Use SDK Cmdlets to Create or Update Password Protection Policy Settings

A reader asks if the script written for the article about updating the Entra ID banned password list can be used to update other settings in the Entra ID password protection policy. The answer is “of course.” The code is PowerShell, and it can be adapted to update any of the password protection settings found in the Entra admin center (Figure 1).

A few considerations must be remembered when updating the Entra ID password protection policy:

• You don’t need additional licenses to use the default password protection policy. If you create a custom policy by updating settings, user accounts must be licensed with Entra P1 or P2.
• Custom password policy settings are immediately effective across the entire tenant. You can’t assign a custom password policy to specific users or groups.
• In a hybrid environment, password protection can extend to Active Directory.

Creating a Password Protection Policy

The underlying concepts for creating a custom password policy are similar to the management of other Entra ID policies (like the Microsoft 365 groups policy):

Check if a custom policy exists, or rather, a directory setting object created using the directory setting template for password rules. The template always has the identifier 5cf42378-d67d-4f36-ba46-e8b86229381d, so we can check if a custom password protection policy exists follows:

$Policy = (Get-MgBetaDirectorySetting | Where-Object {$_.TemplateId -eq "5cf42378-d67d-4f36-ba46-e8b86229381d"})

A client-side filter is used because the Graph API does not support server-side filtering against template identifiers.

If a password policy object is not available, you can create a new password policy object. The values for the policy settings are in a hash table containing an array of values. Each value (a setting) is a hash table consisting of the setting name and its value. For example, this code creates the hash table to hold the setting for lockout duration:

$Value5 = @{}
$Value5.Add("Name", "LockoutDurationInSeconds")
$Value5.Add("Value", $LockoutDuration -as [int32])

After populating values for all settings (or just the ones that are different from the default), run the New-MgBetaDirectorySetting cmdlet to create the new custom password policy:

$NewBannedListParameters = @{}
$NewBannedListParameters.Add("templateId", "5cf42378-d67d-4f36-ba46-e8b86229381d")
$NewBannedListParameters.Add("values", ($Value1, $Value2, $Value3, $Value4, $Value5, $Value6))
$Policy = New-MgBetaDirectorySetting -BodyParameter $NewBannedListParameters -ErrorAction Stop

Updating the Password Protection Policy

If a custom policy already exists, fetch the policy settings, update the value for the settings that you want to change, and use the Update-MgBetaDirectorySetting cmdlet to update the policy. This example changes the lock out duration time to 120 seconds (the default is 60 seconds):

[array]$PolicyValues = Get-MgBetaDirectorySetting -DirectorySettingId $Policy.Id | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Values
($PolicyValues | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "LockOutDurationInSeconds"}).Value = 120
Update-MgBetaDirectorySetting -DirectorySettingId $Policy.id -Values $PolicyValues -ErrorAction Stop

The code for these operations is the same as used in the script to update the banned passwords list. Grab what you need from that script and repurpose it to do whatever you need to. For instance, some organizations like to validate that the password policy settings in the tenants that they manage are consistent and up to date. This is easily done on a periodic basis by creating a PowerShell runbook in Azure Automation. I imagine that checking the password policy would only be one of the Entra ID configuration checks that such a runbook would process. At least, that’s how I would do it.

Next Step – Testing Configurations

The Maester utility includes some checks against the password policy and it would be easy to expand test coverage to whatever aspect of the password policy you consider needs to be checked. Once you’ve mastered programmatic manipulation of the Entra ID password protection policy settings, anything is possible.

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