Understanding the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)
Implementing the Principle of Least Privilege is critical for maintaining a secure and compliant organization. YouAttest makes it easy to automate and manage this process. Discover how YouAttest can help your company enforce PoLP, reduce security risks, and achieve compliance with industry standards.
Why Should you Implement PoLP?
The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) is a security concept that involves assigning users the minimum access privileges required to carry out their duties. It has become the cornerstone for cyber security guidelines and recommendations including: NIST 800-53r5, NIST CSF, The Joint Ransomware Task Force #StopRansomWare Guide and others.
The failure to implement the principle of least privilege has been the cause of multiple attacks resulting in millions of dollars of ransomware payments and damaged brand equity
Challenges to Implement PoLP
Sloppy Identity Management
Some organizations simply are sloppy – and haven’t set up the proper access controls like a functional IAM system like Entra ID, Okta, JumpCloud, Ping, AD to ensure that users are organized and then assigned to applications and resources according to their group memberships.
And this is the key point: Group membership. It is a serious identity flaw that enterprises individually assign elevated privileges to users on an INDIVIDUAL basis as opposed to assigned to a group to these permissions and then putting a user in these “admin” powered groups.
Companies that continue to assign admin-powered permission on a continual basis – are sloppy and do NOT implement the principle of least privilege. (NOTE: This is ONE of the key complaints that the SEC charged against SolarWinds.)
Privilege Creep
The other enemy of PoLP is not as obvious as “sloppy identity management” – but probably more common and deadly. This enemy is called Privilege Creep – and is the natural tendency of identities to add permissions and become loaded with entitlements that are not required to do their current jobs.
Basically the problem being that enterprises are better than GRANTING privileges than reviewing and retracting privileges.
These excess privileges create a significant security vulnerability. Hackers can exploit these over-privileged accounts to gain unauthorized access to sensitive information and systems. Once an attacker compromises such an account, they can leverage its extensive permissions to move laterally within the network, escalate their access, and execute malicious activities. This makes privilege creep a critical security concern.
Security Frameworks and PoLP
Federal organizations are required to follow NIST 800-53r5 for cyber security practices. The NIST CSF (Cybersecurity Framework) is framework created as a guidance for public institutions to utilize.
Both of these frameworks spell out the principle of least privilege.
NIST 800-53r5
AC-6:
Control: Employ the principle of least privilege, allowing only authorized accesses for users (or processes acting on behalf of users) that are necessary to accomplish assigned organizational tasks.
NIST Cybersecurity Framework 1.1
PR.AC-4:
Access permissions and authorizations are managed, incorporating the principles of least privilege and separation of duties.
NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0
PR.AA-05:
Access permissions, entitlements, and authorizations are managed and enforced, incorporating the principles of least privilege and separation of duties (formerly PR.AC-3 and PR.AC-4 in NIST CSF 1.1)
How YouAttest can Help Implement Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)
YouAttest is a purpose based tool to help organizations enforce the Principle of Least Privilege in their enterprise and thus reap the cyber and compliance wards.
The cloud based offering is designed to audit any resource and to make the process and painless as possible by integrating directly into the IAM for a simplified user access review process. (Reviewers simply click on a link, via email or slack, and see only the roles they need to review.)
The most important part is that YouAttest can review key admin groups – in an automated fashion. YouAttest customers regularly review their admin privilege groups on a monthly basis – and log the evidence of these attestations. YouAttest can also provide triggers on these group policies, for real time attestations.
Summary
YouAttest is the only cloud-based IGA platform that deploys in minutes via application SSO into your existing IAM platforms and allows you to enforce the Principle of Least Privilege by automating your reviews of your user, groups and applications.
YouAttest uniquely connects directly to the enterprise IAM (Entra ID, Okta, JumpCloud, Ping) and uses the IAM SSO for reviewing entitlements to BOTH IAM resources and siloed (non-IAM connected) resources.