How to Maintain the Principle of Least Privilege in Cloud Security?

The principle of least privilege refers to limiting access rights to the user for applications, systems, and cloud processes. This concept is known to increase cloud security and reduce the cloud security threats that come due to human errors and malicious intent of insiders and outsiders. Here, we have discussed how to maintain the principle of minimal privilege in cloud security.

Identify Major Risks

According to experts from this website https://sonraisecurity.com/education/principle-least-privilege/, the four identity risks that determine the importance of least privilege are dormant identities, separation of duty, toxic combinations, and privilege escalation.

• Separation of duty refers to an internal control concept where users have shared privileges and responsibilities to prevent fraud and errors.
• Dormant identities refer to identities that lack account activity for a set period.
• Privilege escalation refers to the exploitation of cloud platform vulnerability (IAM configuration) by a malicious user.
• Toxic combinations refer to instances of abuse of privileges enabled by segregation of duties (SoD).

Steps to Maintain Principle of Least Privileges 

Continuous Monitoring

Organizations need to ensure the identity and data access to the cloud platform are continuously monitored. The cloud security system should fire triggers when it detects any deviance from operational norms. The system should identify inactive, miss configured, and suspicious accounts and swiftly act to deactivate them. It should also check the identities for compliance and regularly update identities to meet full compliance requirements.

Find Out Effective Permissions 

The cloud platform includes hundreds of identities which can be a significant security challenge to evaluate the risks posed by the identities (people and non-people). It is impossible to find out sufficient permission of all identities in your cloud account by calling a single API.  You can manage this complexity and the risks posed by identities through end-to-end visibility in trust relationships. With IAM roles, you can establish a trust relationship between your trusting account and other trusted cloud accounts. The trusting account owns the resources that can be accessed, and the trusted accounts contain users that can access these resources.

Involve All Stakeholders 

Your organization should embrace a shift left policy across the organization.  The most feasible way to accomplish this is by integrating DevOps, Security, IAM, Audit, and Cloud teams. Your teams can populate your cloud with workloads of data in all stages- development, staging, and production.

Some workloads might need access to sensitive data, while some workloads would need external access blocked. You can use the swimlanes concept in the cloud to distinguish roles, responsibilities, and capabilities for each sub-process.  These swimlanes diagrams can give you clarity of different needs of monitoring and control.

Take a Role-Based Approach 

It is easier to allocate and manage permissions to roles rather than individuals. This allows effective management of permissions and allows easy implementation of least privileges. People are less likely to get additional permissions that their job role requires. It also helps in revoking permissions as people move within an organization frequently.

Fix the Issues Fast

Organizations should work to prevent problems in the first place. If you have missed that opportunity, you need to act swiftly and close the gaps fast. You can put prevention rules in your cloud account to achieve this. As teams move their workloads to production, you can implement prevention bots to ensure necessary checks are in place. The promotion of the workload can only happen if all policies have been followed.

Define a Review Process

Organizations should plan a yearly review to check roles, and access permissions are meeting the least privileges. This yearly audit can check all existing programs, processes, and users with only permissions required for the job.

The principle of least privileges can help mitigate threats in cloud security that comes due to offering excessive permissions. The IAM is an essential element in the cloud functionality, and the least privileges work to make it more effective in strengthening cloud security.