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1. Mfa For Remote Desktop

Hello Everyone,

We have planned to enable MFA for Azure VM. We need to know the possibilities for achieve the MFA while connect the Azure VM using Remote desktop connection. Questions: Can we achieve the MFA. The combination of Azure MFA and RD Gateway means that your users can access their work environments from anywhere while performing strong authentication. Since Windows Authentication for terminal services is not supported for Server 2012 R2, use. Microsoft has done a great job adding features to the cloud platform over the last year, one of which is Azure MFA (Multi Factor Authentication) which allows a user to login with his/hers username. After Part 1, we have Web Application Proxy installed and this is the configuration blog of WAP Deployment. We will also share the configuration required.

In First article of this series, we discussed the general concept of Azure Multifactor Authentication, and how MFA participate in securing your on premise environment and Hybrid one if exist.

In this article we will go in more technical details about how to use Azure Multifactor Authentication using a real example.

One of my customers have a server which contains a highly secure data and only around 6 users have a remote desktop access to that server, the customer need to add more security layer for accessing this server.

I suggest the customer to use Azure MFA, since it will add a highly secure layer to the remote desktop access to the server in addition to the low cost of this service.

so let’s start the technical steps to do that, remember that we need to integrate remote desktop protocol access (RDP) with Azure MFA.

in this part we will prepare the Azure MFA provider and download the MFA server setup files, In next part we will deploy and configure the MFA server to secure the RDP.

First of all let’s summarize the requirements to implement this scenario:

1- we need an azure account (Azure Tenant) to configure and install the Azure setup, if you don’t have account you can sign up for one month as trial, for more info follow this link : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/

2- integrate RPD protocol with Azure MFA is not supported in windows 2012 R2 (until the date of this article), which means if you need to integrate RPD with Azure MFA you need to install windows 2012 and earlier such as windows 2008 R2.

3- To secure the remote desktop protocol (RDP) with Azure Multifactor, you must install the Azure MFA server in the same RDP server, in other word assume you have a server called “SRV1”, then you should install the MFA setup in the “SRV1” server, if you look back to point #2 you can conclude that you cannot secure the RDP for windows 2012 R2 (until the date of this article).

This deployment called MFA stand alone server since all deployment will be on premise and no integration will be done between local AD and Azure AD.

Now, log in to your azure tenant using https://manage.windowsazure.com, go to active directory tab from left pane:

Now choose MULTI-FACTOR AUTH PROVIDERS option from the top options,

Click New:

MULTI-FACTOR AUTH PROVIDERS used to install the MFA server setup files, also the provider will be responsible for the usage calculations and you can customize your setup from the provide such as fraud alerts.

Now choose App Services -> Active Directory -> MULTI-FACTOR AUTH PROVIDERS – Quick Create.

Name: choose any meaning full name for your provider.
Usage Model: you have two options here, per user enabled and per authentication, this option cannot be changed later, if you need to change it later you must create new provider, the difference between the two model is how Microsoft will charge you, if you choose per enabled user then you will be charged for how many users using MFA regardless of how many actual authentication occurs, if you choose per authentication you will be charged every time the users try to authenticate using Azure MFA.
Directory: choose Don’t link a directory since we will install the stand alone MFA server without integration with Azure AD.

After you fill the required information, click create:

after less than minute a new provider will be available in your tenant as shown below:

Click in the provider just created, then click in the MANAGE button in the bottom of the portal page:

Drivers msi. The MFA Management page will appear, click in Downloads button as below:

in the download server page, it’s list the supported OS versions for MFA server including windows 2012 R2 and this is not what I said before, be smart I mentioned that the RPD feature is not supported in windows 2012 R2 but there is a lot of features that work in windows 2012 R2, Now click in Generate Activation Credentials button to generate the credential which will be used to register your server in MFA provider during the setup.

Email and password credential will be generated, these credential valid to be used within 10 minutes, if you take more than 10 min to start the setup you can re generate a new credentials.

Now click the download text to start the downloading of the MFA setup:

After the download complete, copy the setup file to the server you need to secure the RDP on it and double click on the setup to start the installation.

In Next Part we will continue our demo by installing the multifactor server and configuring it to secure remote desktop access. Kobo usb devices driver download.

So keep tuned 🙂

About Blogger …

Ahmad Yasin (MCSA office 365, MCSE : Messaging, Azure Certified)

Mfa For Remote Desktop