Securing the Unseen: Veza Tackles Non-Human Identity Risks

As the world continues to develop blockchain and other decentralized technologies, being one step ahead of potential security threats is vital. At Calloutcoin.com, we provide the knowledge you need to navigate the world of digital identity solutions. Explore the nuances of the larger crypto environment with us, your trusted navigators. Today, we're diving into a growing concern: the security risks associated with non-human identities (NHIs) and how innovative solutions like Veza's platform are addressing these challenges.

Understanding Non-Human Identities (NHIs)

What are Non-Human Identities?

Non-human identities are a class of digital identities that are not associated with a specific, identifiable human user. Rather, they are tied to a complex web of bots, algorithms, and other tech-driven forces that exist in an organization’s digital ecosystem. Consider them the digital twins of other software, apps, and automated workflows.

The rapid development and emergence of NHIs have created a complex maze of access permissions. In practice, managing and securing these permissions becomes an incredible heavy lift. Organizations are looking to automate more processes and move more services into the cloud. Consequently, the NHIs to which they are surrounded are rapidly increasing—in numbers and diversity. This expansion poses significant security hazards. NHIs can be entry points for malicious actors seeking to obtain unauthorized access to sensitive systems and data.

• Service accounts used by virtual machines (VMs) and workloads to interact with cloud APIs.
• Robotic process automation (RPA) bots that automate repetitive tasks across different systems.
• Containers and images that form the building blocks of modern cloud-native applications.
• OAuth tokens utilized by marketing platforms for integration with CRM systems.
• CI/CD pipelines employed by DevOps tools like Jenkins and GitHub to automate software delivery.
• Third-party tools and services that require access to internal systems and data.

Why NHIs Are a Growing Security Concern?

Attackers often prefer these NHIs as they have no human in the loop. This leads to instances of highly permissive access privileges that are very easily taken advantage of. Once an attacker obtains a NHI, they have the capability to move laterally into the network. This gives them opportunity to escalate privileges and exfiltrate useful information. The results from these violations can be dire. They can cost you huge dollar amounts, tarnish your public perception and prestige, and incur regulatory fines or legal exposure.

Legacy identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions just can’t meet the growing demands of non-human identities (NHIs). Additionally, PAM shortcomings extend to how these tools fail to resolve both threats and vulnerabilities. Yet, these tools are primarily concerned with the administration of human identities. They may lack the most robust features and capabilities to govern and secure non-human identities effectively.

The Limitations of Traditional Security Solutions

Conventional IGA solutions have difficulty discovering and monitoring all the NHIs across an organization’s expansive environment. This challenge is most pronounced with cloud-based services and third-party applications. PAM solutions typically fall short at enforcing access to fine-grained, dynamic access controls for NHIs. As a consequence, they are able to produce overly lax access controls and increased security vulnerabilities.

Veza brings a new paradigm for NHI security. It gives enterprises the full visibility, strong governance and advanced security they need to manage all their non-human identities. With Veza’s platform, you can easily find, monitor, and govern NHIs at scale. It does so consistently whether in on-premise systems, the cloud or third-party applications.

Veza's Approach to NHI Security

Comprehensive Visibility and Governance

Veza provides a public, centralized repository for information on NHIs. This allows organizations of all kinds to get a comprehensive view of their NHI landscape. This visibility is crucial for understanding where security risks may exist, for applying uniform access control policies, and for meeting various compliance mandates.

This is what differentiates Veza from traditional IGA and PAM solutions. It does so by prioritizing NHIs and providing very specific granular access controls. What makes Veza’s platform different is its singular focus on the unique challenges of managing NHIs. Unlike legacy tools that generally miss this key element, Veza was purposefully built to address these challenges directly.

Contrasting Veza with Traditional IGA and PAM Solutions

Veza's platform offers a range of features designed to help organizations improve their NHI security posture:

NHIs are a significant threat because their access privileges are excessively permissive. This can be a major and deadly security hole. A host of factors contribute to this discrepancy. This could be due to confusion about exactly what permissions an NHI should have, a wish to reduce complexity in access management, or lack of a process to routinely audit and update NHI privileges.

• Automated Discovery: Veza automatically discovers NHIs across diverse environments, eliminating the need for manual inventory efforts.
• Granular Access Controls: Veza enables organizations to enforce fine-grained access controls for NHIs based on the principle of least privilege.
• Continuous Monitoring: Veza continuously monitors NHI activity to detect and respond to suspicious behavior in real-time.
• Automated Remediation: Veza automates the process of remediating security issues related to NHIs, such as revoking excessive privileges or rotating compromised credentials.

Key Features of Veza's Platform

In fact, industry research has found that a majority of enterprise applications associated with cloud environments are over-privileged. That’s because they have access to an organization’s most sensitive data. This lack of enforcement over-permissive access provides a huge attack surface. Threat actors can attack it to obtain unauthorized access to sensitive systems and data.

• Open Authorization API (OAA): Veza's OAA allows customers to connect to their own internal custom applications or create their own Veza connectors without the need for costly and time-consuming development and professional services.
• Extensive Integration Ecosystem: Veza supports over 100 integrations, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Okta, Salesforce, Slack, Zendesk, and Box. This extensive integration ecosystem makes it easy for customers to operationalize the Veza platform for key identity security use cases.
• Self-Service Data Import: Veza's self-service data import provides customers on legacy and non-standard systems with a new no-code data import offering that automatically loads and maps system-specific permissions data into Veza.
• Veza GitHub Community: Veza fosters a collaborative environment through its GitHub community, where customers can share and contribute to building their own Veza connectors, extending Veza's integration ecosystem.
• Unified Access Authorization Platform: Veza's platform replaces fragmented tools with a unified solution for automation, simplicity, and precision, streamlining access governance, privilege access, and access management across the entire environment.

Addressing Key NHI Security Challenges

Over-Permissive Access

NHIs use secrets to authenticate and subsequently authorize access to sensitive systems, networks, and resources. These secrets consist of API keys, tokens, and private certificates. However, if these secrets are not handled with care, they are much easier to expose, potentially exposing sensitive data and allowing unauthorized access.

And as our own research found, nearly 70 percent of files in public monitoring research conceal secrets. If we don’t shepherd these files we’ve created with care, they can become a liability exposure. The “secrets sprawl” makes it difficult to keep an active inventory and management plan of all organizational secrets. This contradiction greatly increases the probability of a violation occurring.

Unsecured Secrets

Unfortunately, most organizations do not have enough visibility into third-party vendors and applications that are linked to their environments through NHIs. This lack of visibility shrouds them in darkness when it comes to threat detection and effective security incident response.

According to industry data, over half of organizations have low or no visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth applications. This opacity creates a tremendous burden to prove harm, prevention, or other threat outweighed factors. Without clear visibility into these relationships, organizations are just flying blind and leaving themselves open to attack.

Lack of Visibility

After all, insecure credential management practices play a role in NHI security hazards. Without a formal process to off-board, organizations leave themselves vulnerable for attacks. Not revoking or routinely rotating API keys puts them at extreme risk.

Research shows that just 23% of companies have a well-defined approach to off-boarding employees and disabling API keys. This lack of attention makes them easy targets for an attack. Such improper credential management can leave an extended period of exposure for attackers to take advantage of compromised NHIs.

Insecure Credential Management

Without a strategy for managing NHIs they can turn into “zombie” identities, lingering indefinitely even after they are not actively useful anymore. Zombie NHIs, however, can create a huge security liability. Permissions like that are usually years or decades old and often associated with legacy applications that aren’t being actively managed today.

Attackers can exploit zombie NHIs to gain unauthorized access to systems and data, often without being detected for extended periods. That’s why regularly reviewing and cleaning up NHIs is essential. We encourage this important practice to avoid the dangers of making zombie identities and the risks they pose.

Zombie NHIs

Adopting a zero-trust security model would be foundational for protecting NHIs. This new security model makes all users and devices equally untrustworthy. It should be irrelevant whether they’re inside the organization or outside it. Each and every one of these requests for access need to be validated prior to being granted.

RBAC and ABAC are incredibly effective ways to further control NHI permissions to make sure they only have the privileges that are absolutely necessary. RBAC assigns permissions according to an NHI’s role in the organization. ABAC employs attribute-based information to decide who gets what access.

Actionable Insights for Improving NHI Security Posture

Adopt a Zero-Trust Approach

Privilege creep is a real phenomenon where excess privileges are accumulated over time. This accumulation can increase the risk of security incidents with NHI. To counter privilege creep, those organizations ought to proactively audit and remove privileges that are no longer needed from NHIs.

Therefore, managing API keys, tokens, and certificates are critical for avoiding secrets sprawl and maintaining secure authentication. Organizations should implement a robust secrets management solution that provides the following capabilities:

• Requiring multi-factor authentication for all NHI access requests.
• Enforcing strict access controls based on the principle of least privilege.
• Continuously monitoring NHI activity for suspicious behavior.
• Regularly reviewing and updating NHI access privileges.

Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC)

By following these practical guidelines, organizations can make significant improvements to the NHI security posture. This serious, proactive approach creates strong networks that minimize the risk of breaches and other harmful security incidents. Veza’s platform provides organizations the power and flexibility to manage and secure NHIs effectively across multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments. This gives them the confidence to adopt automation and cloud enterprise services.

• RBAC: Simplifies access management by grouping permissions based on common roles.
• ABAC: Provides more granular control by considering various attributes, such as the NHI's location, time of day, and the sensitivity of the data being accessed.

Regularly Review and Remove Unnecessary Privileges

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This review process should involve:

1. Identifying NHIs with excessive privileges.
2. Determining the specific permissions that are no longer needed.
3. Revoking those permissions in a timely manner.
4. Automating the process of identifying and remediating excessive privileges.

Implement Strong Secrets Management

Managing API keys, tokens, and certificates is essential for preventing secrets sprawl and ensuring secure authentication. Organizations should implement a robust secrets management solution that provides the following capabilities:

• Centralized storage and management of secrets.
• Automated rotation of secrets.
• Auditing of secret access.
• Alerting on suspicious secret activity.

By implementing these actionable insights, organizations can significantly improve their NHI security posture and reduce the risk of breaches and other security incidents. Veza's platform provides the tools and capabilities needed to effectively manage and secure NHIs across diverse environments, enabling organizations to embrace automation and cloud-based services with confidence.

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