Effective Permissions

What the signed-in identity can actually do per policy type, and how the left-nav access marking, the Profile popup's Permissions dialog and Get-IMGraphEffectivePermissions derive it. This page is the "how it works now".

Half	Where it lives	What it says
App consent	token `scp` (delegated) / `roles` (app-only)	which Graph scopes the application was granted
User authorization	Intune RBAC role assignments (+ scope tags) and Entra directory roles	what the user may do

The token carries only the first half (plus wids, the directory role template ids). A user holding just the built-in Read Only Operator Intune role signs in with a token that says DeviceManagementConfiguration.ReadWrite.All, and every write is refused with 403. Effective access is the intersection, so the marking has two layers:

Update-IntuneAccessLevels                       Internal/AccessLevel.ps1
  Layer 1  scp/roles vs _Permissions          -> Full / Limited / None
  Layer 2  Get-IntuneRbacContext              -> Full / Limited / None / Unknown   Internal/EffectivePermissions.ps1
  stamp    AccessType = worst(L1, L2), AccessInfo = both reasons

Layer 2 can only make a type worse. Unknown never colours: Layer 1 stands.

Layer 2 in detail

Applies only to delegated tokens. idtyp = app (or no scp) means application permissions, which bypass Intune RBAC - the roles claim is the whole answer.
Directory-role short-circuit. Intune Administrator (3a2c62db-5318-420d-8d74-23affee5d9d5) or Global Administrator (62e90394-69f5-4237-9190-012177145e10) in wids grants complete Intune RBAC, so every Intune category is Full and Graph is not asked. Global Reader and the partial roles are not shortcuts - the user may also hold an Intune role.
Otherwise two Graph calls:
- GET /beta/deviceManagement/getEffectivePermissions(scope='*') - the same function the Intune portal uses to enable its buttons. It answers with the allowed actions only: notAllowedResourceActions comes back empty on every response, so on its own it cannot tell "the role denies this action" from "no such action exists for this category".
- GET /beta/deviceManagement/resourceOperations - the catalogue: every resource action Intune defines, one entry per action, its id being exactly the Microsoft.Intune_<Category>_<Action> name the first call uses. That is the existence answer the first call cannot give (260 actions over 53 resources on the tenant this was built against). It describes the service, not the user, so it is cached per tenant and survives a token refresh. When it cannot be read, existence is unknown and the verdicts degrade as shown below.

Per type: the _API path is mapped to an Intune resource category (deviceManagement/deviceConfigurations -> DeviceConfigurations, ...; table in Internal/EffectivePermissions.ps1, overridable per type with _ResourceCategory). Only actions that exist for the category are required, so a category with no _Assign (Roles) or one that spells it Modify (ManagedGooglePlay) is not marked down for the actions it never had.

For the category	Level
`_Read` is not in the catalogue	Unknown - no such category exists; say nothing
`_Read` exists, not allowed	None
`_Read` allowed, type declares only Read scopes	Full (read-only by design)
`_Read` allowed, an existing write action (`Create/Update/Delete/Assign/Modify`) not allowed	Limited, tooltip lists the missing actions
every existing action is allowed	Full

The Limited tooltip distinguishes the two shapes of it: "read-only for <Category>" when no write action at all is allowed, and "partial write access to <Category>" when some are (a role that can create and update but not delete or assign is still Limited, but it is not read-only). The Permissions popup's Role, Effective and Result columns show "Partial write" for that second shape rather than "Read" / "Read-only" - Effective and Result only when the token can write too, since a read-only token over a partial-write role really is read-only.

With no catalogue, the same type yields Unknown when _Read is not allowed (it may not exist), Limited when no write action at all is allowed, and Full otherwise - a coarser answer that never invents an action name.

APIs that Intune RBAC does not govern (identity/*, identityGovernance/*, organization/*) and the few listed in $script:RbacUnmappedApis are Unknown. A test fails if a new deviceManagement/ or deviceAppManagement/ type is in neither table.

Caching and refresh

The user's answer is cached per tenant under the token fingerprint (tid|oid|iat) with no TTL; the action catalogue is cached per tenant only, so a refresh re-asks getEffectivePermissions and reuses the catalogue. Both are dropped on disconnect. Any newly minted token - routine renewal, a new sign-in, or Refresh in the Profile popup - has a new iat, misses the cache and re-asks. That single user action therefore covers both kinds of change:

Change	Visible in the token?	Caught by
Directory role via PIM (Intune Administrator, Global Admin)	only in a newly issued token; the routine silent acquire returns the cached one until near expiry	Refresh mints a token with the current `wids`
Intune RBAC assignment (a role added, PIM for Groups)	never - the token is identical	Refresh still produces a new `iat`, so Layer 2 re-asks Graph

A failed lookup is remembered for the same fingerprint (no retry on every menu rebuild) and retried after a refresh. Refresh is provider-agnostic: MSAL (WithForceRefresh), delegated OAuth (refresh_token grant) and MgGraph (Connect-MgGraph re-run) all mint a new token; BYO bearer tokens cannot refresh and the button is already disabled for them.

Scope tags are not modelled. getEffectivePermissions is the global answer; a user limited to some tags can still be refused on individual objects.

Surfaces

Left nav - orange (Limited) / red (None) with the reason in the tooltip; the existing HideNoAccess setting hides red rows. A summary line is logged at sign-in.
Profile popup -> Permissions - one row per policy type: token level, Intune-role level, effective level, reason, plus a header saying where the Intune half came from and when the token was issued. WPF: UI/WPF/Extensions/EffectivePermissionsUIWPF.ps1; Avalonia: UI/Avalonia/Extensions/EffectivePermissionsUIAvalonia.ps1 with UI/Avalonia/Classes/EffectivePermissionRowItem.ps1.
Get-IMGraphEffectivePermissions - the same rows for scripts (-PolicyType, -TokenId), or -Raw for the context (source, the allowed action set, the catalogue of actions that exist, raw response). Runs even when the setting below is off.

Setting

UseRbacAccessMarking (General, default on). Off restores the token-only marking exactly. Registered in Internal/EffectivePermissions.ps1 because engine code reads it.

Verifying against a tenant

Both endpoints, the response shapes and every category name in the table have been run against a live tenant, and Tests/EffectivePermissions.Tests.ps1 asserts the names against the catalogue fixture, so a typo fails the suite. What is still unverified is the other half of each entry - that a given _API really is governed by the category it is mapped to. Those are marked UNVERIFIED, and an unverified mapping is not a safe mapping: only a category name that does not exist at all degrades to Unknown. A mapping to a name that exists but governs a different resource produces a confident verdict derived from the wrong role permissions - a type marked Full because the user's role covers the category it was mistakenly mapped to, or None because it does not. Both are wrong, and neither shows as Unknown. The typo test cannot catch this: the wrong name is a real one. Only a role that grants exactly one category can, so to check on a lab tenant:

Import-Module .\IntuneManagement.psd1 -Force
Connect-IMIntuneManagement ...                      # delegated, as a NON-admin test user
Get-IMGraphEffectivePermissions -Raw | Select-Object Source, TenantId, AsOf
(Get-IMGraphEffectivePermissions -Raw).Allowed | Sort-Object       # what the user's role grants
(Get-IMGraphEffectivePermissions -Raw).Catalog | Sort-Object       # every action Intune defines
Get-IMGraphEffectivePermissions | Where-Object RbacLevel | Format-Table Id, ResourceCategory, TokenLevel, RbacLevel, EffectiveLevel

Assign the test user a custom role granting exactly one category, refresh the token, and check that the types mapped to it are the ones that move. Move confirmed entries out of UNVERIFIED, and add _ResourceCategory overrides where a type maps elsewhere.

Tests

Tests/EffectivePermissions.Tests.ps1 (offline, fixtures under Tests/Fixtures/EffectivePermissions/): category resolution, completeness and every category name against the catalogue, response parsing, per-type verdicts for a full admin / read-only operator / custom role and for a missing catalogue, the never-upgrade property, app-only skip, directory-role short-circuit, fingerprint caching, catalogue caching across a refresh, negative caching, the setting gate, disconnect clearing, Update-IntuneAccessLevels integration and the cmdlet's rows.

The fixtures are recorded responses, not hand-written: ReadOnlyOperator.json is the built-in role's 55 actions, ResourceOperations.json the whole catalogue, and every notAllowedResourceActions is empty because that is what Graph returns. A verdict test that fails is a bug in the code or the mapping - do not "fix" it by inventing not-allowed data the API never sends.

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