New technologies are regularly implemented into IT infrastructure in this era of digital transformation, placing increased importance on sound machine identity management (MIM). But how do you secure and protect what you don’t know you have? This is a common predicament that organizations are facing amid a growing risk surface as cloud migrations and digital transformation are exponentially increasing the amount of machine identities an organization must secure.
The consequences of not having full visibility into the number of certificates and keys in your organization can be costly and severe. Let’s take an inventory of some of the mainstays in our personal and professional lives that fall under the machine identities umbrella:
- Mobile phone apps
- Car systems
- Wi-Fi and VPN access
- Encrypted email
- Remote system admin access
- Industrial IoT
- Online banking and shopping
- Applications
- Home Internet of Things
- And more…
Going a step further, consider that life-saving medical equipment, such as pacemakers and insulin pumps, have certificates on them that can be compromised, and it’s clear this is a situation that commands our full attention.
Common challenges for managing machine identities include certificate-related outages, PKI updates and Certificate-as-a-Service, key and certificate audit findings, unprotected DevOps IT services and unmanaged SSH keys.
So, how can practitioners stay ahead of these potential pitfalls? The three main tenets of machine identity management are:
Visibility – complete visibility into your certificate infrastructure, unauthenticated as well as authenticated scan of devices, monitor status, get notifications, and understand and renew when certificate passwords expire.
Control – group certificates and keys based on specific business use cases to ensure auditing and compliance, define granular role-based access control, create audit trails for each user and certificate or key-related activity to prevent unauthorized action, standardize certificate processes and eliminate rogue, unknown, and non-compliant certificates.
Automation – automation is an important way forward; use certificate management tools to fully automate renewal, revocation, and provisioning processes such as AppViewX.
There are major risks of inaction. Consider the possibilities of:
- Code-signed malware that bypasses security controls
- Man in the middle attacks enabled by misused certificates
- SSH keys that leave with terminated employees
- Spoofed websites that use stolen or forged SSL/TLS keys and certificates
- Outages resulting from expired certificates
MIM has long been a passion of mine as I’ve personally spearheaded the creation of this category and have seen how large this risk surface is becoming. Important benefits of adopting a MIM program include avoiding outages, improving security, strengthening investments, achieving compliance and expediting digital transformation projects.
For identity management to be successful, it must be foundational. Remember, you cannot secure and protect what you don’t know you have! Have any questions? Just ask!
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