Identity Federation Attacks Explained: Token Forgery, Rogue Trust, and Federation Misconfigurations

Read full article here: https://www.slashid.com/blog/identity-security-federation-issues/?source=nhimg

The last blog post explored non-human identity (NHI) security challenges, identifying identity federation as a major attack vector. Today, we’ll take a deeper look into federation-based threats, drawing on public research and historical breaches.

Identity federation—used to centralize authentication across internal and third-party systems—is now a double-edged sword. While it simplifies access management, it also introduces serious security vulnerabilities that attackers increasingly exploit. This article dives deep into the top identity federation attack vectors, from rogue trust relationships to token forgery and cloud misconfigurations, using real-world examples from APT29, Scattered Spider, and recent high-profile breaches like MGM Resorts and SolarWinds.

We explore how protocols such as SAML, OIDC, and Kerberos underpin federated identity systems—and how adversaries manipulate these mechanisms to impersonate users, escalate privileges, and maintain stealthy persistence. Notably, federation-based attacks are harder to detect, often bypass traditional perimeter defenses, and can silently compromise multiple environments through transitive trust.

Top Threat Vectors Covered:

• Rogue Federation - When attackers spoof or compromise an Identity Provider (IdP), creating fake trust paths.

• Token Forgery - Stealing or injecting signing keys to generate valid authentication tokens (e.g., Golden Ticket attacks).

• Misconfigured Federation - In cloud services like AWS, improper role trust settings can enable unauthorized access without detection.

Why Identity Federation Is a Critical Risk Surface:

• Transitive breach potential - A compromise in AD can lead to a breach in Entra, Okta, or AWS.

• Hard-to-detect exploits - Token misuse can appear valid unless deep behavioral analytics are in place.

• Shared infrastructure weaknesses  - SaaS and CI/CD integrations increase blast radius when federation is exploited.

Practical Mitigations:

• Audit and restrict federated trust policies in cloud roles (e.g., AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity in AWS).

• Monitor IdP event logs (e.g., username changes, rogue certificate additions).

• Implement anomaly detection for token usage across services.

• Secure signing infrastructure and rotate keys frequently.

• Combine IAM and SOC efforts for contextual, real-time federation threat detection.

As federated identities become the default architecture for multi-cloud and SaaS ecosystems, attackers are weaponizing that convenience. Security teams must rethink federation—not just as an architectural feature, but as a high-risk identity control plane requiring active governance, real-time detection, and policy hardening.