---
title: >-
  Azure user-assigned managed identity trusts an external OIDC issuer and can
  escalate privileges to obtain administrator-equivalent RBAC rights
description: Datadog, the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring.
breadcrumbs: >-
  Docs > Datadog Security > OOTB Rules > Azure user-assigned managed identity
  trusts an external OIDC issuer and can escalate privileges to obtain
  administrator-equivalent RBAC rights
---

> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.datadoghq.com/llms.txt).

# Azure user-assigned managed identity trusts an external OIDC issuer and can escalate privileges to obtain administrator-equivalent RBAC rights

## Description{% #description %}

An Azure user-assigned managed identity has a federated identity credential that trusts an OIDC issuer associated with another Microsoft Entra tenant or a non-Entra identity provider, and its service principal can escalate privileges to obtain administrator-equivalent Azure RBAC rights at the tenant root, a management group, or a subscription. An attacker who can obtain a token from the external issuer as this identity could authenticate as the managed identity and escalate privileges.

An issuer is considered external when it is outside the identity's Microsoft Entra tenant, even if your organization owns or manages the workloads using it. The finding identifies external federation combined with administrative permissions or a privilege-escalation path; it does not establish whether that federation is expected.

## Remediation{% #remediation %}

1. Verify that the federated identity credential's issuer, subject, and audience are expected. Delete the credential if the external trust is unnecessary. See [Configure a user-assigned managed identity to trust an external identity provider](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/workload-id/workload-identity-federation-create-trust-user-assigned-managed-identity).
1. Remove unnecessary privilege-escalation permissions from the managed identity and grant only the permissions required by the workload. See [Remove Azure role assignments](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/role-based-access-control/role-assignments-remove).