Detecting and mitigating insufficient IAM and key management in cloud services
Insufficient IAM can happen in a scenario where we have a large number of user identities (such as in an enterprise organization) but we fail to properly manage the identities. Or we might use cryptography to protect sensitive data but fail to follow key rotation best practices, and as a result, increase the chance of data exposure by unauthorized persons.
Here are some common consequences of insufficient IAM and key management:
- Failing to follow the principle of least privileged, which leads to excessive permissions being granted
- Failing to configure access controls – for example, allowing unauthorized access to sensitive data (such as PII, credit card data, healthcare data, and so on), which leads to exposed credentials
- Not enforcing the password policy (for example, allowing short passwords, not enforcing password changes, allowing password reuse, and so on), which leads to...