Book Image

Mastering Azure Security - Second Edition

By : Mustafa Toroman, Tom Janetscheck
Book Image

Mastering Azure Security - Second Edition

By: Mustafa Toroman, Tom Janetscheck

Overview of this book

Security is integrated into every cloud, but this makes users put their guard down as they take cloud security for granted. Although the cloud provides higher security, keeping their resources secure is one of the biggest challenges many organizations face as threats are constantly evolving. Microsoft Azure offers a shared responsibility model that can address any challenge with the right approach. Revised to cover product updates up to early 2022, this book will help you explore a variety of services and features from Microsoft Azure that can help you overcome challenges in cloud security. You'll start by learning the most important security concepts in Azure, their implementation, and then advance to understanding how to keep resources secure. The book will guide you through the tools available for monitoring Azure security and enforcing security and governance the right way. You'll also explore tools to detect threats before they can do any real damage and those that use machine learning and AI to analyze your security logs and detect anomalies. By the end of this cloud security book, you'll have understood cybersecurity in the cloud and be able to design secure solutions in Microsoft Azure.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Identity and Governance
5
Section 2: Cloud Infrastructure Security
9
Section 3: Security Management

Understanding passwordless authentication

In a world in which passwords are not enough to protect identities, we need another, more secure, approach to further protect identities. Passwords can be guessed or phished without physically having access to a user's device or storage. With passwordless authentication, Azure AD offers two different methods to sign in to a cloud-based user account without needing passwords anymore.

You can use the Microsoft Authenticator app, the app you already know from the Understanding multi-factor authentication section. With this method, you are prompted to approve your sign-in by tapping or entering a number in the Authenticator app, as shown in Figure 3.41:

Figure 3.41 – Phone-based passwordless authentication

All the user has to do is register the app as an MFA option and then, in the smartphone app, choose Enable phone sign-in from the drop-down menu. After following the instructions in the app, the user can...