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Monday, December 23, 2024

Are Lengthy-Lived Credentials the New Achilles’ Heel for Cloud Safety?


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 standard 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 enhancing, 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 just about 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 response to Datadog, this highlights a persistent subject: whereas centralised identification administration is turning into extra frequent, unmanaged customers with long-lived credentials proceed to pose a major safety danger.

Nearly half of organisations using AWS are still using long-lived credentials.
Almost half of organisations utilizing AWS are nonetheless utilizing long-lived credentials. Supply: Datadog

The prevalence of long-lived credentials spans all main cloud suppliers and infrequently contains outdated or unused entry keys.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60% of AWS IAM customers, and 46% of Microsoft Entra ID purposes had entry keys that have been greater than a 12 months outdated.

Lengthy-lived credentials include a major danger of information breaches

Lengthy-lived cloud credentials by no means expire and continuously get leaked in supply code, container pictures, construct logs, and utility artifacts, in response to Datadog. Previous analysis carried out by the corporate has proven they’re the commonest reason for publicly documented cloud safety breaches.

SEE: The highest 5 cybersecurity tendencies for 2025

Krug mentioned there may be mature tooling out there 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 vital safety mechanism to dam credential theft.

There are much less long-lived credentials, however change is simply too sluggish

There have been strikes to mitigate the issue, resembling AWS launching IAM Identification 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 undoubtedly must be, as a result of if we look on the final 10 years of information breaches, the first theme is that long-lived entry key pairs have been the basis 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 danger for the enterprise.”

The long-lived credentials drawback isn’t unique to APAC — it’s a world subject

In response to Krug, APAC is not 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 specific jurisdiction, firms worldwide use comparable approaches with comparable cloud suppliers, usually 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 short-term credentials has slowed the adoption of those practices. Krug mentioned the “carry and shift” concerned in migrating improvement workflows to single sign-on might be appreciable. That is partly because of the mindset shift required and partly as a result of organisations should present satisfactory assist and steering to assist groups adapt.

Many cloud credentials are over one year old.
Many cloud credentials are over one 12 months outdated. Supply: Datadog

Nevertheless, he famous that instruments like AWS Identification Centre, which has been accessible 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.

SEE: How AI is amplifying the dangers of information within the cloud

“AWS Identification Centre is a superb product and permits these very seamless consumer flows, however people are nonetheless midstream in migrating to it,” Krug mentioned.

What do you have to do together with your long-lived credentials?

Datadog’s report warned that it’s unrealistic to count on that long-lived credentials might 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, short-term credentials,” the report mentioned.

Workloads. For workloads, Datadog mentioned this finish might be achieved with IAM roles for EC2 situations or EKS Pod Identification 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 answer is to centralise identification administration utilizing an answer like AWS IAM Identification 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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