EIDAUTH-017: Per-User MFA vs Conditional Access MFA Conflict Detection

Platform
Entra ID / M365
Category
Entra ID Authentication Methods & MFA
Severity
Medium
Zero Trust pillar
Identity (weight 3)
Golden fixtures
1
Branch coverage
Observed: fixtures prove the verdicts they exercise
Provenance
baseline

What it checks

Legacy per-user MFA settings (enabled/enforced at the individual user level) can conflict with Conditional Access-based MFA policies, creating unpredictable authentication behavior. When both are active, users may experience duplicate MFA prompts, authentication failures, or inconsistent policy enforcement depending on which mechanism evaluates first. Organizations should migrate entirely to Conditional Access-based MFA and disable per-user MFA settings to ensure consistent policy application.

Recommended value

Per-user MFA disabled for all users with MFA enforced exclusively through Conditional Access policies

Remediation

Check per-user MFA status via Entra ID > Users > Per-user MFA and identify users with per-user MFA enabled or enforced. Create equivalent Conditional Access policies that enforce MFA for all users before disabling per-user MFA. Disable per-user MFA by setting each user's status to Disabled after confirming Conditional Access MFA coverage is complete.

Fixture-proven verdicts

Every verdict below is proven by a golden fixture in the module's gating test suite. This table derives from the last green run; it cannot be edited by hand.

Verdict scenarios for EIDAUTH-017
ScenarioExpected verdict
always-warnWARN

Framework mappings

NIST SP 800-53
IA-2(1)
CIS M365 Benchmark
5.2.2.1