macOS - Platform SSO is configured and assigned

Overview

If Platform SSO policies aren’t enforced on macOS devices, endpoints might rely on insecure or inconsistent authentication mechanisms, allowing attackers to bypass Conditional Access and compliance policies. This opens the door to lateral movement across cloud services and on-premises resources, especially when federated identities are used. Threat actors can persist by leveraging stolen tokens or cached credentials and exfiltrate sensitive data through unmanaged apps or browser sessions. The absence of SSO enforcement also undermines app protection policies and device posture assessments, making it difficult to detect and contain breaches. Ultimately, failure to configure and assign macOS Platform SSO policies compromises identity security and weakens the organization’s Zero Trust posture.

Enforcing Platform SSO policies on macOS devices ensures consistent, secure authentication across apps and services. This strengthens identity protection, supports Conditional Access enforcement, and aligns with Zero Trust by reducing reliance on local credentials and improving posture assessments.

Remediation

Use Intune to configure and assign Platform SSO policies for macOS devices to enforce secure authentication and strengthen identity protection, see:

• Configure Platform SSO for macOS in Intune – Step-by-step guidance for enabling Platform SSO on macOS devices.
• Single sign-on (SSO) overview and options for Apple devices in Microsoft Intune – Overview of SSO options available for Apple platforms.

Run it

The check runs as part of the whole assessment, with the ZeroTrustAssessment module installed:

Install-Module ZeroTrustAssessment -Scope CurrentUser
Connect-Maester
Invoke-Maester -Pack ZTA -SkipBuiltIn

Leave out -SkipBuiltIn to run Maester’s own checks in the same run.

About this check

Severity	High
Effort to fix	High
Impact on users	Low
Pillar	Devices
Category	Device management
Product	Intune
Feature	Device configuration
Area	Authentication
ATT&CK	T1078.004 Cloud Accounts
Licence	Intune
Tenant	Workforce

Product, feature, area and ATT&CK are Maester’s: the assessment does not record them, so Maester keeps them in the pack’s taxonomy.json.

A Microsoft check, part of the Zero Trust Assessment pack. Text from ZeroTrustAssessment 3.1.0, © Microsoft, MIT licence.