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Quick Tip - Retrieving vCenter Identity Federation Secret Token Expiry

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As part of setting up vCenter Server or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Identity Federation, if your identity provider supports the SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) protocol, you must generate a token from vCenter Server. This token enables the identity provider to automatically publish users to the vCenter Server Identity Broker (vIDB), so that you can look up users from your identity provider for vSphere Role assignment.


The token that is generated by vCenter Server is known as a JWT (JSON Web Token) and once you have copied it, you can no longer retrieve the value, which is by design. In the vSphere UI, it does provide the expiry of the last JWT token that was generated and I was recently asked on how to retrieve this value?

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Decoding Services Roles/Permissions from a VMware Cloud Services Platform (CSP) Token

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To programmatically access the various VMware Cloud Services (CSP) such as VMware Cloud on AWS as an example, a user must first generate a CSP Refresh Token using the CSP Console.


When creating a new CSP Refresh Token, you have the option to scope access to a specific set organization roles and service roles which will enable you to limit the permissions of this token to specific CSP Services. In the example below, I have created a new token which is scoped to the organization owner role along with two VMware Cloud on AWS Service Roles: Administrator (Delete Restricted) and NSX Cloud Admin to be able to grant access to a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC.


One common issue that I see folks run into when working with some of the CSP Services including VMware Cloud on AWS from a programmatic standpoint is that they did not properly create a token with the correct permissions which usually will lead to some type of invalid request.

For popular services like VMware Cloud on AWS, it is usually pretty easy to track down, especially if the user who is using the CSP Refresh Token is the same person who created it. However, if you are not the person who created the original token or if you have forgotten or you may have access to multiple token, it can be a little bit difficult to troubleshoot.

The good news and probably lesser known detail about how CSP Refresh Tokens work is that you can actually decode these tokens to understand what specific scopes were used to create the initial token. Below are two methods to decode these tokens, both CSP Refresh Tokens (generated from the CSP UI) as well as CSP Access Token, which is returned when you request access providing your CSP Refresh Token.

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