It’s time for a new version of Azure AD Connect to incorporate Microsoft’s lessons learned and distribute the fixes Microsoft made to the larger public. Last Friday, Microsoft released the fourth version in the 1.4 branch of Azure AD Connect: v1.4.38.0.

Azure AD Connect is Microsoft’s free Hybrid Identity bridge product to synchronize objects and their attributes from on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) environments and LDAP v3-compatible directories to Azure Active Directory.

What’s New

Microsoft made the following improvements:

Password Hash Sync

Microsoft updated Password Hash Sync (PHS) for Azure Active Directory Domain Services to properly account for padding in Kerberos hashes. This provides a performance improvement during password synchronization from Azure Active Directory to Azure Active Directory Domain Services.

Pass-through Authentication

Microsoft added support for reliable sessions between the authentication agent and the Azure service bus when Pass-through Authentication (PTA) is used as the authentication method.

This release of Azure AD Connect enforces TLS 1.2 for communications between the authentication agent and Azure AD when Pass-through Authentication (PTA) is used as the authentication method.

Microsoft added a DNS cache for websocket connections between the authentication agent and Azure AD when Pass-through Authentication (PTA) is used as the authentication method.

Microsoft added the ability to target a specific agent from cloud to test for agent connectivity.

Seamless Single Sign-on

Release 1.4.18.0 introduced a bug where the PowerShell cmdlet for Seamless Single Sign-on (also known as Desktop SSO) was using the login windows credentials instead of the admin credentials provided. As a result, it was not possible to enable Seamless Single Sign-on in multiple forests through the Azure AD Connect Configuration Wizard.

A fix was made to enable Seamless Single Sign-on (also known as Desktop SSO)simultaneously in all forests through the Azure AD Connect Configuration Wizard.

Version information

This is version 1.4.38.0 of Azure AD Connect.
This release in the 1.4 branch for Azure AD Connect was made available for download on December 6, 2019.

Download information

You can download Azure AD Connect here.
The download weighs 91.0 MB.