Hardware and Entra External ID: A New Way to Authenticate
So, you’ve decided to automate your home. You pick up a Raspberry Pi, maybe an Arduino UNO or two, wire up some sensors, and start imagining all the dashboards and automations you’re about to build. But before anything even blinks or beeps, you hit your first roadblock: how do I control all of this? Naturally, you spin up a small Django web app, pull in a few Python libraries to talk to your Arduinos, and expose some endpoints. Great—now you can control your devices. But then the second roadblock hits: how do you access it securely? If you're an Azure‑first shop, the answer historically wasn’t great. For consumer‑grade IoT, TVs, or constrained devices, you’d often end up reaching for AWS Cognito or Okta because Microsoft simply didn’t offer a clean, standard way to authenticate on devices that can’t show a login screen. That gap just closed. Microsoft has introduced full support for the OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant—a capability designed specifically for IoT devices, smart T...