Cloud infrastructure entitlement management in AWS

Customers use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to securely build, deploy, and scale their applications. As your organization grows, you want to streamline permissions management towards least privilege for your identities and resources. At AWS, we see two customer personas working towards least privilege permissions: security teams and developers. Security teams want to centrally inspect permissions across their organizations to identify and remediate access-related risks, such as excessive permissions, anomalous access to resources or compliance of identities. Developers want policy verification tools that help them set effective permissions and maintain least privilege as they build their applications.

Customers are increasingly turning to cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) solutions to guide their permissions management strategies. CIEM solutions are designed to identify, manage, and mitigate risks associated with access privileges granted to identities and resources in cloud environments. While the specific pillars of CIEM vary, four fundamental capabilities are widely recognized: rightsizing permissions, detecting anomalies, visualization, and compliance reporting. AWS provides these capabilities through services such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Detective, AWS Audit Manager, and AWS Security Hub. I explore these services in this blog post.

Rightsizing permissions

Customers primarily explore CIEM solutions to rightsize their existing permissions by identifying and remediating identities with excessive permissions that pose potential security risks. In AWS, IAM Access Analyzer is a powerful tool designed to assist you in achieving this goal. IAM Access Analyzer guides you to set, verify, and refine permissions.

After IAM Access Analyzer is set up, it continuously monitors AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles within your organization and offers granular visibility into overly permissive identities. This empowers your security team to centrally review and identify instances of unused access, enabling them to take proactive measures to refine access and mitigate risks.

While most CIEM solutions prioritize tools for security teams, it’s essential to also help developers make sure that their policies adhere to security best practices before deployment. IAM Access Analyzer provides developers with policy validation and custom policy checks to make sure their policies are functional and secure. Now, they can use policy recommendations to refine unused access, making sure that identities have only the permissions required for their intended functions.

Anomaly detection

Security teams use anomaly detection capabilities to identify unexpected events, observations, or activities that deviate from the baseline behavior of an identity. In AWS, Amazon GuardDuty supports anomaly detection in an identity’s usage patterns, such as unusual sign-in attempts, unauthorized access attempts, or suspicious API calls made using compromised credentials.

By using machine learning and threat intelligence, GuardDuty can establish baselines for normal behavior and flag deviations that might indicate potential threats or compromised identities. When establishing CIEM capabilities, your security team can use GuardDuty to identify threat and anomalous behavior pertaining to their identities.

Visualization

With visualization, you have two goals. The first is to centrally inspect the security posture of identities, and the second is to comprehensively understand how identities are connected to various resources within your AWS environment. IAM Access Analyzer provides a dashboard to centrally review identities. The dashboard helps security teams gain visibility into the effective use of permissions at scale and identify top accounts that need attention. By reviewing the dashboard, you can pinpoint areas that need focus by analyzing accounts with the highest number of findings and the most commonly occurring issues such as unused roles.

Amazon Detective helps you to visually review individual identities in AWS. When GuardDuty identifies a threat, Detective generates a visual representation of identities and their relationships with resources, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, or AWS Lambda functions. This graphical view provides a clear understanding of the access patterns associated with each identity. Detective visualizes access patterns, highlighting unusual or anomalous activities related to identities. This can include unauthorized access attempts, suspicious API calls, or unexpected resource interactions. You can depend on Detective to generate a visual representation of the relationship between identities and resources.

Compliance reporting

Security teams work with auditors to assess whether identities, resources, and permissions adhere to the organization’s compliance requirements. AWS Audit Manager automates evidence collection to help you meet compliance reporting and audit needs. These automated evidence packages include reporting on identities. Specifically, you can use Audit Manager to analyze IAM policies and roles to identify potential misconfigurations, excessive permissions, or deviations from best practices.

Audit Manager provides detailed compliance reports that highlight non-compliant identities or access controls, allowing your auditors and security teams to take corrective actions and support ongoing adherence to regulatory and organizational standards. In addition to monitoring and reporting, Audit Manager offers guidance to remediate certain types of non-compliant identities or access controls, reducing the burden on security teams and supporting timely resolution of identified issues.

Single pane of glass

While customers appreciate the diverse capabilities AWS offers across various services, they also seek a unified and consolidated view that brings together data from these different sources. AWS Security Hub addresses this need by providing a single pane of glass that enables you to gain a holistic understanding of your security posture. Security Hub acts as a centralized hub, consuming findings from multiple AWS services and presenting a comprehensive view of how identities are being managed and used across the organization.

Conclusion

CIEM solutions are designed to identify, manage, and mitigate risks associated with access privileges granted to identities and resources in cloud environments. The AWS services mentioned in this post can help you achieve your CIEM goals. If you want to explore CIEM capabilities in AWS, use the services mentioned in this post or see the following resources.

Resources

• AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer
• Amazon GuardDuty
• Amazon Detective
• AWS Audit Manager
• AWS Security Hub

 
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