It's Finally Time to Embrace Trusted Computing

Does your corporate network treat users on VPNs as trusted regardless of who they are?

Does your web server connect to its database as a fictitious user with a password in a config file somewhere?

Or perhaps the most frightening scenario: did your platform engineer log in as root to configure your CI/CD pipeline toolchain?

These three situations are all examples of anonymous users – someone taking action somewhere on your network or in one of your cloud accounts without identifying themselves.

In each case, such anonymity presents a massive hole in your threat surface: a hole that attackers are actively exploiting.

Locking down such vulnerabilities, however, is more difficult than it sounds.

Each situation results from someone trying to get some work done. Introducing a security measure that prevents people from doing what they need to do is a non-starter.

What organizations require is a comprehensive approach to eliminating the risks of anonymous computing that doesn't interfere with anyone's work.

The key to that approach? Rethinking how your organization handles identity.

The Problem with Identity

Identity and access management systems have been around for decades – but they have always associated identities with human beings.

Whenever a situation arises where some infrastructure asset requires an identity, as in the example of the web server accessing a database, then an administrator must create a fictitious identity and give it the privileges it requires to accomplish the task at hand.

That fictitious identity, however, doesn't correspond to a person, as the connection between server and database has no inkling of the identity of the human making a request at the web interface.

In other words, treating machine identities (identities associated with infrastructure assets rather than humans) as though they were human identities leads to anonymous computing – and anonymous computing leads to vulnerabilities that bad actors are only too happy to capitalize on.

The Problem of Fragmentation

One of the main reasons this ineffective approach to machine identities falls short is because it fragments the management of identities.

Perhaps a human must log in to access a particular web page or app, thus providing their credentials that establish their identity. But that page or app leverages a different identity to access a database, or more generally, any API.

As a result, the organization must keep track of different types of identities with different rules and different privileges – leading to a complex, fragmented mess that only introduces more vulnerabilities as well as operational overhead.

Such fragmented identity also leads to fragmented secrets – passwords, API keys, and the like. Humans have the luxury of keeping passwords in their heads or perhaps using parts of their bodies for the purpose, but machines have no fingers or faces.

Instead, the machine identity's secret ends up in some config file somewhere, ripe for the hacking.

Eliminating Fragmentation with Cryptographic Identity

The playwright Anton Chekhov famously remarked, "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired."

The same is true with secrets: if you place a secret somewhere in the first act, then by the second act it will be stolen.

The more fragmented your identities are, the more likely they will be compromised – and following Chekhov, compromised they will be.

Secret vaults don't solve this problem. They can secure individual secrets, but they do nothing to resolve the challenges of fragmented identity.

The solution to this conundrum is centralized, cryptographic identity. Instead of many secrets, implement a single secret, and protect it assiduously.

This single secret is the private key that forms the cryptographic basis of all authentication across the IT landscape. Protect the private key with a hardware security module (HSM) – the best technology available for securing a secret.

From that single private key, establish a centralized cryptographic identity infrastructure using a platform like Teleport's that provides secretless authentication and ephemeral authorization – giving human users the ability to get their work done without providing an API key or other long-term, static secret.

Such 'just in time' authentication and authorization provide a comprehensive approach to identity that works for humans as well as infrastructure assets regardless of type or location.

Getting Zero Trust Right

If it sounds like Teleport's centralized cryptographic identity follows zero trust best practices, you'd be right – but there's more to this story.

Zero trust refers to an approach to security design that grants access to any resource based entirely on the identity and intent of a user.

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), in turn, provides secure, remote access to corporate resources based entirely on identity and the associated context of the interaction.

Teleport provides ZTNA but goes one step further. By centralizing its ZTNA approach on cryptographic identity, it extends the ability to provide secretless authentication to any infrastructure asset, giving users ephemeral authorization with granular role-based access controls for individual workload interactions.

The result: the elimination of all anonymous computing across the organization while empowering people to get their work done, streamlining access without getting in their way.

The Intellyx Take

Fewer vulnerabilities lead to better security, which every organization desires – but empowering people to get their work done is actually the most important value proposition Teleport offers.

Historically, there has always been a tradeoff between security and convenience. The more locked down the security becomes, the harder it is for people to get their jobs done.

After all, why would a platform engineer log in as root to configure the CI/CD pipeline? The answer: anything short of root access would make their job too difficult, time-consuming, or perhaps even impossible.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how good a particular security tool or approach is if people don’t use it consistently – or turn it off altogether.

Teleport’s most essential capability, therefore, isn’t its comprehensive approach to securing infrastructure assets. It’s the fact that it can provide such security while making engineers’ jobs easier.

And that makes all the difference.

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Teleport is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. No AI was used to write this article.