Detections
Analytics

5.2.2.4 (L1) Ensure Sign-in frequency is enabled and browser sessions are not persistent for Administrative users

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Information

In complex deployments, organizations might have a need to restrict authentication sessions. Conditional Access policies allow for the targeting of specific user accounts. Some scenarios might include:

 - Resource access from an unmanaged or shared device
 - Access to sensitive information from an external network
 - High-privileged users
 - Business-critical applications

Ensure Sign-in frequency periodic reauthentication does not exceed 4 hours for E3 tenants, or 24 hours for E5 tenants using Privileged Identity Management.

Ensure Persistent browser session is set to Never persistent

Note: This CA policy can be added to the previous CA policy in this benchmark "Ensure multifactor authentication is enabled for all users in administrative roles"

Forcing a time out for MFA will help ensure that sessions are not kept alive for an indefinite period of time, ensuring that browser sessions are not persistent will help in prevention of drive-by attacks in web browsers, this also prevents creation and saving of session cookies leaving nothing for an attacker to take.

NOTE: Nessus has not performed this check. Please review the benchmark to ensure target compliance.

Solution

To remediate using the UI:

 - Navigate to Microsoft Entra admin center

https://entra.microsoft.com/

.
 - Click to expand Protection > Conditional Access Select Policies
 - Click New policy
 - Under Users include Select users and groups and check Directory roles
 - At a minimum, include the directory roles listed below in this section of the document.
 - Under Target resources include All cloud apps and do not create any exclusions.
 - Under Grant select Grant Access and check Require multifactor authentication
 - Under Session select Sign-in frequency select Periodic reauthentication and set it to 4 hours for E3 tenants. E5 tenants with PIM can be set to a maximum value of 24 hours
 - Check Persistent browser session then select Never persistent in the drop-down menu.

 - Under Enable policy set it to Report Only until the organization is ready to enable it.

At minimum these directory roles should be included in the policy:

 - Application administrator
 - Authentication administrator
 - Billing administrator
 - Cloud application administrator
 - Conditional Access administrator
 - Exchange administrator
 - Global administrator
 - Global reader
 - Helpdesk administrator
 - Password administrator
 - Privileged authentication administrator
 - Privileged role administrator
 - Security administrator
 - SharePoint administrator
 - User administrator

Impact:

Users with Administrative roles will be prompted at the frequency set for MFA.

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/benchmarks/17682

Item Details

References: CSCv7|16.3

Plugin: microsoft_azure

Control ID: 91feab7f6bfade007f6c51079da7849ac096633c1a7803ffa8aa7edb82a94740