That alphabet of Security starts with I of “Identity”

It’s an understatement to say security is moving fast, it’s changing very rapidly and the pressure to keep up with it, increases too.

From various angles, people in IT (as in Information Technology), are under fire to keep the infrastructure secure. Cloud is getting mature, new features pop up every week.
It’s almost a contradiction, but also legislation is catching up to close the holes regarding the protection of people’s security and privacy.

In many cases, the first reaction of customers, management, ITPros, Developers, DevOps,… is to look for the ultimate and ideal tool that will help to plug the security hole.

But if you only focus on the tooling, you’ll discover rather sooner than later, it is not sufficient to get your security watertight.
One of the basic reasons is that tools can’t be implemented properly without involving people and processes. I don’t need to explain the PPT (people-proces-technology) or PPP (people-proces-products) triade, right?

Lots of security management approaches and certifications handle this triad (ISO27001, CISSP, … I’ll cover that another time.

(credits: smart picture of ITGovernance.co.uk)

Rather than diving into the search for a tool, you better take a step back and consider first.

What’s the primary function of security?
Protecting an item that you want to keep (safe), right?

[The reason (“why”) for keeping it safe = the CIA triad, Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability]

When you think about the processes (“how”) to secure  an asset (anything that is worth securing), there are 3 basics actions you need to define

• authorization: what you can do with the asset (the CRUD stuff, create/read/update/delete)
• identification: who needs the authorization?
• authentication: the method to proof your identity (using passwords, passes, cards, 2FA, MFA, …)

This is essentially the foundation of my credo “no security without identity”

Just by interpreting the basic components of security, you directly hit the “PROCESS” part of the PPT triad.
Now, here’s were most technical people get into trouble… not knowing how to put this in practice.

But let me ask you a simple question: within the normal, usual businesses or companies, where does the identity process typically start?
Yes, correct, HR (Human Resources)

The second question: can you name at least 2 typical high-level HR processes (for people).
Answer: something like “hire” and “fire”, or synonyms like “onboarding/off-boarding”, “termination”, “end-of-life” (but that sounds pretty dramatic when talking about people…).

These 2 events announce the beginning and the end of a lifecycle, the identity lifecycle.
And to make it complete, you also need to define the life-in-between as people change over time.

BTW, just a small side step here: this does not apply to humans only, but any other asset in your environment has pretty much the same cycle and it does not matter if it’s considered “IT” or not… computer, certificates, smart cards, disks, tapes, … but also cars, documents, …

This idea to consider the lifecycle as universal, is a great approach to explain the “identity lifecycle” to non-techies that get involved in the identity lifecycle processes.

This is the common ground you can use to talk to HR people, business managers, Executive level, …

Now, if you look on the internet for pictures on identity lifecycle management, you’re smashed with a lot of complex schemas…

Many of results are variations of 3 essential processes

Depending on your background you might name them differently, like:

For the sake of simplicity, when teaching IDM and security workshops I usually only keep the keywords “Hire”, “Change” and “Fire”.
Short and easy to remember for most people.

For your understanding, the circle approach  would assume you start over again after the “Fire” block, but that’s not always the case. The cycle might stop.
So, the approach below is easier to visualize for most people.

Clockwise:

1. Starting the cycle at (1),
2. updating the identity at (2),
3. exiting the cycle at (3)

As I mentioned, earlier, virtually any IT or asset related proces is basically working like this.

Now, let’s take it a step further… How does identity management control security?

A first thing to consider is the typical length of the hire-change-fire modules.

How many tasks/steps does it usually take to complete each of the 3 steps?
Keep the asset in mind and keep it simple…

Typical actions in a hire process:

• signing contract
• getting an network/AD account
• getting an email address
• getting building access
• IT stuff (laptop, …)
• …

Pretty straight forward…
How much time would it take, in simple cases to start working?  Hours if not days.

What about the change process? For example, you get promotion to team lead or head of department…

• hand over your tasks to peers
• get ramped up on new job
• in some cases, there is segregation of duties, getting rid of existing rights permissions
•  getting access to new environment
• changing communications channels (notifications to stakeholders of change)
• …

In reality, this usually takes a few weeks.

And what are the typical things your consider for the “fire” process?

• informing stakeholders/customers
• disabling the account
• changing password
• lock account
• removing access
• extracting documentation form personal storage
• move documents to manager or team
• handing over ownership
• knowledge transfer
• data backup/archiving
• cleaning the mailbox
• deleting the account (* not always allowed for various reasons)
• sending legal / tax documents
• and more…

As you can understand, this entire termination process might take months… In many situations the termination process must be executed in different steps, like:

• Disabling the account till x+30 days (for example, revert in case the person gets a renewal)
• Removing access on x+60 days
• Kill mailbox on X+90
• Remove the account on X+1y (or even: never)

In some cases accounts must be kept for legal reasons or tracking/cybersecurity reasons…

The further you go in the lifecycle, you need to combine more tasks, and tasks or decisions get more complex.

Overall you can distinguish 2 properties of these processes: duration and complexity. Both go up.

Now, when considering security, why is this important?
Instead of discussing the impact of successful processes, it’s easier to find out what happens if it fails.

WHAT IF… (the process fails)??

Let’s run through the cycle again….

What if the “Hire” process fails?

• you can’t access the building
• you do not get an account
• you can’t logon
• you can’t access documents
• …

Basically, on your first (few) day(s) you can’t work. Sorry!
But what’s the balance for security: just great, because the risk is nearly 0, except for a bad start and a bit of reputation damage..
At the end: you can’t do any harm, essentially.

In case of the “change” process, a larger part of the tasks and operations will impact the security posture.

When your “change” process fails,  for example

• you can still access your old documents
• you get more access (eg collecting access of your old and new role)
• you start collection sensitive accesses over time
• managers don’t know
• user profiles get copied from existing colleagues in the same team (no ‘reset’ or the permissions before the new ones are assigned)
• …

So for this second piece of the circle, the impact might be significant, over time.

But for the “end-of-life” the story is completely different, a failing “deprovisioning” scenario has major impact on the business and IT process

• accounts stay active
• accounts not being disabled
• access not removed
• active accounts not detected
• account with highly privileged access still active
• accounts being deleted too soon
• unauthorized users that have access to critical resources
• hackers go undetected for a long time, using sleeping accounts
• hardware not returned,
• data stolen,
• over-use of budgets to software licenses that are not revoked
• access badges allow unauthorized access to your building and environment
• failure to ‘deprovision’ old hard disks properly expose your company data to interested (unauthorized) parties…
• …,

It’s clear that a failing deprovisioning/end-of-life process has major impact on your enterprise security.

And hackers or disgruntled employees like that.

Of course you can imagine the benefits of an efficient and effective end-of-life process. It’s the opposite.

Does that require you implement an automated identity management?
No.

That’s where ISO27001 and eg GDPR surprises a lot of people.

Once you’ve got the basic processes in place you can discuss tooling, not the other way around.

You have
no security without managing your identity.

you want
no identity without security.

Did I mention  that I’ll be presenting more of this fun stuff on TechoRama 2017.
Check it out here: http://sched.co/9M94

I’m very proud to present a session on the ABC of identity: Maximizing security with 10 simple processes.

 

Protecting your #FIM2010/#MIM2016: Core account type differentiators

When handling solutions in the identity & access management area (and practically speaking working with FIM/MIM), a very basic discussion is always coming back: which types of accounts do you need?
It’s seems a trivial question but you can apply it to different areas of the solution, both from a technical as from a logical perspective…

When talking about the technical perspective, I’m looking at securing your technical implementation.

A more practical question would be: what user accounts do I need to prepare before I start implementing my IAM solution? What is needed to implement my solution in a secure, but manageable way, with respect to principles of “segregation of duties” and “least-privilege“, but also “due care”, “due governance”…

With a bit of experience (referring to the installation requirement of a typical FIM/MIM configuration), you can easily list at 5 categories of accounts you need:

1. installer accounts: typically administrator accounts to run the setup, with some privileges on the server and back-end systems to get the server components running
2. service accounts: account that will be configured on applications running continuously in the background (FIM Sync service, FIM Service service, SQL Database services
3. account that are not running full time in the background, but run a technical task now and then, not continuously, but automated without user interaction (eg like the FIM Sync run profile scheduling, …)
4. personal accounts, that logon to the desktop, what every single person is using to do his daily job and IT work (logging on on your laptop, remotely connecting to the server,… )
5. personal administrator accounts: that logon to the desktop, or to the server desktop for highly priviledged IT work (logging on your laptop as admin, connecting to the server as admin, administrative tasks…)

So what are the key differentiators to define and separate these accounts?

One of the primary differentiators is interactive desktop logon (1).
Typically an installation account or an administrator needs to logon…. A service account running the application in the background on the server, … does not.

Also, when securing your environment this is a key parameter to lock down the privileges.

This differentiator is also directly related to password management.

Account logging on in the desktop can change their passwords. Accounts running in the background, without interaction will have major trouble when they are under password change policy.
Unless the application supports managed service accounts, but that’s not wide spread yet, certainly not for the FIM/MIM components…so I’ll skip that track for now.

But an installer account, DOES NEED desktop logon, but SHOULD NOT be deleted when someone leaves the company.
The best example of this difference is the FIM Installer account, that gets local admin access to the Windows server and to the SQL server as SA. This account is also injected in the FIM portal as default (GOD MODE) admin, so you DON’T want to loose this account.

So, another easy differentiator is the link to a physical person (2).
Typically physical persons are ‘managed’ with a lifecycle (eg under contract with your company). You know the typical hire-change-fire processes… (people on-board, people change jobs, people leave the company)

You don’t want to run your background services on a personal account, because… if you are running your identity management the proper way (and you will), they will be deprovisioned one time, right?

In normal (I should rather say normalized) security situations, the principle of least-privilege dictates that normal user accounts should not have extensive administrative rights, these should be attributed to separate administrative accounts.

So, the parameter: “highly privileged rights” (3) is a another key differentiator between the different types of accounts that can logon to a desktop.

The opposite of the ‘physical’ account are accounts that are not (or better, SHOULD not be) used by people, but run in the background, most server and/or Active Directory admins immediately think about the following system / GPO settings

• deny run as a service
• deny logon as a batch job

So, considering “segregation of duties” and “least-privilege” makes them mutually exclusive. (I beg you to disagree and provide me motivated arguments …), which provides me 2 other differentiators

• run as a background service (4)
• run as a batch job (5)

Based on these differentiators, the basic accounts types you can define are

• service accounts
• technical accounts
• functional accounts
• personal accounts
• personal admin accounts

	Account Type
Task type	Service Account	Technical Account	Functional Account	Personal Account	Personal Administrator  Account
Run as a Background Service (continuously)	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO
Running a batch job (Specific Task or script)	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO
Interact with desktop/Physical Logon	NO	NO	YES	YES	YES
Highly Privileged Rights	NO	NO	YES	NO	YES
Direct Link to physical person (link to HR)	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES

I’ve been working with a variety of customers and environments and I challenge this matrix every single time.

So I would like to challenge you to find a better, easier, more solid matrix.
Is there anything in this set of parameters that doesn’t make sense? Too simple, to complex, anything missing?

If yes, let me know and we go for the next version.

Note-to-self: Internet, privacy and copyright (blogs, #TNWIKI, …)

While working on TechNet Wiki Governance, I stumbled into some useful links.

Saving it to my external memory for quick reference:

• Writing a Blog Disclaimer
  • http://www.blogherald.com/2007/10/02/writing-a-blog-disclaimer/
• What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content
  • http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/what-do-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/
• 10 Big Myths about copyright explained
  • http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
• Copyright Crash Course.
  • http://www.lib.utsystem.edu/copyright/