It always seems that once any team or an organization has implemented an Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution or system – then everything is all-set and things are ready to go. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. All it does – is just provide a false sense of security.
IAM solutions are often heralded as the forming the foundation of enterprise security. Organizations go to great lengths to ensure that they invest heavily in such “secure” systems. They integrate them with multiple point solutions and 3rd party systems. They enthusiastically showcase how these systems adhere to modern compliance standards with policy and audit reports. On paper everything looks hunky dory. However, implementing IAM systems without continuous monitoring creates a danger sense of confidence in teams. One time implementation lulls them into perceived long-term security – and this undermines the IAM solution’s effectiveness.
These IAM anti patterns decision have a multitude of causes. Sometimes decisions need to be made quickly, and tooling systems are rushed. At other times, a workflow is misconfigured and a just in time access granted to a subject is not revoked after the task is completed. Some rights and permissions automatically become permanent in a critical delivery window. Meanwhile, autonomous software-driven service accounts sneak into production unbeknownst to anyone else. At best these are just minor incidents, and at worst – these reckless mishaps can wreak havoc within the entire technical ecosystem of the entire enterprise.
When Excessive Privilege Becomes the Default
Excessive privilege and privilege creep are some of the industry standard terms that one generally comes across in cybersecurity – often considered a benign infraction. On top of that, the principle of least privilege - a universally accepted rule often gets overlooked. When minor hindrances or obstacles during development process become a nuisance for developers – providing broader access often becomes the quickest solution approach. The tendency to move fast, break things, and ship code quick overrides the need to “fix things later” and that later rarely arrives.
As an example, in many cloud security incidents, an adversary may not even resort to escalating privileges in the first place. They might perform a simple scan of identities/accounts and find the weak ones that already have administrative or higher-level privileges. These were the users that were provided with broader access in the context of “move fast” and deliver products quickly. Over time, however, without regular account reviews, visibility into rights and privileges of these accounts is lost in the dark. All it took was an increase in blast radius of a simple IAM access control and minor credential leaks turned into a full-blown security incident.
Invisible Risks: Shared Identities and Permanent Credentials
Another element of IAM anti patterns include shared identities and long-lived credentials. Team may rationalize that providing individual user identities with a decentralized approach increases operational overhead – hence they might resort to using shared identities, further justified by legacy constraints. As the days go by, these shared identities become the norm, and overall accountability becomes a relic of the past. Security is not individualized or personalized anymore. It becomes optional.
Another factor is long-lived or permanent credentials. These can drive a deeper risk as API keys or tokens can be created with no expiration or very little oversight. They can be copied into scripts or stored inside repositories and given a pass. While organizations leverage human controls like MFA to fortify their security, often these forgotten machine-level user identities build up and snowball into major risk vectors.
These invisible identities can transform into a shadow IAM layer – one that operates with full administrative access but lives outside of any governance or supervision.
Scale Breaks IAM Faster Than Attacks Do
As teams and organizations grow, so does the complexity of managing the enterprise tech stack. IAM complexities can even compound such faster – starting from manual provisioning and de-provisioning processes to employee movement and system sprawl. Sometimes 3rd party vendors and contractors might have excess privileges, meanwhile employees that might have left the organization still have their access controls intact. Even role or designation changes are partially reflected in rights and permissions.
Role-based access control (RBAC) is considered a silver bullet in this context. However, as roles explode and compliance requirements strengthens its grip across systems – eventually this sophistication can turn into a fatal flaw. As a result, roles lose their meaning.
This reinforces the illusion that existing structured systems in place are emblematic of robust security – but that is often not the case.
Breaking the Illusion and Reclaiming Trust in IAM
The most dangerous aspect of IAM antipatterns is that those persist and are undetectable for long periods of time. They rarely trigger any alarms. Everything seems fine until a breach finally exposes how the implicit trust in such systems have been misplaced to a great extent.
This is where a mindset shift is required. Trust should not be implicit. Never trust, always verify, also known as Zero Trust principle should be considered strictly at all times. Any access that is provided to either humans or agents should be considered temporary and and contextual - not permanent and assumed. The entire IAM lifecycle should be managed carefully with robust supervision. Automation should be thoroughly tested before releasing into production environments. Lastly, monitoring should lean toward active detection rather than passive logging – with any IAM noise treated as early indicators of compromise.
In summary, security should definitely not be considered an afterthought. Further, IAM is not a one-time implementation approach and forgotten thereafter. It is a living system that requires continuous checks and monitoring – and that is inevitable. It needs to be correctly balanced across the board with speed, scale, and usability. Sometimes these trade-offs just accumulate and spill over as weaknesses – often exploitable. As a result, a regular IAM security control flips into an explosive liability. When IAM systems are designed with such considerations in mind, IAM stops being an illusion and becomes a foundational pillar upon which trust can be bestowed in an increasingly complex digital world.