Azure Point-to-Site VPN with RADIUS Authentication

Posted on January 8, 2018 Updated on January 8, 2018

Reading Time: 4 minutes

For the money, it’s hard to beat the Azure VPN Gateway. Until recently though, Point-to-Site VPNs were a bit clunky because they needed mutual certificate authentication. It wasn’t bad, but it certainly wasn’t good. Thankfully, Microsoft now allows RADIUS backed authentication. This post is how you impliment said configuration.

 

To start off, here is my environment information I’m using to setup this configuration.

Virtual Network: “raidus-vnet”

Virtual Network Address Space: 10.1.0.0/24

Virtual Network VM Subnet: 10.1.0.0/28

Virtual Network Gateway Subnet: 10.1.0.16/28

VPN Gateway SKU: VpnGW1

VPN Client Address Pool: 172.28.10.0/24

Domain Controler/NPS Server Static IP: 10.1.0.10

 

 

Virtual Network (VNET) Setup:

You most likely already have a VNET where you will be configuring this setup, but if you don’t you need to create one with two subnets. One subnet for infrastructure, and one “Gateway Subnet”. The Gateway Subnet will be used automatically, and is required,  when you configure the VPN Gateway.

 

VPN Gateway Setup:

The Azure VPN Gateway is just about as easy as it gets to configure and to managed (sometimes to a fault). The only caveat you need to be aware of in this scenerio, is that RADIUS Point-to-Site authentication is only available on the SKU “VPNGW1” and above. You’ll then need to choose the vnet where you have created the VPN Gateway, and create a Public IP Address resource.

 

This will take anywhere from 20-45 minutes to provision, as noted. While that’s running, you can provision your NPS (Network Policy Server) VM. This being a test environment, I provisioned a VM to be both the domain controler and the NPS box. Make sure to set a static IP on the NPS box’s NIC in Azure, you’ll need a static for your VPN configuration. I used 10.1.0.10.

After complete,  you will need to configure the VPN Gateway’s Point-to-Site configuration. Choose “RADIUS authentication”, enter in the static IP of the will-be NPS server, and set a Server Secret. This being a test environment, my password is obviously not as secure as I hope yours would be.

 

Configure NPS:

Now, go back into that VM that was created earlier and install the NPS role.

 

After it’s installed, you need to create a Network Policy with a condiational access clause (I used a group in AD) and tell it what security type you want to allow.

 

 

 

 

Next, you’ll need to create a Client Access Policy. Here you need the IP of the VPN Gateway you created, and the shared secret. Here is the interesting bit, you can’t view the IP of your VPN Gateway in the Gateway Subnet. If you looked at “Connected Devices” in the VNET the VPN Gateway doesn’t show any IP. I know that the VPN Gateway is deployed (behind the scenes) as an H/A pair, but I would assume they’re using a floating IP that they could surface. Anyways, there is no real way to find it – but it looks like (after testing with a dozen different deployments) it uses the 4th available IP in the subnet. This subnet being a 10.1.0.16/28, the 4th IP is 10.1.0.21. This is the IP that goes in the address of the RADIUS Client.

 

 

Next, I configure NPS Accounting. You don’t have to do this, but I think it helps for the sake of connection logging and for troubleshooting. You can log a few different ways, and choose here just to use a text file to a subfolder I created called “AzureVPN”.

 

 

 

Generate VPN Client Package:

Now that everything is set, you need to generate a VPN Client Package to distribute to your users.

 

After it is installed, you can see the VPN Connection in the VPN list and users can logon using their domain credentials.

 

 

 

After logging in, we can go back and look at the accounting log which shows us the successfull authentication of that user.

 

 

There we go, connecting to an Azure VPN Gateway with RADIUS authentication using domain credentials. I think we can all thank Microsoft for this one, and not having to do cert management anymore.

I hope I’ve made your day at least a little bit easier.