08- Implementing Identity and Account Management Controls

Ahmed Sultan
Senior Technical Instructor
ahmedsultan.me/about
1
Outlines

8.1- Implement Identity and Account Types

8.2- Implement Account Policies

Labs
Lab 10: Managing Access Controls in Windows Server
Lab 11: Configuring a System for Auditing Policies
Lab 12: Managing Access Controls in Linux

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8.1- Implement Identity and Account Types
8.2- Implement Account Policies

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IDENTITY MANAGEMENT CONTROLS

• Identity and access management (IAM) involves both IT/security procedures and
technologies and Human Resources (HR) policies.
• A background check determines that a person is who they say they are and are
not concealing criminal activity, bankruptcy, or connections that would make
them unsuitable or risky.
• For some jobs, especially federal jobs requiring a security clearance, background
checks are mandatory.
• Some background checks are performed internally, whereas others are done by
an external third party.

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IDENTITY MANAGEMENT CONTROLS (cont.)

• Onboarding at the HR level is the process of welcoming a new employee to the

organization.
• As part of onboarding, the IT and HR function will combine to create an account
for the user to access the computer system, assign the appropriate privileges, and
ensure the account credentials are known only to the valid user.
• These functions must be integrated, to avoid creating accidental configuration
vulnerabilities, such as IT creating an account for an employee who is never
actually hired.

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IDENTITY MANAGEMENT CONTROLS (cont.)

• The terms of an NonDisclosure Agreement (NDA) might be incorporated within

the employee contract or could be a separate document.
• When an employee or contractor signs an NDA, they are asserting that they will
not share confidential information with a third party.

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PERSONNEL POLICIES FOR PRIVILEGE MANAGEMENTs

• HR and IT must collaborate to ensure effective privilege management.

• These policies aim to ensure that the risk of insider threat is minimized.

• Separation of Duties
✓ Separation of duties is a means of establishing checks and balances against the possibility
that critical systems or procedures can be compromised by insider threats.
✓ Duties and responsibilities should be divided among individuals to prevent ethical conflicts or
abuse of powers.

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PERSONNEL POLICIES FOR PRIVILEGE MANAGEMENT
(cont.)
• Least Privilege
✓ Least privilege means that a user is granted sufficient rights to perform his or her job and no
more.
✓ This mitigates risk if the account should be compromised and fall under the control of a
threat actor.
✓ Least privilege should be ensured by closely analyzing business workflows to assess what
privileges are required and by performing regular account audits.

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PERSONNEL POLICIES FOR PRIVILEGE MANAGEMENT
(cont.)
• Job Rotation
✓ Job rotation (or rotation of duties) means that no one person is permitted to remain in the
same job for an extended period.
✓ For example, managers may be moved to different departments periodically, or employees
may perform more than one job role, switching between them throughout the year.
✓ Rotating individuals into and out of roles, such as the firewall administrator or access control
specialist, helps an organization ensure that it is not tied too firmly to any one individual
because vital institutional knowledge is spread among trusted employees.
✓ Job rotation also helps prevent abuse of power, reduces boredom, and enhances individuals'
professional skills.

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PERSONNEL POLICIES FOR PRIVILEGE MANAGEMENT
(cont.)
• Mandatory Vacation
✓ Mandatory vacation means that employees are forced to take their vacation time, during
which someone else fulfills their duties.
✓ The typical mandatory vacation policy requires that employees take at least one vacation a
year in a full-week increment so that they are away from work for at least five days in a row.
✓ During that time, the corporate audit and security employees have time to investigate and
discover any discrepancies in employee activity.

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OFFBOARDING POLICIES

• Offboarding is the process of ensuring that an employee leaves a company

gracefully, It is also used when a project using contractors or third parties ends.
• In terms of security, there are several processes that must be completed:
✓ Account management—disable the user account and privileges, Ensure that any information
assets created or managed by the employee but owned by the company are accessible (in
terms of encryption keys or password-protected files).
✓ Company assets—retrieve mobile devices, keys, smart cards, USB media, and so on, The
employee will need to confirm (and in some cases prove) that they have not retained copies
of any information assets.
✓ Personal assets—wipe employee-owned devices of corporate data and applications, The
employee may also be allowed to retain some information assets (such as personal emails or
contact information), depending on the policies in force.

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SECURITY ACCOUNT TYPES AND CREDENTIAL
MANAGEMENT
• Operating systems, network appliances, and network directory products use
some standard account types as the basis of a privilege management system.
• These include standard user, administrative user, security group accounts, and
service accounts.
• Guest Accounts
✓ A guest account is a special type of shared account with no password.
✓ It allows anonymous and unauthenticated access to a resource.
✓ The Windows OS creates guest user and group accounts when installed, but the guest user
account is disabled by default.
✓ Guest accounts are also created when installing web services, as most web servers allow
unauthenticated access.

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SECURITY GROUP-BASED PRIVILEGES

• The concept of a Security Group Account simplifies and centralizes the

administrative process of assigning rights.
• Rather than assigning rights directly, the system owner assigns them to security
group accounts.
• User accounts gain rights by being made a member of a security group.
• A user can be a member of multiple groups and can therefore receive rights and
permissions from several sources.

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SECURITY GROUP-BASED PRIVILEGES (cont.)

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ADMINISTRATOR/ROOT ACCOUNTS

• Administrative or privileged accounts are able to install and remove apps and
device drivers, change system-level settings, and access any object in the file
system.
• In practice, it is very hard to eliminate the presence of default administrator
accounts.
• A default account is one that is created by the operating system or application
when it is installed.
• The default account has every permission available.
• In Windows, this account is called Administrator; in Linux, it is called root.
• This type of account is also referred to as a superuser.

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SERVICE ACCOUNTS

• Service Accounts are used by scheduled processes and application server

software, such as databases.
• Windows has several default service account types.
• These do not accept user interactive logons but can be used to run processes and
background services:
✓ System—has the most privileges of any Windows account, The local system account creates
the host processes that start Windows before the user logs on, Any process created using the
system account will have full privileges over the local computer.
✓ Local Service—has the same privileges as the standard user account, It can only access
network resources as an anonymous user.
✓ Network Service—has the same privileges as the standard user account but can present the
computer's account credentials when accessing network resources.

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SERVICE ACCOUNTS (cont.)

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Lab

Lab 10: Managing Access Controls in Windows Server

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8.1- Implement Identity and Account Types
8.2- Implement Account Policies

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ACCOUNT ATTRIBUTES AND ACCESS POLICIES

• A user account is defined by a unique Security Identifier (SID), a name, and a

credential.
• Each account is associated with a profile.
• The profile can be defined with custom identity attributes describing the user,
such as a full name, email address, contact number, department, and so on.
• The profile may support media, such as an account picture.
• As well as attributes, the profile will usually provide a location for storing user-
generated data files (a home folder).

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ACCOUNT ATTRIBUTES AND ACCESS POLICIES (cont.)

• Each account can be assigned permissions over files and other network resources
and access policies or privileges over the use and configuration of network hosts.
• These permissions might be assigned directly to the account or inherited through
membership of a security group or role.
• Access policies determine things like the right to log on to a computer locally or
via remote desktop, install software, change the network configuration, and so
on.
• On a Windows Active Directory network, access policies can be configured via
group policy objects (GPOs).
• GPOs can be used to configure access rights for user/group/role accounts.

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ACCOUNT ATTRIBUTES AND ACCESS POLICIES (cont.)

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ACCOUNT PASSWORD POLICY SETTINGS

• System-enforced account policies can help to enforce credential management

principles by stipulating requirements for user-selected passwords:
✓ Password length—enforces a minimum length for passwords, There may also be a maximum
length.
✓ Password complexity—enforces password complexity rules (that is, no use of username
within password and combination of at least eight upper/lower case alpha-numeric and non-
alpha-numeric characters).
✓ Password aging—forces the user to select a new password after a set number of days.
✓ Password reuse and history—prevents the selection of a password that has been used
already, The history attribute sets how many previous passwords are blocked.

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ACCOUNT RESTRICTIONS

• To make the task of compromising the user security system harder, account
restrictions can be used.
• Location-Based Policies
✓ A user or device can have a logical network location, identified by an IP address, subnet,
virtual LAN (VLAN), or organizational unit (OU).
✓ This can be used as an account restriction mechanism.
✓ For example, a user account may be prevented from logging on locally to servers within a
restricted OU.
• Geofencing
✓ Refers to accepting or rejecting access requests based on location.
✓ Geofencing can also be used for push notification to send alerts or advice to a device when a
user enters a specific area.
✓ This is often used for asset management to ensure devices are kept with the proper location.

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ACCOUNT AUDITS

• Accounting and auditing processes are used to detect whether an account has
been compromised or is being misused.
• A security or audit log can be used to facilitate detection of account misuse:
✓ Accounting for all actions that have been performed by users.
✓ Change and version control systems depend on knowing when a file has been modified and
by whom.
✓ Accounting also provides for non-repudiation (that is, a user cannot deny that they accessed
or made a change to a file).
✓ The main problems are that auditing successful access attempts can quickly consume a lot of
disk space, and analyzing the logs can be very time-consuming.
✓ Detecting intrusions or attempted intrusions.

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ACCOUNT AUDITS (cont.)

• Here records of failure-type events are likely to be more useful, though success-
type events can also be revealing if they show unusual access patterns.

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ACCOUNT LOCKOUT AND DISABLEMENT

• If account misuse is detected or suspected, the account can be manually disabled

by setting an account property.
• This prevents the account from being used for login.
• Note that disabling the account does not close existing sessions.
• You can issue a remote logoff command to close a session.
• Account disablement means that login is permanently prevented until an
administrator manually re-enables the account.

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ACCOUNT LOCKOUT AND DISABLEMENT (cont.)

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ACCOUNT LOCKOUT AND DISABLEMENT (cont.)

• An account lockout means that login is prevented for a period.

• This might be done manually if a policy violation is detected, but there are several
scenarios for automatically applying a lockout:
✓ An incorrect account password is entered repeatedly.
✓ The account is set to expire, Setting an account expiration date means that an account
cannot be used beyond a certain date, This option is useful on accounts for temporary and
contract staff.
✓ When using time- or location-based restrictions, the server periodically checks whether the
user has the right to continue using the network, If the user does not have the right, then an
automatic logout procedure commences.

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ACCOUNT LOCKOUT AND DISABLEMENT (cont.)

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Lab

Lab 11: Configuring a System for Auditing Policies

Lab 12: Managing Access Controls in Linux

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