Does Conditional Access override per user MFA?

In the blog post, I thought to show how to easily transition from per-user based MFA to a Conditional Access based MFA.

What is Conditional Access? “..The modern security perimeter now extends beyond an organization’s network to include user and device identity. Organizations can utilize these identity signals as part of their access control decisions… Conditional Access is the tool used by Azure Active Directory to bring signals together, to make decisions, and enforce organizational policies. Conditional Access is at the heart of the new identity driven control plane.”

Check Azure AD Premium license

Check first if your organization has either Azure AD Premium Plan 1 og 2. Log into Microsoft Azure. In the portal, navigate to Azure Active Directory > Overview. In my example below, Azure AD Premium P2 is shown.

Check per-user MFA status

Log into Microsoft 365 admin center. Navigate to Users > Active Users > Multi-factor authentication.

A new page will open, showing all the users, and their multi-factor autentication status. In the example below (in norwegian this one..), we have a couple of users who have MFA enabled, some enforced and some others in disabled state.

Connect to Azure AD using PowerShell

To start our transition from per-user MFA to Conditional Access, you’ll need to start Windows PowerShell as an administrator and connect to Azure AD using the following in cmdlet:

Connect-MsolService

This cmdlet is part of the MSOnline module. If you haven’t got this module installed in your system, you can install it by typing the following in your elevated PowerShell console:

Install-Module MSOnline

Convert per-user MFA to Conditional Access based MFA with PowerShell

When we are connected to Azure AD with PowerShell, Microsoft has luckily provided the community with a great script that we could use for helping us with the convertion.

# Sets the MFA requirement state
function Set-MfaState {

    [CmdletBinding()]
    param(
        [Parameter(ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$True)]
        $ObjectId,
        [Parameter(ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$True)]
        $UserPrincipalName,
        [ValidateSet("Disabled","Enabled","Enforced")]
        $State
    )

    Process {
        Write-Verbose ("Setting MFA state for user '{0}' to '{1}'." -f $ObjectId, $State)
        $Requirements = @()
        if ($State -ne "Disabled") {
            $Requirement =
                [Microsoft.Online.Administration.StrongAuthenticationRequirement]::new()
            $Requirement.RelyingParty = "*"
            $Requirement.State = $State
            $Requirements += $Requirement
        }

        Set-MsolUser -ObjectId $ObjectId -UserPrincipalName $UserPrincipalName `
                     -StrongAuthenticationRequirements $Requirements
    }
}

# Disable MFA for all users
Get-MsolUser -All | Set-MfaState -State Disabled

Run the script to disable MFA for all users. You’ll find both the script and some great documentation by visiting this site on Microsoft Docs.

Create MFA Conditional Access policy

In the previous step, you’ll disabled MFA for all users when running the PowerShell script. If some user logs in with their credentials at this time, they will not be asked for MFA. It’s time to create our new Conditional Access MFA Policy.

Log in to the Azure portal . Open the menu and browse to Azure Active Directory > Security > Conditional Access. Click on New policy.

Name your policy. In my example, I went for MFA All Users. Select All Users and All Cloud Apps. Under Access control > Grant, select Grant access, and enable Require multi-factor autentication. Enable the policy and click Save.

In a few minutes our new Conditional policy will take affect. At this time, you’ll successfully moved from per-user MFA to Conditional Access based MFA. The last step is to verify the changes and confirm that it’s in working order.

Verify the transition

All users show the MFA status disabled on the Microsoft 365 Multi-Factor Autentication page.

When logging into, for example portal.office.com, with an account that already had MFA configured, it will work again without need of completing the MFA setup again.

Any user that did not have MFA enabled, or any new users created in the future will be asked to go through the MFA setup before they will be able to log in again, for example into portal.office.com as mentioned earlier.

Does Conditional Access enable MFA?

Does Conditional Access override security defaults?

Does Conditional Access require modern authentication?

What can be used to bypass MFA authentication in Azure?