NHIs and Identity Lifecycle Management

Entro Security

NHIs and Identity Lifecycle Management

IAM (Identity and Access Management) is a popular topic within cloud computing, however IAM lifecycle management (ILM) is often ignored. Yet, ILM is critical to the security posture of any organization. In this article, we discuss the differences between IAM and ILM, and suggest how to better secure organizations by following ILM best practices.

IAM and IGA for NHIs – What’s different?

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) and Identity Access Management (IAM), often seen as human-centric, actually deal with a significantly larger number of non-human identities such as service accounts, access tokens, API-Keys, and secrets used by applications. These non-human identities outnumber human ones and undergo rapid changes, necessitating software-driven management and stringent policies for effective governance and security.

What is Identity lifecycle management?

Managing the lifecycle of identities, from provisioning to decommissioning, is crucial for ensuring the security of applications. Whether an identity exists for mere minutes or spans months, the longer its lifespan, the greater the risk of exposure. Therefore, maintaining visibility across all lifecycle stages of an identity is paramount. This visibility entails comprehensive knowledge of the secrets involved, understanding the identity’s originator, the resources or data it grants access to, its creation time, its storage location within a vault, and other pertinent details. Such oversight ensures robust security measures are in place for secrets security.

What is the difference between IGA and ILM?

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) is the ongoing management of access and permissions for identities, ensuring smooth business operations while maintaining secure access to applications and resources within an organization’s technology infrastructure. In contrast, Identity Lifecycle Management (ILM) encompasses the entire lifespan of identities, from creation to retirement, involving multiple stages and complexities. IAM and IGA are components of ILM that focus on day-to-day operational management, while secure ILM practices extend to long-term operational management. Although many organizations prioritize and regularly practice IAM, particularly in cloud environments, fewer devote attention to their ILM strategies. Amid the demands of daily tasks, they often overlook the need to evaluate the weaknesses in their IAM operations and consider the broader implications of identity management over time.

Challenges in ILM and IAM cybersecurity

Here are the most common challenges with ILM:

• Too many NHIs: Organizations are typically dealing with thousands if not hundreds of thousands of NHIs at any given time. The larger the organization, the more critical non-human identity management becomes.

• Third-party security is hard to control: Vendors and partners are a reality in an interconnected digital world. Usually, an NHI is given to the vendor in order to connect with your digital environment. However, it’s a huge challenge to get third-party organizations to keep to the same security protocols across the board.

• Zombie IT: External threats like malware can lurk in the shadows of the cloud and may have access to NHIs without being noticed. They are hard to spot, but by looking for any abnormal behavior patterns, it is possible to sniff them out. However, this cannot be done manually, and it takes advanced tooling to find and report on them.

• Exposed NHIs: NHIs get exposed in source code repositories, employee communication channels, storage buckets, and many more ways. Once exposed, organizations find themselves unprepared and not knowing how to handle the situation.

• Lack of centralized view: As organizations use multiple vaults and as multi-cloud adoption grows it becomes harder to have a centralized view of all IAMs. Yet, this is the need of the hour for security teams that are stretched thin in every direction.

How Entro Helps

Entro’s NHI and Secrets Security Platform helps:

Proactively rotate secrets on a regular schedule, regardless of whether a breach has occurred, limiting the amount of time a secret can be used maliciously in the wrong hands.

Avoid Downtime by leveraging dual secrets strategies and other recommended approaches to switch over to the new secret without any downtime.

Enforce Policies and establish a posture for NHI and secrets security, including least privilege permissioning on inception, rotation policies, and automated workflow integrations. Establish uniform posture and secure behavior for all NHIs throughout your environment.

Compliance and Reporting to identify secrets and NHIs that have not been rotated per policy, idle secrets, locations secrets were discovered, and more.

Secure your data by maintaining vaulting policies to securely store encrypted secrets at rest as well as rotation and least privilege permissioning for NHI’s utilizing those secrets to interact with your data.

Vault all Secrets: Without exceptions. Entro ensures secrets are vaulted upon creation and idle tokens are always offboarded.

Simplify Provisioning: Automate the onboarding, offboarding, and internal role changes of users to ensure access is updated or revoked as needed.

Least-Privilege Permissioning: Restrict NHIs to the minimum appropriate permissions necessary to perform their function without disruption.

Automated Workflow Management: Enable workflows that automate approval processes, reducing manual intervention for NHI creation and permission scoping.

Entro secures Non-human identities and the Secrets that create them, from inception to rotation.