The top 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 well-liked hyperscale cloud companies, warning that they continue to be a critical 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 don’t seem to be advancing as shortly or successfully as wanted to mitigate dangers.
Lengthy-lived credentials are nonetheless a giant risk to cloud safety
The report revealed that almost half (46%) of organisations utilizing AWS depend on IAM customers for human entry to cloud environments — a apply Datadog known 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 line with Datadog, this highlights a persistent subject: whereas centralised identification administration is changing 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The prevalence of long-lived credentials spans all main cloud suppliers and sometimes contains outdated or unused entry keys.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 functions had entry keys that have been greater than a yr previous.
Lengthy-lived credentials include a big danger of knowledge breaches
Lengthy-lived cloud credentials by no means expire and steadily get leaked in supply code, container pictures, construct logs, and utility artifacts, in line with Datadog. Previous analysis performed by the corporate has proven they’re the most typical reason for publicly documented cloud safety breaches.
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Krug stated there may be mature tooling available in the market to make sure secrets and techniques don’t find yourself in manufacturing environments, similar to static code evaluation. Datadog’s report additionally notes the rise of IMDSv2 enforcement in AWS EC2 cases, an necessary safety mechanism to dam credential theft.
There are much less long-lived credentials, however change is just too sluggish
There have been strikes to mitigate the issue, similar to AWS launching IAM Id Centre, permitting organisations to centrally handle entry to AWS functions. Whereas firms are within the course of of fixing to the service, Krug stated, “I simply don’t know that everybody considers this their highest precedence.”
“It undoubtedly must be, as a result of if we look on the final 10 years of knowledge breaches, the first theme is that long-lived entry key pairs have been the foundation reason for these knowledge breaches mixed with overly permissive entry,” he defined. “If we eradicate one facet of that, we actually considerably scale back the chance for the enterprise.”
The long-lived credentials drawback isn’t unique to APAC — it’s a worldwide subject
In line with Krug, APAC isn’t any totally different from the remainder of the world. With no regulation to manage the administration of long-lived credentials within the cloud in any specific jurisdiction, firms worldwide use comparable approaches with comparable cloud suppliers, typically throughout a number of international jurisdictions.
What’s stopping the transfer away from long-lived credentials?
The hassle required to transition groups to single sign-on and short-term credentials has slowed the adoption of those practices. Krug stated the “carry and shift” concerned in migrating growth workflows to single sign-on could be appreciable. That is partly as a result of mindset shift required and partly as a result of organisations should present sufficient assist and steerage to assist groups adapt.
Nonetheless, 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 making certain that workflows stay environment friendly.
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“AWS Id Centre is a superb product and permits these very seamless person flows, however people are nonetheless midstream in migrating to it,” Krug stated.
What do you have to do along with your long-lived credentials?
Datadog’s report warned that it’s unrealistic to anticipate that long-lived credentials could be securely managed. The seller recommends that firms undertake safe identities with fashionable 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, short-term credentials,” the report stated.
Workloads. For workloads, Datadog stated this finish could be achieved with IAM roles for EC2 cases 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 key international hyperscalers.
People: For human customers, Datadog stated the best 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.”
