Today, I faced the challenge to grant a remote consultant temporary access to a VM in Azure.

Since, Bastion may be a cleaner way to access the service, we decided to try JIT via the Azure portal as it gives you a quick and easy access protected with MFA. I decided to AZURE AD federations and granted access to his account on his own domain and request MFA (External Access).

After giving the account permission to login to the VM the user got an error when invoking the JIT. The permission does not allow the user to request JIT. When the user clicked the connect option from Azure portal VM UI, it was showing JIT was not enabled on this particular VM. Therefore, the connection was failing. But JIT was enabled on the VM, and a subscription owner/contributor were able to see “Request Access” when clicked Connect.

I learned that one option will be to use the reader role. But that would have given extra visibility to the VM that I was not interested in exposing.

The solution was to create a custom role at the VM level and assigned the external user to the role.

The permission needed are as follows:

If you prefer to use the JSON, you may use the following:

{
    "properties": {
        "roleName": "Just In Time (JIT) Request",
        "description": "Created by Clopez. Allow non-administrator to request JIT",
        "assignableScopes": [
            "/subscriptions/bdd4aef1-176f-46b9-b150-40930ced4f32/resourceGroups/Falcon1"
        ],
        "permissions": [
            {
                "actions": [
                    "Microsoft.Security/locations/jitNetworkAccessPolicies/initiate/action",
                    "Microsoft.Security/locations/jitNetworkAccessPolicies/read",
                    "Microsoft.Security/policies/read",
                    "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/read"
                ],
                "notActions": [],
                "dataActions": [],
                "notDataActions": []
            }
        ]
    }
}

The result was positive, and now the user has the options to request the JIT.