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Google Login and Single Sign-on to Google Services in Chrome in an AD environment

I've previously posted about the ability to manage Windows PCs in the Google Admin Console. However, what if you are still managing your PCs via local active directory, but use Google Workspace for most things? Well you can have your cake and eat it - you just need to use Google Credential Provider for Windows and do a few configurations.

Step 1 - update your users on the Google Admin Console

You need to add a custom attribute to all of your users (at least those who use PCs) on the Google Admin console to link them with their local AD account. So you need to create a custom attribute in the Google admin console and populate this with the AD windows user details:


The custom attribute you need is Enhanced_desktop_security and the field is AD_accounts. Detailed instructions can be found here.

You can auto populate this field using GADS (Google Apps Directory Sync) if you use this to auto provision your accounts in Google from AD. Alternatively, you can populate them in bulk with a Google Sheets script or manually add them.

Step 2 - Deploy the GCPW and required registry settings

Download the MSI installer from here and deploy via Group Policy or SCCM as normal.

Deploy the following registry settings vis group policy:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Google\GCPW]

"domains_allowed_to_login"="yourgoogledomainname"

"enable_dm_enrollment"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Google\DriveFS]

"ForceBrowserAuth"=dword:00000001

"AutoStartOnLogin"=dword:00000001

The first key specifies the domain allowed to login. If you just put one domain in then the domain is auto-populated on the login screen. However, you can specify multiple domains.

The second key prevents GCPW from trying to enrol the machine on the Google Admin console - we are managing machines here with local group policy. See my other blog posts to cloud manage a machine.

The other two are for the Google Drive App. These are optional, but will auto start the Google Drive app and prompt authentication in the browser. As GCPW does single sign-on then the Drive Apps is signed in.

Step 3 - Testing

If you are using local Chrome policies - you need to test how they interact with GCPW for all policies you have.

The end result

People sign into Chromebooks and PCs with the same account.

Using GCPW updates the local AD password to match the Google one - so if you have apps that auto via a connection to AD these work automatically with the Google Credentials

Chrome has the user automatically signed in after login - so you have single sign-on to all of your Google services.

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Comments

  1. Roger Nixon15 March 2021 at 09:01

    2-step verification does work - but not yet with USB keys - so if they have a key - they need another methods - Auth app or Google prompt. I'm hoping support will come soon.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Scott P-Blog3 May 2022 at 17:06

    Clarify discrepancy: The picture shows the custom filed required as "AD_accounts". The wording in the paragraph has it as "AD_account". ...which is correct ?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Avrohom Eliezer Friedman18 May 2022 at 12:34

    Hi, we have this deployed and it works great. The only issue we have is that users can bypass 2-Step Verification by clicking other user --> sign in options --> Local or domain account password --> and then use their AD username and Google password. This will only get them onto the computer and not logged into Google, but if the previous session they were logged into Google they still are.

    This is a concern because if someone gets the password of a user, they can access their computer (and then often their email account) with just the password and no 2-Step Verification needed.

    I was wondering if there was a boy to disable the other sign-on option so they are forced to use GCPW

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Roger Nixon20 May 2022 at 08:33

      Thats all true - to a point. We set a basic AD password - that get updated on the first user login. After that (assuming you are not wiping profiles) what you say is the case and useful if someone has to login offline on a device.

      You can mitigate this is its a concern to you by reducing the time between re-authentication on Google and by preventing people trusting devices if you want.

      You can also enable/disable the various sign in option via a reg key or GPOs

      Delete

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