Azure AD: Tenant and Audience

The single parameter passed to the middleware, WindowsAzureActiveDirectoryBearerAuthenticationOptions, supplies the settings for determining a token’s validity. It captures the raw values during project creation and stores them in the web.config file. The Audience value is the identifier by which the Web API is known to Windows Azure AD. Any tokens carrying a different Audience are meant for another resource and should be rejected.


The Tenant property indicates the Windows Azure AD tenant used to outsource authentication. The middleware uses that information to access the tenant and read all the other properties (such as which key should be used to verify the token’s signatures) that determine the validity of a token.