Is it possible to enrol a device in Intune without ever having to authenticate on the device itself?

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When it comes to enrolling devices in Intune, there are multiple ways to do so. In a user based enrolment, one will require to provide Entra ID credentials at some stage or the other. However, things can become challenging when there are other authentication requirements like certificates in addition to providing standard user credentials. This is normally a case in organization that are federated with Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) or with a non Microsoft Identity provider. A configuration requires a trusted certificate issued to a user or a device before the authentication can be allowed, but one cannot really deliver the certificate if the device is being born in the cloud and hasn't yet enrolled in Intune yet. It's a chicken and egg kind of situation. So how does one get around this without compromising on the security?
The answer lies in the sign-in options at the time of the enrolment.


There are some options available with the Sign-in options, but it is 'Sign-in from another device' that I am particularly interested in covering in this blog post.


This option has been around for a while now, but honestly, I never felt the need to use it until recently when I had to use this option in a customer's environment federated with ADFS. So how does it work? Well for start, you need access to a device where you can perform the alternate authentication. In this particular case, a device that already has a certificate issued and can authenticate easily with ADFS. However, for a quick demonstration, I will just give an overview of the process by covering the enrolment process of an iOS device in Intune using a Windows device already managed and joined to my lab tenant. A word of advice, make sure you don't have the MS Authenticator Application installed as that will most certainly bypass the 'Sign-in from another device' option.

After you select this option, you will be presented with a code.


Open the url microsoft.com/devicelogin on the other device for authentication and enter the code presented earlier which is not case sensitive.


Select the account for authentication. At this stage, if your tenant is federated with ADFS, then you will be taken to the ADFS portal for authentication where you authenticate normally with credentials and certificate issued to your user id or device.






After a successful authentication, the enrolment process should commence.


As an admin you can also verify what was used for authentication in Entra ID logs.



That's it for now. Until next time..

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