The pinnacle 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 widespread hyperscale cloud providers, warning that they continue to be a critical information breach danger.

Talking with roosho, 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 aren’t advancing as shortly or successfully as wanted to mitigate dangers.

Lengthy-lived credentials are nonetheless an enormous menace to cloud safety

The report revealed that almost half (46%) of organisations utilizing AWS depend on IAM customers for human entry to cloud environments — a follow Datadog known as a type of long-lived credential. This was true even for organisations utilizing centralised id administration to grant entry throughout a number of techniques.

Furthermore, practically one in 4 relied solely on IAM customers with out implementing centralised federated authentication. In line with Datadog, this highlights a persistent problem: whereas centralised id administration is changing into extra widespread, unmanaged customers with long-lived credentials proceed to pose a big safety danger.

The prevalence of long-lived credentials spans all main cloud suppliers and infrequently contains outdated or unused entry keys.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 functions had entry keys that have been greater than a 12 months previous.

Lengthy-lived credentials include a big danger of knowledge breaches

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

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Krug mentioned there may be 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 situations, an essential safety mechanism to dam credential theft.

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

There have been strikes to mitigate the issue, comparable to AWS launching IAM Id Centre, permitting organisations to centrally handle entry to AWS functions. 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 positively must 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 have been the foundation reason behind these information breaches mixed with overly permissive entry,” he defined. “If we get rid of one facet of that, we actually considerably cut back the chance for the enterprise.”

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

In line with Krug, APAC isn’t 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 specific jurisdiction, firms worldwide use related approaches with related cloud suppliers, usually throughout a number of world jurisdictions.

What’s stopping the transfer away from long-lived credentials?

The trouble required to transition groups to single sign-on and non permanent credentials has slowed the adoption of those practices. Krug mentioned the “raise and shift” concerned in migrating improvement workflows to single sign-on might be appreciable. That is partly as a result of mindset shift required and partly as a result of organisations should present sufficient assist and steering to assist groups adapt.

Nonetheless, 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 scale 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 do you have to do along 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 adjustments to APIs that attackers generally use.

“Organisations ought to leverage mechanisms that present time-bound, non permanent credentials,” the report mentioned.

Workloads. For workloads, Datadog mentioned this finish might be achieved with IAM roles for EC2 situations or EKS Pod Id in AWS, Managed Identities in Microsoft Azure, and repair accounts hooked up to workloads for Google Cloud if the organisation makes use of the main world hyperscalers.

People: For human customers, Datadog mentioned the simplest resolution is to centralise id administration utilizing an answer like AWS IAM Id Heart, Okta, or Microsoft Entra ID and keep away from utilizing particular person cloud customers for every worker, which it labelled “extremely inefficient and dangerous.”