“I love the overhead of password management” said no one ever.

Password management is hard.  It’s even harder when you’re managing the credentials for non-humans, such as those used by an application.  Back in the olden days when the developer needed a way to access an enterprise database or file share, they’d put in a request with help desk or information security to have an account (often referred to as a service account) provisioned in Windows Active Directory, an LDAP, or a SQL database.  The request would go through a business approval and some support person would created the account, set the password, and email the information to the developer.  This process came with a number of risks:

• Risk of compromise of the account
• Risk of abuse of the account
• Risk of a significant outage

These risks arise due to the following gaps in the process:

• Multiple parties knowing the password (the party who provisions the account and the developer)
• The password for the account being communicated to the developer unencrypted such as plain text in an email
• The password not being changed after it is initially set due to the inability or difficult to change the password
• The password not being regularly rotated due to concerns over application outages
• The password being shared with other developers and the account then being used across multiple applications without the dependency being documented

Organizations tried to mitigate the risk of compromise by performing such actions as requiring a long and complex password, delivering the password in an encrypted format such as an encrypted Microsoft Office document, instituting policy requiring the password to be changed (exceptions with this one are frequent due to outage concerns), implementing password vaulting and management such as CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault or Hashicorp Vault, and instituting behavioral monitoring solutions to check for abuse.  Password rotation and monitoring are some of the more effective mitigations but can also be extremely challenging and costly to institute at a scale even with a vaulting and management solution.  Even then, there are always the exceptions to the systems with legacy applications which are not compatible (sadly these are often some of the more critical systems).

When the public cloud came around the credential management challenge for application accounts exploded due to the most favored traits of a public cloud which include on-demand self-service and rapid elasticity and scalability.  The challenge that was a few hundred application identities has grown quickly into thousands of applications and especially containers and serverless functions such as AWS Lambda and Azure Functions.  Beyond the volume of applications, the public cloud also changes the traditional security boundary due to its broad network access trait.  Instead of the cozy feeling multiple firewalls gave you, you now have developers using cloud services such as storage or databases which are directly administered via the cloud management plane which is exposed directly to the Internet.  It doesn’t stop here folks, you also have developers heavily using SaaS-based version control solutions to store the code which may have credentials hardcoded into it potentially publicly exposing those credentials.

Thankfully the public cloud providers have heard the cries of us security folk and have been working hard to help address the problem.  One method in use is the creation of security principals which are designed around the use of temporary credentials.  This way there are no long standing credentials to share, compromise, or abuse.  Amazon has robust use of this concept in AWS using IAM Roles.  Instead of hardcoding a set of IAM User credentials in a Lambda or an application running on an EC2 instance, a role can be created with the necessary permissions required for the application and be assumed by either the Lambda service or EC2 instance.

For this series of posts I’m going to be focusing on one of Microsoft Azure’s solutions to this problem, which are called Managed Identities.  For you folks that are more familiar with AWS, Managed Identities conceptually work the same was as IAM Roles.  A security principal is created, permissions are granted, and the identity is assumed by a resource such as an Azure Web App or an Azure VM.  There are some features that differ from IAM Roles that add to the appeal of Managed Identities such as associating the identity lifecycle of the Managed Identity to the resource such that when the resource is created, the managed identity is created, and when the resource is destroyed, the identity is destroy.

In the next entry I will do a deeper dive into what a managed identity looks like behind the scenes.

See you soon fellow geek!