The pinnacle of safety advocacy at Datadog, a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform, has urged enterprises in Australia and the APAC area to speed up phasing out long-lived credentials for common hyperscale cloud companies, warning that they continue to be a severe knowledge breach danger.
Talking with TechRepublic, Andrew Krug highlighted findings from Datadog’s State of Cloud Safety 2024 report, which recognized long-lived credentials as a persistent safety danger issue. Whereas credential administration practices are bettering, Krug famous they aren’t advancing as shortly or successfully as wanted to mitigate dangers.
Lengthy-lived credentials are nonetheless a giant menace to cloud safety
The report revealed that just about half (46%) of organisations utilizing AWS depend on IAM customers for human entry to cloud environments — a follow Datadog referred to as a type of long-lived credential. This was true even for organisations utilizing centralised identification administration to grant entry throughout a number of methods.
Furthermore, almost one in 4 relied solely on IAM customers with out implementing centralised federated authentication. In accordance with Datadog, this highlights a persistent difficulty: whereas centralised identification administration is turning into extra frequent, unmanaged customers with long-lived credentials proceed to pose a big safety danger.
The prevalence of long-lived credentials spans all main cloud suppliers and infrequently consists of outdated or unused entry keys. The report discovered that 62% of Google Cloud service accounts, 60% of AWS IAM customers, and 46% of Microsoft Entra ID purposes had entry keys that had been greater than a yr previous.
Lengthy-lived credentials include a big danger of information breaches
Lengthy-lived cloud credentials by no means expire and ceaselessly get leaked in supply code, container photographs, construct logs, and software artifacts, based on Datadog. Previous analysis performed by the corporate has proven they’re the commonest reason behind publicly documented cloud safety breaches.
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Krug mentioned there may be mature tooling available in the market to make sure secrets and techniques don’t find yourself in manufacturing environments, resembling static code evaluation. Datadog’s report additionally notes the rise of IMDSv2 enforcement in AWS EC2 situations, an essential safety mechanism to dam credential theft.
There are much less long-lived credentials, however change is just too gradual
There have been strikes to mitigate the issue, resembling AWS launching IAM Id Centre, permitting organisations to centrally handle entry to AWS purposes. Whereas firms are within the course of of fixing to the service, Krug mentioned, “I simply don’t know that everybody considers this their highest precedence.”
“It positively ought to be, as a result of if we have a look at the final 10 years of information breaches, the first theme is that long-lived entry key pairs had been the foundation reason behind these knowledge breaches mixed with overly permissive entry,” he defined. “If we remove one aspect of that, we actually considerably cut back the chance for the enterprise.”
The long-lived credentials downside isn’t unique to APAC — it’s a world difficulty
In accordance with Krug, APAC isn’t any completely different from the remainder of the world. With no regulation to manage the administration of long-lived credentials within the cloud in any explicit jurisdiction, firms worldwide use comparable approaches with comparable cloud suppliers, typically throughout a number of world jurisdictions.
What’s stopping the transfer away from long-lived credentials?
The hassle required to transition groups to single sign-on and non permanent credentials has slowed the adoption of those practices. Krug mentioned the “carry and shift” concerned in migrating improvement workflows to single sign-on may be appreciable. That is partly because of the mindset shift required and partly as a result of organisations should present satisfactory help and steerage to assist groups adapt.
Nevertheless, he famous that instruments like AWS Id Centre, which has been out there for 3 years, have made this transition extra possible. These instruments are designed to cut back developer friction by streamlining the authentication course of, minimising the necessity for repeated MFA sign-ins repeatedly, and guaranteeing that workflows stay environment friendly.
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“AWS Id Centre is a superb product and allows these very seamless person flows, however people are nonetheless midstream in migrating to it,” Krug mentioned.
What must you do together with your long-lived credentials?
Datadog’s report warned that it’s unrealistic to count on that long-lived credentials may be securely managed. The seller recommends that firms undertake safe identities with trendy authentication mechanisms, leverage short-lived credentials, and actively monitor modifications to APIs that attackers generally use.
“Organisations ought to leverage mechanisms that present time-bound, non permanent credentials,” the report mentioned.
Workloads. For workloads, Datadog mentioned this finish may be achieved with IAM roles for EC2 situations or EKS Pod Id in AWS, Managed Identities in Microsoft Azure, and repair accounts connected to workloads for Google Cloud if the organisation makes use of the most important world hyperscalers.
People: For human customers, Datadog mentioned the simplest resolution is to centralise identification administration utilizing an answer like AWS IAM Id Middle, Okta, or Microsoft Entra ID and keep away from utilizing particular person cloud customers for every worker, which it labelled “extremely inefficient and dangerous.”
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