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Tag: Conjur

  • Conjur Delivers Automated Access Management to Windows Platforms

    Native .NET Libraries and Windows Remote Desktop Support Spans Microsoft Workloads in Cloud, Hybrid and PaaS Environments

    WALTHAM, Mass. – April 5, 2016 – Conjur, Inc., provider of automated access management software, has released significant product enhancements for Microsoft® Windows® environments that addresses the growing customer requirements for building, managing and securing Windows workloads in cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Conjur’s Windows capabilities deliver a consolidated approach for access, control, authorization and audit for Windows resources and development environments.

    Now, customers can seamlessly extend their on-premise datacenter operations to cloud services, leverage Microsoft Azure services and accelerate the .NET software development lifecycle while strengthening security practices.

    Conjur’s new support for native Windows authentication and real-time application of authorization and permissions to dynamic virtual machines ensures an IT graceful migration.

    “As we broaden our market adoption, the need for first class Microsoft Windows support is apparent, especially in hybrid and heterogeneous environments,” said Mitch Haile, Vice President of Products at Conjur. “We are excited to support both .NET native client APIs and Windows Remote Desktop Access Management for modern, highly automated IT environments.”

    Conjur’s Window’s release incorporates support for:

    • Windows Remote Desktop Connector: Integrate Windows authentication for user login to Windows instances operating in cloud environments
    • Native .NET Client Library: Conjur’s new .NET client library is open source and available immediately.

    “Conjur’s new native .NET libraries and Remote Desktop access to Microsoft Windows hosts in the cloud is a significant step forward in enabling automated infrastructure security,” says Dave Bechberger, Senior Architect atExpero Inc.

    Through a centralized authorization service exposed through APIs, Conjur enables enterprises to apply a consistent set of policies for production, staging and test environment access throughout the entire software development cycle. These latest enhancements meet the requirements for the scalable, enterprise-grade secret management solution for organizations in highly regulated industries.

    About Conjur

    Conjur is preventive security for companies that are automating their IT systems, who need to control access, and need to demonstrate control.  For enterprises that need to protect their infrastructure, Conjur is the only solution with comprehensive identity and authorization for every cloud, VM, container, service, job and user. Conjur helps companies such as Netflix, Box, and Puppet Labs solve critical operational, compliance, and security challenges that originate in modern automated infrastructure. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Conjur is funded by Avalon Partners and Amplify Partners. Visit www.conjur.net  and follow @conjurinc on Twitter.

     

    PRContact:
    Tracy Wemett
    BroadPR
    +1-617-868-5031
  • Practice Safe SSH with Teleport

    Practice Safe SSH with Teleport

    Decentralized Key Management and Sharing Is Not The Answer ­­ Practice Safe SSH with Teleport

    View PostAll projects start off with the best intentions, user management and security around accounts won’t be an afterthought. Despite those intentions, the requirements to move fast tend to override things suchDecentralized Key Management and Sharing Is Not The Answer ­­ Practice Safe SSH with Teleport All projects start off with the best intentions, user management and security around accounts won’t be an afterthought. Despite those intentions, the requirements to move fast tend to override things such as account hygiene, and before you know it, you are trying to manage hundreds, if not thousands, of SSH keys and privileged accounts either manually or with a tool that wasn’t designed for key management. You also probably need to keep track of authorization privileges, and a shared document or spreadsheet is not the correct method, especially when you have systems that need to be PCI compliant or are in SOX scope.

    Centralized Key Management

    Does your current SSH key management strategy feel like this? Are you using manual methods to distribute and manage SSH public keys? As the number of hosts and users increase, this method becomes more and more unwieldy and also can present you with security and compliance risks. By moving to a centralized approach with Conjur’s Teleport open­ source solution, you are now able to benefit from the following: ● No more SSH key sharing between developers ● Each developer has their own unique login, with their own distinct set of privileges ● Simple SSH key creation and deletion

    User Management

    A proper strategy for programmatic provisioning and deprovisioning of user accounts is equally as important as SSH key management. In addition to SSH key management, Teleport also provides an LDAP service that allows for a customized list of users/groups that can be associated with specific projects and environments. When a new developer joins a project, you can quickly programmatically provision the account and access rights, and when a developer departs, you can revoke the rights as well as remove the SSH key.

    SSH Key Rotation

    Scheduled SSH Key rotation should also be part of the overall security strategy and posture, and for those systems that need to be PCI DSS compliant, SSH keys need to be rotated annually. By providing a centralized SSH key solution, Teleport allows you to seamlessly rotate the keys, as well as keep a detailed audit log around which key was rotated when.

    Conclusion

    SSH is a powerful tool that provides a great deal of value and security for your developers, but with that great power comes great responsibility. Teleport is a tool that allows you to provide that power to your developers while also knowing that you are practicing safe SSH and are being secure and responsible.as account hygiene, and before you know it, you are trying to manage hundreds, if not thousands, of SSH keys and privileged accounts either manually or with a tool that wasn’t designed for key management. You also probably need to keep track of authorization privileges, and a shared document or spreadsheet is not the correct method, especially when you have systems that need to be PCI compliant or are in SOX scope.

    About the Author/Mike Kail

    mike_kailMike Kail was Yahoo’s CIO and SVP of Infrastructure, where he led the IT and Data Center functions for the company. He has more than 24 years of IT Operations experience with a focus on highly scalable architectures, prior to joining Yahoo. Most recently, Kail served as VP of IT Operations at Netflix. Prior to that, he was VP of IT Operations at Attensity, where he was responsible for the Americas data center operations team; including managing various big data systems with their Hadoop cluster, HBase, and MongoDB components. He has been recognized widely for his insightful industry commentary on Twitter, and was recently named by the Huffington Post as one of the “Top 100 Most Social CIOs on Twitter.” He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Iowa State University. Reach out to him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

  • Conjur up some agile, automated authorization management

    Conjur up some agile, automated authorization management

    One issue that has plagued IT since its inception is adding and removing authorized users. Most network and application security rely on somehow validating credentials to confirm that an individual is authorized to access the resources, but in a rapidly changing environment it is a serious challenge to keep authorization and authentication systems up to date. Conjur hopes to solve that problem.

    What is Conjur? In a nutshell, Conjur is an API-backed virtual appliance that makes cloud infrastructure projects possible by giving DevOps teams the ability to manage permissions and authorizations in a secure, automated, and well-audited way. In other words, Conjur allows for automated authorization management.

    Kevin O’Brien, part of the founding team at Conjur, shared some thoughts on Conjur, the issues the company seeks to address, and how Conjur can make life easier for DevOps teams. “As we’ve grown into the market, we’ve seen a lot of DevOps teams struggling with the same kind of authorizations problems, either slowing or killing cloud initiatives outright. For the ones that make it off the ground, they have to build a tangled web of handwritten scripts or hacked together key/certificate/user/access management inside of toolchains that are designed for other purposes (things like Puppet, Ansible, Docker, Chef, Salt, GitHub, etc.).”

    Conjur provides a dedicated platform for conducting authorizations without relying on insecure alternatives. Rather than trying to force old authorization technologies and ideas—like Active Directory—into a radically new environment—like an agile DevOps infrastructure, organizations can leverage Conjur.

    Conjur helps simplify and automate tasks like moving SSH keys out of insecure locations such as on-disk storage, or in Docker images, or GitHub repositories, and consolidating them on the secure, encrypted Conjur server. Conjur can manage secrets, including SSL certificates, across their entire lifecycle—from provisioning to replacement—with minimal downtime. And, Conjur maintains a comprehensive audit log of its activities.

    O’Brien relayed the story of one Conjur customer. This customer provides data analytics products for healthcare organizations, and solves complex computational problems with a focus on reducing health costs. The customer wanted to integrate DevOps concepts and culture into its business model, but ran into some stumbling blocks.

    “They were running into an issue where they wanted to begin using an AWS-based clustered genomics product, which would have allowed them to automate a large portion of their analytics, but were being told by their insurance payers that moving client data into that environment would be an impediment to doing business, because they couldn’t provide sufficiently granular access rights (the product used passwordless SSH keys),” explained O’Brien. “The insurance companies saw that as an ePHI issue, and absent a more sophisticated control and auditing, it was a no-go.”

    This company used Conjur to replace the default authorization mechanism in the project with a “Conjurized” access check, which allowed it to store the relevant keys in ephemeral storage and manage permissions through Conjur rather than by embedding them in code throughout their product set. Along with the audit capabilities, this meant that it had effectively taken a show-stopping design and circumvented it in a matter of weeks, without relying on key distribution or having to spend any time building an in-house solution.

    Conjur even has a solution dedicated to “DevOps and User Enablement.” O’Brien described it, “At a macro level, we’re solving a problem that is unique to DevOps and cloud: unlike the on-premise infrastructure of 20 years ago, protected by an Active Directory/LDAP system that handled authorization, role-based access control, and so on, there’s no way to translate that to the rapidly changing infrastructure that teams deal with today.”

    User enablement, in the end, is about driving innovation and speed. Conjur claims to make that possible (and more automated), without sacrificing security or auditability, or requiring a lot of custom work to use.