Author: Art Poghosyan

The attack surfaces that today’s businesses and public entities must manage have never been more complex and difficult to protect. The introduction of cloud and SaaS offerings over the past decade has caused seemingly insurmountable IT sprawl, with a third of successful attacks now occurring via unmanaged or virtually unknown assets. And while shadow IT is an urgent threat confronting many organizations, the migration of the software development life cycle to the cloud—and the rise of machine identities—is compounding the attack surface in profound ways. Emerging out of the Agile and lean strategies for software development in the 2010s, DevOps predates the mainstreaming of cloud computing.

But once the value of cloud-based IT resources came to be widely appreciated, development teams began moving their developer environments to the cloud in a big way—to the point where many people today think of DevOps and cloud as inseparable. Recent Gartner research showed that much of enterprise IT spending is now directed toward cloud projects. In fact, for IT categories like application software, infrastructure software, business process services and system infrastructure, more than 51% of IT spending will shift away from traditional solutions to the public cloud by 2025. Nearly two-thirds of spending on application software alone will be directed toward the cloud by 2025.

The explosion in cloud DevOps has brought with it a huge uptick in the number of privileges, credentials, identities and access rights under management. We’re all familiar with how digital identity and access management (IAM) works in conventional settings through combinations of usernames and passwords. In the DevOps world, where cloud containers can run as distinct microservice processes interacting with other processes (machine-to-machine communication), identities and privileges are usually governed through SSL/TLS certificates. These machine identities have emerged as a critical security priority across multiple industries, not just because they’ve proliferated exponentially, but because of the lack of effective tools and strategies available to IT security teams.

Machine Identities—Scope of the Issue

A recent global survey of 1,000 CIOs found that the average organization has 250,000 machine identities under management coming into 2022, with that number expected to double by 2024. The study also found that 83% of organizations suffered a machine identity-related outage in the past year, with 57% of organizations experiencing at least one data breach or security incident related to compromised machine identities over the same time period.

Because the perimeter defense solutions and strategies that formed the basis of IT security best practices for many years are of little use in cloud environments, security admins have had to rely on existing IAM and privileged access management (PAM) tools to secure data, accounts, and development pipelines. Not surprisingly, identities and access privileges have become the leading attack vector in the cloud, providing attackers with an exponentially higher number of vulnerabilities to target within the enterprise than were available even a few years ago. We’ve seen these points of weakness come into play in recent high-profile breaches and attacks such as SolarWinds, Codecov and PHP.

Embracing Zero-Trust Principles to Secure the DevOps Pipeline

Fortunately for today’s DevOps teams, cloud-oriented privilege management technologies have evolved rapidly in recent years, especially in the categories of cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) and time-based role access management or just-in-time privileging. CIEM solutions target the security weak points and process vulnerabilities that are unique to the cloud environments. These include the lack of deep visibility into user, group, and role privileges, which together make it difficult to conduct oversight and control over the activities of users within cloud infrastructure and applications. Where conventional approaches such as IAM and PAM are designed primarily to secure data, apps, and users within the organization, CIEM is designed to manage permissions risks to prevent cloud breaches and data theft.

Emerging CIEM solutions are bringing to bear advanced capabilities in discovery, monitoring and auditing to significantly broaden visibility into DevOps processes for IT security professionals. With a CIEM solution, security teams can scan cloud applications for existing users, groups, roles and granted privileges down to the resource level. Each user, group, role, and privilege can be categorized to identify and verify that privileged users have the appropriate levels of access. Access reports can be generated to concisely outline users and groups with the most privilege and the highest risk.

On the audit front, CIEM solutions provide the capability to track and report on levels of privilege as well as all activity associated with those privileges. In this way, it becomes possible to generate privileged access reports for consumption by internal and external auditors to ensure compliance with regulatory and other requirements such as SOX, GDPR, HIPAA, GLBA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 2, FedRAMP and more. Similarly, with the ability to monitor privileged access across all cloud applications, security teams can apply behavior analysis to identify privilege abuse and abnormal activities from users. As with conventional SIEM tools, CIEM solutions will generate alerts to administrators to suspect activities or behaviors—for instance, if a user attempts to circumvent policies preventing direct privileged access to cloud services.

Just-In-Time Privileging and Zero Standing Privileges

Importantly, CIEM solutions are also effectively eliminating standing privileges to cloud resources based on least-privilege access and zero-trust principles. The automated granting and expiring of permissions—just-in-time (JIT) privilege grants—is highly effective at minimizing attack surfaces. Because these JIT/zero standing privilege (ZSP) solutions work on a zero-trust model, no one and nothing is trusted with standing access to cloud accounts and data.

With JIT permissioning, elevated privileges can extend either for the duration of a session or task, or for a set amount of time. Once the task is complete, those elevated privileges are automatically revoked–all without sys-admin involvement. Where a user previously had standing access privileges potentially extending around the clock for months at a time, converting to JIT granting would compress that attack surface to several hours per month. Further, JIT permissioning largely frees organizations from having to maintain and pay for both privileged and non-privileged accounts. Dynamic secrets generation – where a dynamic secret is generated on demand and is unique to a client, instead of a static secret being defined and shared ahead of time – also provides a better model for securing temporarily deployed services and features.

DevOps and DevSecOps are still new and fast-evolving concepts within the wider computer science and cybersecurity universe. No doubt, DevOps has been wildly successful in accelerating automation and speeding time to market for innovative applications and business services. To date, however, security solutions providers have struggled with cloud access management. In other words, they have struggled to accelerate privileged access solutions that could secure the devices, data, and resources used by DevOps teams, especially in cross-cloud environments. Dynamic permissioning platforms using JIT privilege grants and employing ZSP principles show great promise in solving these problems.