{"id":606318,"date":"2026-04-25T21:42:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T21:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/606318\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T21:42:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T21:42:13","slug":"hackers-can-abuse-entra-agent-id-administrator-role-to-hijack-service-principals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/606318\/","title":{"rendered":"Hackers Can Abuse Entra Agent ID Administrator Role to Hijack Service Principals"},"content":{"rendered":"

A critical scope overreach vulnerability was recently identified in the Microsoft Entra Agent Identity Platform. The newly introduced Agent ID Administrator role allowed accounts to hijack arbitrary service<\/a> principals and escalate privileges across the entire tenant.<\/p>\n

Microsoft has fully patched this behavior across all cloud environments as of April 2026.<\/p>\n

How the Permission Boundary Breaks<\/p>\n

The Microsoft Agent Identity Platform is a preview feature that provides artificial intelligence agents with identities using blueprints, agent identities, and agent users.<\/p>\n

To manage these non-human entities, Microsoft introduced the Agent ID Administrator role. According to Microsoft documentation<\/a>, this role was strictly scoped to manage only agent-related objects.<\/p>\n

\"AA discrepancy in the Microsoft Entra \u201cprivileged\u201d indicator will be fixed(source : SilverFort)<\/p>\n

However, because agent identities are built on top of standard application and service principal primitives, a critical scoping gap emerged.<\/p>\n

Silverfort researchers found that actions like updating agent identity owners allowed administrators to modify the ownership of any service principal in the tenant.<\/p>\n

A user with the Agent ID Administrator<\/a> role could assign themselves as the owner of a completely unrelated, high-privileged service principal.<\/p>\n

Once ownership was established, the attacker could generate new credentials and authenticate as that targeted application.<\/p>\n

If the compromised service principal held elevated directory roles or high-impact Graph API permissions, this takeover primitive provided a direct path to full compromise of the environment.<\/p>\n

\"AttackAttack Flow(Source: SilverFort)<\/p>\n

Attackers leveraging this vulnerability would naturally target the most powerful non-human identities in a network.<\/p>\n

According to Silverfort research<\/a>, organizations should proactively identify service principals with admin-level directory roles and secure them appropriately.<\/p>\n

Administrators can utilize the Azure CLI alongside jq to query the Microsoft Graph API<\/a> for these vulnerable configurations.<\/p>\n

The following script discovers service principals with privileged directory roles.<\/p>\n

BASE=”https:\/\/graph.microsoft.com”
roles=”$(az rest -m GET –url “${BASE}\/beta\/roleManagement\/directory\/roleDefinitions?\\$filter=isPrivileged eq true&\\$select=id,displayName” -o json)”
u=”${BASE}\/beta\/roleManagement\/directory\/roleAssignments?\\$expand=principal(\\$select=id,displayName)&\\$top=999″
{
echo -e “SP_NAME\\tSP_ID\\tROLE”
echo -e “——–\\t——\\t—-“
while :; do
j=”$(az rest -m GET –url “$u” -o json 2>\/dev\/null)” || break
jq -r –argjson roles “$roles” ‘
($roles.value | map(select(.displayName|test(“Reader”;”i”)|not) | {key:.id, value:.displayName}) | from_entries) as $r
| .value[]
| select(.principal.”@odata.type”==”#microsoft.graph.servicePrincipal”)
| select($r[.roleDefinitionId] != null)
| [.principal.displayName, (.principal.id \/\/ .principalId), $r[.roleDefinitionId]] | @tsv
‘ <<<“$j”
u=”$(jq -r ‘.”@odata.nextLink”\/\/empty’ <<<“$j”)”
[[ -z “$u” ]] && break
done | sort -t$’\\t’ -k1,1
} | column -t -s $’\\t’<\/p>\n

Microsoft acknowledged the issue and deployed a fix that prevents the Agent ID Administrator role from managing the owners of non-agent service principals.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

While the immediate threat is resolved, the underlying risk of service principal ownership abuse remains a high-value attack path.<\/p>\n

Security teams must actively monitor their audit logs for successful events involving the addition of owners or credentials to service principals.<\/p>\n

Because many tenants contain at least one privileged service principal, treating these identities as critical infrastructure is essential to preventing future privilege escalation attacks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Follow us on Google News<\/a>, LinkedIn<\/a>, and X<\/a> for daily cybersecurity updates. Contact us<\/a> to feature your stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A critical scope overreach vulnerability was recently identified in the Microsoft Entra Agent Identity Platform. The newly introduced…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606319,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[74],"class_list":{"0":"post-606318","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}