Skip to main content

Using Azure device code authentication on a arduino iot 33 and getting the Teams presence from the Microsoft Graph

A while ago I published this post on accessing the Graph directly from an Arduino, this made use of the "resource owner password credentials grant" (meaning it used a hard coded username and password). Once you have enabled MFA (multi factor authentication) on an account this grant no longer works because you have no ability to provide the other factors for the Authentication to succeed.  For devices like Arduino's or most IOT devices that have very limited UI capabilities this is where device code authentication can be used.

The way Device Code Authentication works is instead of posting the user credentials to the token endpoint to get an access token, you make a post first to the /v2.0/devicecode endpoint which will then give you a specific user code to use to authenticate with on another device. You then visit http://microsoft.com/devicelogin (on a pc or mobile device) enter the user code and authenticate as the required user doing any extra MFA authentication. In the meantime the limited UI device polls the Token Endpoint and once authentication has been completed(on the external device) instead of the endpoint returning a pending error the poll results will be a normal Access token (and refresh token) that can then be used to access any Graph resources you have access to.

Visually on the Serial port here is what the whole process looks like on the Arduino

The last part of this code makes a request to get the Presence from Microsoft Teams which was introduced into beta in the Microsoft Graph in December see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/presence?view=graph-rest-beta.

So putting this all together you can make a simple Teams presence light with a circuit like (circuit is for demonstration purposes only)


and processing the Presence result you can get returned from the Graph using the code I've referenced below

A few notes on Device code Authentication, its important when you setup your App Registration in the Azure Portal that you mark your registration as public "Treat application as a public client" eg



Device code requests must be made against the Tenant endpoint (so you can't use the common endpoint). In the code I've included discovery code that gets the tenant specific endpoint to use based on the domain name stored in the Secrets file.

Also if your reading this because your following the documentation for Device code on https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/v2-oauth2-device-code and you can't get it to work there is an issue with the payload information in the document. Where device_code is used as a parameter name in the payload in the documentation it should just be code with your device code as the value.

I've put the sketch which contains the code I've used for Device Code authentication and grabbing the presence from the Microsoft Graph on GitHub here https://github.com/gscales/MS-Graph-Arduino/tree/master/MSGraph-Presence please refer to my previous article on details on getting you code up and running on an Arduino Iot33 which include downloading the SSL certs to the device which is required (also flash the firmware).

A couple of notes on the code because the Json parsing library I used can't handle the access token response I needed to manually parse the token out (which is a little frustrating) but is one of the chanllendges of working with Arduino's and dealing with the issues that limited memory causes. 

Popular posts from this blog

Testing and Sending email via SMTP using Opportunistic TLS and oAuth in Office365 with PowerShell

As well as EWS and Remote PowerShell (RPS) other mail protocols POP3, IMAP and SMTP have had OAuth authentication enabled in Exchange Online (Official announcement here ). A while ago I created  this script that used Opportunistic TLS to perform a Telnet style test against a SMTP server using SMTP AUTH. Now that oAuth authentication has been enabled in office365 I've updated this script to be able to use oAuth instead of SMTP Auth to test against Office365. I've also included a function to actually send a Message. Token Acquisition  To Send a Mail using oAuth you first need to get an Access token from Azure AD there are plenty of ways of doing this in PowerShell. You could use a library like MSAL or ADAL (just google your favoured method) or use a library less approach which I've included with this script . Whatever way you do this you need to make sure that your application registration  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/quickstart-register-

The MailboxConcurrency limit and using Batching in the Microsoft Graph API

If your getting an error such as Application is over its MailboxConcurrency limit while using the Microsoft Graph API this post may help you understand why. Background   The Mailbox  concurrency limit when your using the Graph API is 4 as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling#outlook-service-limits . This is evaluated for each app ID and mailbox combination so this means you can have different apps running under the same credentials and the poor behavior of one won't cause the other to be throttled. If you compared that to EWS you could have up to 27 concurrent connections but they are shared across all apps on a first come first served basis. Batching Batching in the Graph API is a way of combining multiple requests into a single HTTP request. Batching in the Exchange Mail API's EWS and MAPI has been around for a long time and its common, for email Apps to process large numbers of smaller items for a variety of reasons.  Batching in the Graph is limited to a m

How to test SMTP using Opportunistic TLS with Powershell and grab the public certificate a SMTP server is using

Most email services these day employ Opportunistic TLS when trying to send Messages which means that wherever possible the Messages will be encrypted rather then the plain text legacy of SMTP.  This method was defined in RFC 3207 "SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over Transport Layer Security" and  there's a quite a good explanation of Opportunistic TLS on Wikipedia  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunistic_TLS .  This is used for both Server to Server (eg MTA to MTA) and Client to server (Eg a Message client like Outlook which acts as a MSA) the later being generally Authenticated. Basically it allows you to have a normal plain text SMTP conversation that is then upgraded to TLS using the STARTTLS verb. Not all servers will support this verb so if its not supported then a message is just sent as Plain text. TLS relies on PKI certificates and the administrative issue s that come around certificate management like expired certificates which is why I wrote th
All sample scripts and source code is provided by for illustrative purposes only. All examples are untested in different environments and therefore, I cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

All code contained herein is provided to you "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind. The implied warranties of non-infringement, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are expressly disclaimed.