What are service accounts in Active Directory? (2023)

What are service accounts in Active Directory?

What is a service account in Active Directory? A service account is a special user account that is created for the sole purpose of running a particular service or application on the Windows operating system. Services use the service accounts to log on and interact with the operating system.

Service accounts are a special type of non-human privileged account used to execute applications and run automated services, virtual machine instances, and other processes. Service accounts can be privileged local or domain accounts, and in some cases, they may have domain administrative privileges.

A service account is a user account that is created explicitly to provide a security context for services running on Windows Server operating systems. The security context determines the service's ability to access local and network resources. The Windows operating systems rely on services to run various features.

In many environments, administrators prefer to simply create a domain user account and assign appropriate privileges to it. Then this user account is used in order to start a specific service on a computer. In that case there is really no difference between a user account and the so called service accounts.

The Identity parameter specifies the Active Directory managed service account to get. You can identify a managed service account by its distinguished name, GUID, security identifier (SID), or Security Account Manager (SAM) account name.

To open the Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) Microsoft Management Console (MMC) console, on the Active Directory server click Start > Run, enter dsa. msc , and press Enter. Right-click the folder where you want to create the new account and select New > User.

A service account is a special type of Google account intended to represent a non-human user that needs to authenticate and be authorized to access data in Google APIs. Typically, service accounts are used in scenarios such as: Running workloads on virtual machines (VMs).

Service accounts differ from normal user accounts in multiple ways: They don't have a password and can't be used for browser-based sign-in. They're created and managed as a resource that belongs to a Google Cloud project. In contrast, users are managed in a Cloud Identity or Google Workspace account.

A Microsoft service account is an account used to run one or more services or applications in a Windows environment. For example, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and Internet Information Services (IIS) all run under service accounts.

LDAP Authentication

Service account is an unprivileged user that is used to make an authenticated bind to the LDAP Server. It is the preferred method of binding to the LDAP server if you have to perform search and modify operations on the directory.

What is a domain service account?

A domain user account enables the service to take full advantage of the service security features of Windows and Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services. The service has whatever local and network access is granted to the account, or to any groups of which the account is a member.

Service accounts are non-human privileged accounts used by applications, automated services, and that execute other IT processes. Because these are machine accounts they cannot be protected by MFA.

Common types of Active Directory service accounts include built-in local user accounts, domain user accounts, managed service accounts, and virtual accounts. These accounts have broader privileges and greater access to the infrastructure than other accounts, which makes them vulnerable to security exploitation.

Root and administrator accounts are typically used for installing and removing software and changing configurations. They grant very broad and highest access privileges for specific servers or databases and are also appropriately called superuser accounts.

An LDAP server, also called a Directory System Agent (DSA), runs on Windows OS and Unix/Linux. It stores usernames, passwords, and other core user identities. It uses this data to authenticate users when it receives requests or queries and shares the requests with other DSAs.

Kubernetes service accounts are Kubernetes resources, created and managed using the Kubernetes API, meant to be used by in-cluster Kubernetes-created entities, such as Pods, to authenticate to the Kubernetes API server or external services.

A service account is a special type of Google account intended to represent a non-human user that needs to authenticate and be authorized to access data in Google APIs. Typically, service accounts are used in scenarios such as: Running workloads on virtual machines (VMs).

What is a service account in SQL Server?

SQL Server service accounts allow SQL Server to run with the rights and privileges assigned to the service account. This is better than using an existing user's account, because if the password on the account is changed, it is necessary to change the password in SQL Server 2000.

Kubernetes binds each Pod to a service account. You can have multiple Pods bound to the same service account, but you can't have multiple service accounts bound to the same Pod (figure 11.4). For example, when you create a Kubernetes namespace, by default Kubernetes creates a service account.

By default, the App Engine default service account has the Editor role in the project. This means that any user account with sufficient permissions to deploy changes to the Cloud project can also run code with read/write access to all resources within that project.

Users as service accounts

An IAM user is a resource in IAM that has associated credentials and permissions. An IAM user can represent a person or an application that uses its credentials to make AWS requests. This is typically referred to as a service account.

Service accounts differ from normal user accounts in multiple ways: They don't have a password and can't be used for browser-based sign-in. They're created and managed as a resource that belongs to a Google Cloud project. In contrast, users are managed in a Cloud Identity or Google Workspace account.

AV service accounts never need Domain Admin rights.

Service Accounts

These accounts are privileged local or domain accounts that are used by an application or service to interact with the operating system. Typically, they will only have domain access if it is required by the application being used.

Compute Engine uses two types of service accounts: User-managed service accounts. Google-managed service accounts.

There are three types of service accounts native to Azure Active Directory: Managed identities, service principals, and user-based service accounts. Service accounts are a special type of account that is intended to represent a non-human entity such as an application, API, or other service.

What is MSA and gMSA?

This type of managed service account (MSA) was introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. The group Managed Service Account (gMSA) provides the same functionality within the domain but also extends that functionality over multiple servers.

Managed Service Accounts are a Windows feature introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2 for increasing the security of non-user service accounts. Managed Service Accounts, shortened as MSAs, have an automatically-managed, complex password that removes the requirement of manually dealing with password rotation and security.

It won't break anything, but it's also completely unnecessary and actually discouraged by Microsoft. Domain Admin gives your SQL service far too many rights it just doesn't need.