EIDPIM-012: Emergency Access Account Validation
- Platform
- Entra ID / M365
- Category
- Entra ID Privileged Identity Management
- Severity
- Critical
- Zero Trust pillar
- Identity (weight 2)
- Golden fixtures
- 3
- Branch coverage
- Observed: fixtures prove the verdicts they exercise
- Provenance
- baseline
What it checks
Emergency access (break-glass) accounts are critical safeguards that ensure administrative access to the tenant when normal authentication mechanisms fail, such as during MFA outages, Conditional Access misconfigurations, or identity provider failures. At least 2 break-glass accounts should exist, be cloud-only, excluded from all Conditional Access policies, and protected with strong authentication such as FIDO2 keys stored securely. Without properly configured break-glass accounts, an organization risks permanent lockout from its own tenant
Recommended value
At least 2 emergency access accounts that are cloud-only, permanently assigned Global Administrator, excluded from all Conditional Access policies, with FIDO2 or long complex passwords stored securely
Remediation
Create at least 2 dedicated emergency access accounts that are cloud-only (not synced), assign permanent Global Administrator role, exclude from all Conditional Access policies, and configure with FIDO2 security keys or very long complex passwords stored in a physical safe. Configure monitoring alerts for any sign-in activity on these accounts and test the break-glass procedure quarterly
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.
| Scenario | Expected verdict |
|---|---|
| clean | PASS |
| known-bad | WARN |
| throttled | Not Assessed |
Framework mappings
- NIST SP 800-53
- AC-2(2), CP-2
- CIS M365 Benchmark
- 1.1.4
- MITRE ATT&CK
- T1078.004