Zero standing privilege (ZSP) is an applied zero trust security strategy for privileged access management (PAM). The term zero standing privilege was coined by an analyst at Gartner. In practice, it implies no users should be pre-assigned with administrative account privileges. Zero-trust security forbids authorization based on static predefined trust boundaries.

This blog is part of a series on how to provide identity-based access to AWS resources. In the first tutorial, we saw how to set up an identity-aware AWS bastion host using the OSS solution, Teleport. In this blog, we will expand the scenario to use a single-sign-on (SSO) authentication mechanism to issue certificates to specific groups of users to access AWS resources.

Our previous blog post on authorization security covered the seven most common authorization vulnerabilities. This post will discuss 11 authorization best practices that help avoid vulnerabilities and defeat specific attack vectors.

Container escape is a security risk in which malicious players can leverage a containerized application’s vulnerabilities to breach its isolation boundary, gaining access to the host system’s resources. Once an attacker accesses the host system, they can escalate their privilege to access other containers running in the machine or run harmful code on the host. Depending on how vulnerable the host is, the actor could also access other hosts in the network.

Authorization vulnerabilities allow malicious users to perform unwanted actions or access resources that are deemed protected otherwise. Authorization vulnerabilities are one of the most widely found vulnerabilities in web applications. The OWASP top 10 list of web application security risks listed broken access control vulnerabilities as the number one risk in 2021, so understanding authorization vulnerabilities is an important topic for application security engineers.

SSH has always been the default mechanism to get remote shell access into a running Unix or Linux operating system from a terminal client to execute commands. While SSH is familiar, Docker provides more lightweight and easier-to-use methods that don’t require running your container with an SSH server. This post will explore two methods to get shell access into a Docker container using OpenSSH and the docker exec command.

A month ago I tweeted about my annoyance with SSO or Single Sign On. While single is in the name, I’m required to “single sign on” multiple times a day. I’m not the only one; the tweet went viral with over 25k likes and 2 Million impressions. The tongue-in-check tweet created a lot of fun responses and more rage against SSO user experience than I expected. SSO was meant to solve password fatigue but we got something worse.

More and more business-critical applications run on Amazon Web Services. Protecting these mission-critical applications from potential attacks requires moving beyond typical security approaches such as using only a jump box or firewall to control access. This multi-part tutorial will show how DevOps teams can secure their AWS services using a zero-trust, identity-based approach that not only increases security, but improves developer productivity.

Kubernetes is a valuable resource and a leading container management system in development pipelines across the world, but it’s not exempt from malicious attacks. Using Kubernetes requires a deep understanding of Kubernetes’ environment—including the different vulnerabilities you can be exposed to while creating, deploying, or running applications in your clusters.

In the last few years, Kubernetes has grown exponentially in popularity. Its wide adoption can be attributed to its open source nature, flexibility, and ability to run anywhere. Developers also love the fact that you can manage everything in Kubernetes using code. kubectl is the Kubernetes-specific command line tool that lets you communicate and control Kubernetes clusters. Whether you’re creating, managing, or deleting resources on your Kubernetes platform, kubectl is an essential tool.

OpenSSH ProxyJump and ProxyCommand directives tell the SSH client how to connect to a remote server via an intermediary server — often called a jump host, jump server, or bastion server. If you are new to jump servers, read our tutorial on how to set up a jump server and learn some of the best practices to secure them.