Application ID and Certificate

Summary

• Runs: as background service.
• Scenario: attended, unattended, and unattended with MFA enabled.
• Application permissions.
• Recommended for unattended executions or when you want to access the Microsoft Graph API as an application (a background service / daemon) without a signed-in user.

Details

• When registering your application, you must select an application type. For application ID and certificate authentication type, use a web application (which uses OAuth 2.0 client credentials flow).

• This authentication method is similar to Application ID and secret, but it uses a certificate as a secret instead of a client secret string.

Using certificates

To authenticate using a certificate as a secret, take the following steps:

1. In the Azure portal:

   • Locate your registered Microsoft 365 application.
   • Select Certificates & secrets and upload your certificate (public key) file. It can have one of the following file types: .cer, .pem, .crt.
     
     

     

     
     
2. Convert the raw contents of your .pfx file representing the certificate to a base64 string. You can use a web-based tool like Base64.Guru or assign the Convert.ToBase64String(System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(pfxFilePath)) value to a String variable.
3. In the Microsoft 365 Scope activity:

• Set Authentication Type to Application ID and Certificate.
• Set Certificate as Base64 to the base64 representation of the certificate.
• If a password is required to use the certificate, set the value for the Certificate Password property as well.