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Azure Container Registry (ACR) integrates with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to secure access through identity-based authentication. Instead of using shared administrator credentials, you assign identities like service principals and managed identities to specific registry roles. This structure enforces the principle of least privilege, ensuring that applications and users only have the exact access they need to perform their jobs.
When assigning these roles, you must choose the scope to limit where the permissions apply. You can apply access controls at different levels of the Azure resource hierarchy depending on your management needs:
A nested hierarchy showing Azure Container Registry access control scopes from broadest to narrowest: Subscription, Resource Group, Registry, and Repository. It illustrates how permissions narrow at each level down to specific token-based repository actions like push, pull, and delete.
If the built-in roles do not meet your security requirements, you can design custom roles to define precise permission boundaries.
To restrict access even further, ACR supports repository-scoped permissions that limit actions to specific repositories within a single registry. This level of control is managed by generating tokens that map to digital access keys rather than full Azure AD identities. These tokens grant granular rights for precise operations:
This token-based system is ideal for automated CI/CD pipelines where you must prevent one application from accessing another application's images.
Security management requires continuous visibility, which you achieve by enabling audit logs for the registry. You can configure Azure Monitor or Event Grid to collect logs for every authentication attempt, push, pull, and delete action. Reviewing these logs regularly helps you detect anomalous behavior and confirm that your access control policies remain effective over time.
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Azure Container Registry integrates with Azure Active Directory to secure access through identity-based authentication, assigning service principals and managed identities to specific registry roles to enforce the principle of least privilege.
You can apply access controls at the subscription level (granting access to all registries within the entire subscription), the resource group level (limiting access to registries within a specific group), or the registry level (restricting permissions to a single ACR instance).
Repository-scoped tokens can grant push permission to upload new container images, pull permission to download container images, and delete permission to remove images and clean up registry storage.
You can configure Azure Monitor or Event Grid to collect logs for every authentication attempt, push, pull, and delete action, enabling continuous visibility to detect anomalous behavior.
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