Single Sign-On Or Single Point of Failure?

20 Jun 2024 – Posted by Anthony Trummer

No one can argue with the convenience that single sign-on (SSO) brings to users or the security and efficiency gains organizations reap from the lower administrative overhead. Gone are the days of individually managing multiple user accounts across numerous services. That said, have we just put all our eggs in one proverbial basket with regards to our SSO implementations? The results of our latest research remind us of why the saying cautions against doing this.

To help organizations assess their exposure in the event of an IdP compromise, we’re publishing a whitepaper that walks through these potential impacts. It examines how they differ depending on the privileges involved with the compromise. This includes the surprising impacts that even an unprivileged IdP account can have, all the way up to the complete disaster caused by a fully compromised IdP.

As part of our continuing collaboration with Teleportour Francesco Lacerenza (@lacerenza_fra) explored these scenarios and how they apply to it specifically. If you’re not familiar with it, “The Teleport Access Platform is a suite of software and managed services that delivers on-demand, least-privileged access to infrastructure on a foundation of cryptographic identity and Zero Trust…”thereby integrating robust authentication and authorization throughout an infrastructure.

As our motto is “Build with Security”, we help organizations build more secure environments, so we won’t leave you hanging with nightmares about what can go wrong with your SSO implementation. As part of this philosophy, the research behind our whitepaper included creating a number of Teleport hardening recommendations to protect your organization and limit potential impacts, in even the worst of scenarios. We also provide detailed information on what to look for in logs when attempting to detect various types of attacks. For those seeking the TL;DR, we are also publishing a convenient hardening checklist, which covers our recommendations and can be used to quickly communicate them to your busy teams.

Be sure to download the whitepaper (here) and our checklist (here) today! If you would like to learn more about our other research, check out our blogfollow us on X (@doyensec) or feel free to contact us at (email protected) for more information on how we can help your organization “Build with Security”.