Why is Identity and Access Management (IAM) important?
Modern computing rests on the foundation of digital identification. Digital identity, as defined by Cloudflare, is "the recorded collection of observable qualities by which a computer can identify an external entity." Identity and access management (IAM) is a system of business procedures, regulations, and technologies that facilitates the administration of electronic or digital identities inside an organization. IAM frameworks enable IT administrators to regulate user access to sensitive company data.
IAM is necessary for all contemporary enterprises because it improves data security, guarantees regulatory compliance, streamlines access to vital resources by eliminating human error, and enables organizations to manage access across numerous cloud platforms and systems. Gartner sums it up by saying that a good IAM program “enables the right individuals to access the right resources at the right times for the right reasons.”
Machine identities are high-value targets
In conventional computing and business environments, digital identities, such as usernames and passwords, were used to verify human identity. But as technology evolves and business models adapt to the global shifting environment, machine identities have evolved as a new sort of digital identity.
Due to the broader spectrum of machine identities use cases—web transactions, software authenticity, privileged access, DevOps, cloud workloads and IoT devices—the attack surface associated with machine identities is developing far more rapidly than that of human identities. The number of machines deployed on enterprise networks is increasing dramatically as the sorts of machines requiring identities expand beyond traditional physical devices and servers.
According to Forbes, machine identities on corporate networks are growing twice as fast as human identities, with software bots, for example, used in banking, accounting, business, and IT outperforming other sorts of devices. Due to their popularity, machine identities have become an attractive target for cybercriminals, who utilize them as effective attack vectors to infiltrate corporate networks. According to research, machine identities are now a desirable commodity on the dark web.
This is symptomatic of cybercriminals' developing "business model." Machine identities have become an essential component of Crime-as-a-Service toolkits, especially for threat actors that lack the technical ability of a conventional attacker. They give threat actors different means of network infiltration. For instance, cybercriminals can use machine identities to avoid discovery by concealing themselves in encrypted traffic, impersonating a trusted machine to access sensitive data, or traversing a network. Considering the chance of success, the return on investment for a single machine identity is astronomical.
TLS Machine Identity Management for Dummies
IAM is about treating equally human and machine identities
It is axiomatic that organizations must continue to safeguard their human identities. This can be accomplished by utilizing security awareness training to enhance their expertise with phishing attacks and other social engineering tactics.
Consequently, businesses must give equal consideration to machine identities. Initiatives for digital transformation are in peril because attackers can exploit weaknesses in machine identity management strategies. Organizations must develop complete machine identity management programs that are given the same level of importance as personnel security awareness training and email security initiatives. Then, companies can combine these projects into a comprehensive IAM architecture to enable a Zero Trust strategy in which identities and other resources are validated continuously.
The following IAM best practices will help you ensure that you protect all your digital identities—human and machine.
1. Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
The magnitude and velocity of disruption, as well as the consequent acceleration of the adoption of different cloud platforms, have pushed security teams to their limits by making it increasingly impossible to apply adequate levels of authentication at multiple entry points.
These alterations have also prompted enterprises to reevaluate the condition of their existing user authentication techniques, with many seeking to modernize their authentication strategies. Organizations have discovered that their current IAM systems are inadequate for supporting and securing innovative business models. Therefore, evolving access restrictions are essential for business continuity and resilience.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a crucial element of strong authentication. Before gaining access to sensitive data, applications, or devices, multi-factor authentication systems require each user to demonstrate their identity using several authentication methods. This helps organizations increase their overall degree of security and prevent unauthorized access to sensitive company data by attackers. MFA and a robust machine identity management program should work in tandem to secure digital projects and assure the success of enterprises.
2. Rotate and remove credentials
Digital certificates are used to determine the identity of machines. Certificates expire and must be revoked and rotated, in contrast to passwords, which need not be changed until there is a clear indication of a breach.
By selecting longer certificate validity periods, we end up with a greater number of certificates and their corresponding private keys that must be protected. This expands your attack surface, making your certificates and keys enticing targets for adversaries seeking to compromise a certificate. Alternatively, if you own certificates with a short validity term, the damage will be less severe, as the attacker will have less time to exploit your compromised certificates.
The expiration of a certificate presents an excellent chance to rotate the key associated with it. Therefore, short certificate validation aids in establishing appropriate key hygiene practices.
The cryptoperiod is defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as "the time span during which a specific key is authorized for use by legitimate entities." The duration of a cryptoperiod is determined by several variables, including the operational environment, the classification and volume of protected data, the personnel rotation, etc. NIST recommends that the maximum cryptoperiod of private keys linked with certificates be between one and three years. According to Scott Helme, "you should rotate your private keys at least once a year" and failure to do so "is poor hygiene, and the longer a cryptographic key is in use, the more likely it is to be compromised."
3. Automate workflows
Automating the provisioning and deprovisioning of human accounts and privileges, as well as the installation and revocation of machine identities, is essential. The fact that these digital identities are intertwined with all elements of digital life provides organizations with a growing operational problem since they must be managed at scale. Managing digital credentials manually in spreadsheets might be problematic from a management standpoint. Without effective automation and management, significant service and business interruptions are possible and do occur.
As enterprises recognize the difficulties associated with managing their machine identities, it is imperative that they consider using an automated certificate lifecycle management platform. Such technology will allow businesses to control the identities of their machines over their full lifecycles without human mistakes. These kinds of tools can minimize staff time and operational expenses, as well as boost availability, capability, and scalability. In doing so, they can prevent a certificate outage, decreasing the danger of digital assault and protecting the brand reputation of a firm.
While some businesses have invested in certificate lifecycle management solutions to overcome the challenges they face with digital certificates and machine identity management, it is imperative that businesses do their research and look for solutions that are open and interoperable with their expanding technology stacks.
4. Regularly audit resources
Ensure that you are always aware of every certificate and credential in your enterprise. Having visibility into your digital identities means periodically scanning the network to identify credentials and mapping them to their owners - whether these owners are humans or machines. While this greatly simplifies future IAM processes, it also helps administrators look backward to discover orphaned, expired, or otherwise insecure certificates and credentials.
Discovery doesn’t stop with scanning your network. Care must be taken to ensure that the results of the scan are stored and updated in your existing inventory. In addition, discovered certificates should be grouped to allow for more simplified management. You may elect to create groups for certificates used in testing and production environments. You may also group them based on business functions. The latter will help you simplify tracking your certificates and alert escalation.
5. Enforce a strong password policy
You should take every effort to ensure the security of your passwords, just as you would with your house keys. Regardless of the accounts they protect, all passwords should be generated with the following three guidelines in mind: lengthy, unique, and complicated.
If your password is lengthy, unique, and complicated, you should never change it unless you discover that an unauthorized user is accessing your account, or it was compromised in a data breach. This recommendation is supported by the most recent NIST guidelines.
As we engage in more and more online activities, we may now manage 100 or more passwords. Creating, storing, and remembering so many passwords might be troublesome. However, passwords serve as the initial line of security against hackers and data thefts. Free, user-friendly password managers can make password management easier than ever before.
A password manager facilitates the creation and maintenance of secure passwords for the increasing number of online accounts we access. By utilizing a password manager, you can avoid putting a sticky note with your most important passwords or a convoluted notebook of passwords in a drawer. Now, you only need to remember one secure password to access your password manager's vault.
6. Don’t embed keys into code or instances
As the number of severe vulnerabilities and assaults against encryption keys and processes rises, the enterprise's requirement for robust private keys for certificates and SSH becomes more pressing. When private keys are hardcoded into code or in memory, for instance, they are vulnerable to many threats as well as side-channel attacks. Using a Hardware Security Module (HSM), such as the one offered by Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities, to generate and store keys mitigates these concerns by creating FIPS-compliant private keys with maximum entropy via random number generation and safe hardware protection.
Security-conscious industries, such as banking, financial services, government agencies, and retail, have long employed HSM security. Critical business applications that handle sensitive data frequently employ HSM key management and hardware security. HSMs are also required for a secure PKI as well as the protection of SSL/TLS certificates used on mission-critical enterprise applications.
7. Grant least privilege
The notion of least privilege is one of the most prevalent best practices for roles and permissions. IAM least privilege promotes businesses to restrict access and permissions to the greatest extent possible, without interfering with users' regular routines.
Best practices for role management should be utilized to determine the minimal set of privileges that users in each role require to accomplish their duties. In addition to this role-based access control, businesses can also use attribute-based access control to set the necessary permissions across departments. However, the objective is to routinely evaluate usage, remove unneeded standing rights, and provide system function permissions whenever possible to limit capabilities.
It is crucial to restrict administrative and change capabilities so that single administrators do not have more access than they need. Divide duties to prevent over-provisioning access to select individuals and apply best practices for privileged access management (PAM).
8. Adopt a zero trust approach
In a business environment in which applications are supplied from the cloud to the cloud, users are geographically dispersed and utilize many machines to do mundane chores. This implies that all transactions, including those initiated by employees, are fundamentally dangerous and require a separate security approach.
Zero trust is a strategic initiative and guiding principle that aids organizations in preventing data breaches and securing their assets by supposing that no entity can be trusted. Zero trust security is founded on the principle "Never Trust, Always Verify" and involves tight, continuous verification of user and machine identities to limit implicit trust zones.
Network segmentation, implementation of privilege access management, and adoption of multi-factor authentication are typically the first steps companies take on the path to zero trust. However, a frequently overlooked aspect is the efficient administration of machine IDs. This covers the safeguarding of certificates and cryptographic keys linked with the entity.
To ensure effective protection, a zero trust architecture must encompass all on-premises and cloud resources, as well as all machine and human account access requests. This is made possible by applying zero trust to human and machine identities. The management of all identities—both human and machine—must be robust for zero trust to be effective and for organizations to gain its benefits.
Securing your machine identities
Networks consist of machine-to-machine connections. As new technologies have been embraced, the definition of machines has extended to include mobile devices, applications, cloud instances, containers, microservices, clusters, APIs, and smart algorithms, in addition to physical machines, servers, and personal computers.
A seemingly simple transaction, such as connecting to your local bank's server to check your balance, requires the authentication of hundreds of devices before they can connect. These machines range from the bank's on-site servers to cloud-based applications.
In addition, each of these connections requires immediate authorization. In any case, how can machines decide whether to allow or refuse a connection if they can't accurately recognize another machine? How can you and the bank ensure that the transmitted information has not been intercepted?
It's easy to see how important machine identities are to every aspect of your organization, and how they can be misused by cybercriminals. Now that machine identities are on your radar, are you ready to start managing them?
Automation and full visibility are vital to protecting machine identities, and the Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities is the best place to start.
Why Do You Need a Control Plane for Machine Identities?
Related posts