TL;DR: App registrations are an app’s blueprint and hold its credentials in one home tenant. Service principals (what you see under Enterprise applications) are the identities that hold permissions in every tenant that uses the app, which is why one stolen credential in the ConnectWise Cloud Backup incident reached 100+ tenants. What are we talking about?
Principal Problems: App Registrations, Service Principals, and the Hidden Risk of Multi-Tenant Apps
About this summary. This is a short excerpt from the description that SpecterOps published with its article. Cyber Security News did not report or verify the underlying story. Read the original: https://specterops.io/blog/2026/11/06/app-registrations-vs-service-principals/
Source attribution: headline and facts are from SpecterOps (specterops.io). Summary method: excerpt of the source description. See our source attribution policy.
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