28 January 2018

With the increasing adoption of cloud services, the traditional perimeter security approach becomes less and less effective. The on-premise security layer, which protects users against cyber-attacks, is just no longer existent if users have direct access to a company’s cloud services from any location, at any time and, in the best case, from any device.

The four “A”s, Authentication, Authorization, Administration and Audit, become more and more important in a [hybrid] cloud based working environment.

“When identity and access management (IAM) works well, it means the right people have the right access to the right resources when they need them with appropriate governance in place from wherever the data or application is needed.” [1]

The magic word is “right”: With IAM we control the access of well-known groups of people to well-known resources. Unfortunately, cyber attackers do often not belong to these groups.

From the NIST NVD we learn, that 67% of the vulnerabilities published in 2017 need no privileges for exploitation.

Privileges None means: “The attacker is unauthorized prior to attack, and therefore does not require any access to settings or files to carry out an attack.” [2]

This holds e.g. for remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities. An RCE allows an attacker to get full control of the victim’s computer or service, in the worst case with administrative privileges. With this, the entire new perimeter is bypassed. For an RCE example see CVE-2017-11459. [3]

Identity becomes an important part of a new perimeter but can never replace the perimeter.

The NIST NVD data give another important insight for shaping a company’s security strategy: In 41% (5958) of 14647 vulnerabilities the user must interact with the attacker for their exploitation.

This means that well-made user awareness training can prevent lots of cyber-attacks.

Have a great week.

[1] AusCERT 2017 – Identity is the new perimeter
Anthony Caruana, 05/30/2017, CSO Online
https://www.cso.com.au/article/619970/auscert-2017-identity-new-perimeter/
Last seen: 01/28/2018

[2] Common Vulnerability Scoring System v3.0: Specification Document
https://www.first.org/cvss/specification-document
Last seen: 01/28/2018

[3] CVE-2017-11459
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-11459
Last seen: 01/28/2018