App secret valid longer than 24 months

As you might know, it’s only possible to create app registrations secrets that are valid for a maximum of 24 months. At least in the Azure UI. The process of creating it in the UI I described in an earlier post. In this blog post, you will learn how to create an app secret valid longer than 24 months.

In the section “Summary” you can find everything you’ll need in case you don’t need all the explanations.

Problem

In general, I think it is a good idea to change a secret regularly. The Problem with the Power Platform is that we have to do a bunch of manual stuff whenever the secret expires. For example, every connection reference using the App registration needs to be reconnected manually.

Which means when you use a App registration with parts of the Power Platform you normally want the secret to be valid longer than 24 months. As mentioned this is not possible to achieve in the Azure portal as seen on the following screenshots.

Solution

The solution is to create the secret via a console. With that, one could create secrets that last as long as you’d need.

There are two different ways of doing it I know of.

• Via the Azure CLI prompt in the Azure portal. As described on Tip #1404 of CRM Tip of the Day
• Via a Azure cmdlet called New-AzureADApplicationPasswordCredentials

In this post, we will take a look at the second approach.

All the credit for this should go to Isaac Stephens (LinkedIn & Twitter) for coming up with the solution. As well as Gayan Perera (LinkedIn) for letting me know.

Implementation/Configuration

So let’s get to work and implement/configure our solution.

Install AzureAD Module

First of all, we have to install the AzureAD PowerShell module.

To do so we open an Admin elevated PowerShell and type the following command.

Install-Module AzureAD

Define Dates

The next step is to define the start and end date in between the secret should be valid.

First, we save today’s date in a variable called “startDate”.

$startDate = Get-Date

We then add X years to it and save it as the end date. In our case, we add 10 years.

$endDate = $startDate.AddYears(10)

Connect to Azure

To be able to execute the command we would like to run we have to connect the current session to Azure. We use the following command for that.

Connect-AzureAD -Confirm

This will open a popup where you can sign in with the correct credentials.

Create secret

Now we come to the real part of this solution.

For the following command we need the start and enddate, a custom identifier which could be whatever you’d like as well as the ObjectId of the App registration in question. This you can find in the Azure Portal in the overview of the App registration.

The command runs the mentioned cmdlet to create a new secret which starts at our defined startdate and ends at the enddate. The result is saved in a variable called “aadappsecret”.

$aadappsecret = New-AzureADApplicationPasswordCredential -ObjectId <ObjectID> -CustomKeyIdentifier "MySecret" -StartDate $startDate -EndDate $enddate

If you write the variable name in the powershell it will print it out. In the result of that you will find the value of the secret which you need to save for later use. Here is the command for that

$aadappsecret

In my case it looked as followed.

If I take a look in the Azure portal it looks like this.

Now you have a secret which lasts longer than 24 months (in our case 10 years).

Conclusion

As described there are several solutions to create an App secret valid longer than 24 months. If you know how to do it it’s not very complex to achieve a longer valid secret.

I hope this post helped you. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Summary

You need the object ID and execute the following commands.

To install the module you might need an elevated PowerShell.

Install-Module AzureAD
$startDate = Get-Date
$endDate = $startDate.AddYears(10)
Connect-AzureAD -Confirm
$aadappsecret = New-AzureADApplicationPasswordCredential -ObjectId <ObjectID> -CustomKeyIdentifier "MySecret" -StartDate $startDate -EndDate $enddate
$aadappsecret

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