Microsoft Graph Azure AD User Out Of Sync

0
votes

When I log onto the Microsoft Graph Explorer with my Microsoft account and run the following query https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/ I get the correct user returned.

On Azure AD (using the same login) I created an application with a key and when I sign in through c# using Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.ClientCredentials with a token for resource https://graph.microsoft.com and run the same query I get a completely different user. They are out of sync and I'm baffled.

Any ideas? Should I create a new Azure account as I've had the Azure account from day 1 and I'm only doing this now to test for a client request.

1
azure-active-directorymicrosoft-graph-api

1 Answers

0
votes

Don't create a new Azure account. When you are using Graph Explorer, are you signed in with a user from your Azure AD tenant? If not, Graph Explorer will default to use a demo tenant for your queries.

Also (if you have more than one tenant) you need to make sure that you select the correct tenant as part of the token acquisition (from https://login.microsoftonline.com/{tenantId | tenantDomain}. If you want the results to match between Graph Explorer and your app, the tenant the signed-in user belongs to (for Graph Explorer case) and the tenant used by your app needs to be the same.

UPDATE based on comment below:

I think I know what's going on here. In graph explorer, you are signing in with your personal account - and it's showing you profile data of that personal account, including the unique ID for this account in the Microsoft Account system. In this case you aren't signing into an Azure AD tenant at all. Microsoft Graph supports access from both personal and commercial accounts.

Now, additionally, I'm guessing when you signed up for an Azure subscription, you used this personal account. When you do that, it creates an Azure AD tenant, and creates a guest user in that tenant that is (linked to) your personal account - this account is also configured as an admin account. This mechanism allows you to sign in with your personal account (authenticated by the Microsoft Account system) into an Azure AD tenant, because the personal account maps to this guest user in your tenant. In your application, you are getting an app token to your Azure AD tenant. When you query the tenant for users, you don't see any user with the same id or email address as you did with graph explorer. However if you actually look at the userPrincipalName, you'll see it should be a mangled form of the original email address of your personal account. This indicates that this Azure AD user account in your tenant is a guest/external user (similar to a foreign principal).

Hope this helps,