Azure Identity Broker plugin for Python¶

This package extends the Azure Identity library by providing supplemental credentials for authenticating via an authentication broker.

An authentication broker is an application that runs on a user’s machine that manages the authentication handshakes and token maintenance for connected accounts. Currently, only the Windows authentication broker, Web Account Manager (WAM), is supported.

Source code | Package (PyPI) | API reference documentation | Microsoft Entra ID documentation

Getting started¶

Install the package¶

Install the Azure Identity Broker plugin for Python with pip:

pip install azure-identity-broker

Key concepts¶

This package enables broker support via InteractiveBrowserBrokerCredential which is a subclass of the InteractiveBrowserCredential of the Azure Identity library.

Parent window handles¶

When authenticating interactively via InteractiveBrowserBrokerCredential, a parent window handle is required to ensure that the authentication dialog is shown correctly over the requesting window. In the context of graphical user interfaces on devices, a window handle is a unique identifier that the operating system assigns to each window. For the Windows operating system, this handle is an integer value that serves as a reference to a specific window.

Microsoft account (MSA) passthrough¶

Microsoft accounts (MSA) are personal accounts created by users to access Microsoft services. MSA passthrough is a legacy configuration which enables users to get tokens to resources which normally don’t accept MSA logins. This feature is only available to first-party applications. Users authenticating with an application that is configured to use MSA passthrough can set enable_msa_passthrough to True inside InteractiveBrowserBrokerCredential to allow these personal accounts to be listed by WAM.

Redirect URIs¶

Microsoft Entra applications rely on redirect URIs to determine where to send the authentication response after a user has logged in. To enable brokered authentication through WAM, a redirect URI matching the following pattern should be registered to the application:

ms-appx-web://Microsoft.AAD.BrokerPlugin/{client_id}

Examples¶

Authenticate with `InteractiveBrowserBrokerCredential`¶

This example demonstrates using InteractiveBrowserBrokerCredential as a broker-enabled credential for authenticating with the BlobServiceClient from the azure-storage-blob library. Here, the win32gui module from the pywin32 package is used to get the current window.

import win32gui
from azure.identity.broker import InteractiveBrowserBrokerCredential
from azure.storage.blob import BlobServiceClient

# Get the handle of the current window
current_window_handle = win32gui.GetForegroundWindow()

credential = InteractiveBrowserBrokerCredential(parent_window_handle=current_window_handle)
client = BlobServiceClient(account_url, credential=credential)

To bypass the account selection dialog and use the default broker account, set the use_default_broker_account argument to True. The credential will attempt to silently use the default broker account. If using the default account fails, the credential will fall back to interactive authentication.

credential = InteractiveBrowserBrokerCredential(
    parent_window_handle=current_window_handle,
    use_default_broker_account=True
)

Troubleshooting¶

See the Azure Identity troubleshooting guide for details on how to diagnose various failure scenarios.

Next steps¶

Client library support¶

Client and management libraries listed on the Azure SDK release page that support Microsoft Entra authentication accept credentials from this library. You can learn more about using these libraries in their documentation, which is linked from the release page.

Known issues¶

This library doesn’t support Azure AD B2C.

For other open issues, refer to the library’s GitHub repository.

Provide feedback¶

If you encounter bugs or have suggestions, open an issue.

Contributing¶

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.