sort and filter on the column headers. This can also be achieved using the order by clause as follows:

search * |where Category=="AuditEvent"  | order by TimeGenerated desc

A blog post discussing the query language can be found here

We are interested in all calls where someone has tried to access a Secret from the key vault. For that we are looking for an AuditEvent with an OperationName of SecretGet. If we also want to restrict the columns we retrieve then you can use “project” e.g.

search * | where Category=="AuditEvent"  and OperationName == "SecretGet"
| order by TimeGenerated desc
| project TimeGenerated, OperationName, CallerIPAddress, ResultSignature, requestUri_s

Now we are familiar with writing queries we can look at alerting. I’d like to set up an alert when the key vault is access from an IP Address other than the one where my application is running. This can be done as follows:

search * | where Category=="AuditEvent" and CallerIPAddress != "51.140.184.51"

This ip address is actually the Azure Portal and is shown when you view the resource group that contains the key vault.I’m using this ip address so that I will actually get an alert (at the wrong time) when my application runs

Click New Alert Rule

The following screen should appear

The Alert Target should be the Log Analytics we’ve been using and the Target Criteria (when clicked) should show the query we’ve just written

We need to configure the rule for when this alert should be triggered. I’m interested when at least 1 attempt has been made in the last 5 minutes to access the Key Vault from an unknown location, so I set the threshold to be zero and click Done. We’ve now configured the logic to determine when the event is fired. Now we need to say what we want to happen when it fires.Firstly we need to give the alert a name and description

Now we need to configure how we are alerted. For this you need to create an action group. An action group allows you to define a collection of activities that will happen when the alert is fired. Click New Action Group

Action Types can be any of the following:

An action group can have multiple actions and you can select both email and SMS in a single action.Once you have created your Action Group you need to select in then click “Create alert rule”

Your alert is now set up and running. You can view/edit alerts by selecting Monitor in the Azure Portal

then click Alerts (preview), you will be able to see the alerts that have fired.

Click Manage Rules to edit the alert.

When the alert is fired I will get an email containing the details of the alert.

Log analytics is a powerful tool and whilst this series of posts has been related to auditing of Key Vault we can use log analytics for a wide variety of log sources such as Application Insights. We can also use the same mechanism for alerting to these other log sources,

The next post is a video that shows you how to connect existing log files to log analytics

Azure Key Vault is a good way to share secrets with your partners in a way that allows you to have control over the access to each of the assets in Azure. We also need to know who is accessing the resources and from where so that we can monitor for suspicious activity. This post will talk through setting up the key vault and then configuring logging to keep track of the audit information for your certificates, keys and secrets. For each application that you want to access your resources you will need to create some credentials that the application can use.

To allow an application to access key vault an App Registration needs to be added to Azure Active Directory (AAD). This effectively sets up a username and password that the application can use for credentials.

Open the azure portal (http://portal.azure.com) and navigate to Active Directory.

Click "App registrations"

Then "New application registration"

Name needs to be unique within your AD, select Web API/API and enter sign-on url. If you not building a website then enter anything in here. It might be useful to use a url related to your existing domain with application name appended. It doesn’t need to be a valid url. The click “Create”

Once created copy the Application ID as this is equivalent to a username to be used when calling the Key Vault in code. You now need to create the password.

Click Settings then Keys

Enter a name in the description field and select a duration, then click Save. The new key value will be displayed. You will need to copy this as it will not be visible again once you leave this page. This will be used as the password.

Now create the Key Vault. To do that it is a good idea to put it in a specific resource group, especially if you are creating a set of resources that the key vault is going to access or if you are going to setup third party access. Once the Resource Group has been created, select it and add a Key Vault. When the Create Key Vault panel appears, click Access Policies, click "Add new"

Pick the application you just created in AAD and select Get in Secret permissions, Save then go back to the main Key Vault pane and click Create

You have just given the application we created earlier access to just retrieving secrets. As you can see from the access policy you can give the application permissions to access a combination of Keys, Secrets and Certificates with the minimum access of Get. The Key Vault security is at the vault level and you cannot protect individual secrets at the user level. By granting only Get access on the Secret the application will not be able to list the Secrets available and will only be able to retrieve secrets it knows the names of.

Now the Key vault is set up and can be accessed, we want to know who is accessing the vault and from where. Out of the box this is not enabled and requires additional configuration and resources to allow us to be able to retrieve this audit information. This is achieved by enabling diagnostic logs in the Key Vault.

Before you can enable this you need to create a new storage account in this resource group to store the logs, then add Application Insights to the resource group

Once these have been provisioned, navigate to the Key Vault you just created & click Diagnostic logs

Click "Turn on diagnostics"

Select “Archive to Storage Account” and Pick the storage account you’ve just created

Select “Send to Log Analytics” and Create a new OMS workspace in your resource group

Once created select this for Log Analytics

select the AuditEvent log and click Save. 

Now any changes to the Key Vault plus any access from your application will be logged and visible via log analytics. There’s a 10 – 15 minute delay between accessing the Key Vault and the log appearing.

To Add a Secret to the vault, Navigate to the vault, click Secrets then Add

Select Manual from the Upload options, enter a name and the secret

Remember the name you gave the Secret as you will need this in your code when accessing the key vault. This secret will now have a unique identifier that you will use. The one I’ve just created is:

https://recneps-vault.vault.azure.net/secrets/recnepssvsb-key

You should see in the logs this secret being created and also when it gets accessed.

Accessing the KeyVault in C# can be seen here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/key-vault/key-vault-use-from-web-application

The application in the example uses settings as defined below:

ClientID is the Application ID we created in the application registration in AD

ClientSecret is the key you created (that you had to save as it wasn’t visible again) as part of creating the application registration in AD.

Each Key, Secret and Certificate has a unique url which is used as the SecretURI e.g. https://recneps-vault.vault.azure.net/secrets/recnepssvsb-key

You now have your key vault set up with audit logging and are able to access it. My next blog post will talk you through how to access the logs and also how to set up alerting