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 information breach threat.
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 threat 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 an enormous 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, practically one in 4 relied solely on IAM customers with out implementing centralised federated authentication. Based on Datadog, this highlights a persistent difficulty: whereas centralised identification administration is turning into extra frequent, unmanaged customers with long-lived credentials proceed to pose a major safety threat.
The prevalence of long-lived credentials spans all main cloud suppliers and sometimes contains outdated or unused entry keys.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60% of AWS IAM customers, and 46% of Microsoft Entra ID purposes had entry keys that had been greater than a yr outdated.
Lengthy-lived credentials include a major threat of knowledge breaches
Lengthy-lived cloud credentials by no means expire and regularly get leaked in supply code, container photos, construct logs, and utility artifacts, based on Datadog. Previous analysis carried out by the corporate has proven they’re the most typical reason behind publicly documented cloud safety breaches.
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Krug mentioned there’s mature tooling available in the market to make sure secrets and techniques don’t find yourself in manufacturing environments, comparable to static code evaluation. Datadog’s report additionally notes the rise of IMDSv2 enforcement in AWS EC2 cases, an essential safety mechanism to dam credential theft.
There are much less long-lived credentials, however change is just too gradual
There have been strikes to mitigate the issue, comparable to AWS launching IAM Id Centre, permitting organisations to centrally handle entry to AWS purposes. Whereas firms are within the course of of adjusting to the service, Krug mentioned, “I simply don’t know that everybody considers this their highest precedence.”
“It positively needs to 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 had been the foundation reason behind these information breaches mixed with overly permissive entry,” he defined. “If we eradicate one aspect of that, we actually considerably cut back the chance for the enterprise.”
The long-lived credentials drawback isn’t unique to APAC — it’s a world difficulty
Based on Krug, APAC is not 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 explicit jurisdiction, firms worldwide use related approaches with related cloud suppliers, typically throughout a number of international jurisdictions.
What’s stopping the transfer away from long-lived credentials?
The trouble required to transition groups to single sign-on and momentary credentials has slowed the adoption of those practices. Krug mentioned the “elevate and shift” concerned in migrating improvement workflows to single sign-on will be appreciable. That is partly because of the mindset shift required and partly as a result of organisations should present sufficient help and steerage to assist groups adapt.
Nevertheless, he famous that instruments like AWS Id Centre, which has been obtainable 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.
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“AWS Id Centre is a good product and permits these very seamless consumer flows, however people are nonetheless midstream in migrating to it,” Krug mentioned.
What must you do together with your long-lived credentials?
Datadog’s report warned that it’s unrealistic to count on that long-lived credentials will be securely managed. The seller recommends that firms undertake safe identities with fashionable authentication mechanisms, leverage short-lived credentials, and actively monitor adjustments to APIs that attackers generally use.
“Organisations ought to leverage mechanisms that present time-bound, momentary credentials,” the report mentioned.
Workloads. For workloads, Datadog mentioned this finish will 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 most important international hyperscalers.
People: For human customers, Datadog mentioned the simplest answer 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.”
