Segregation of duties policy enforcement - Hitachi ID Identity Manager
(1)Hitachi ID Identity Manager includes what is probably the most advanced segregation of duties (SoD) engine available. The Identity Manager SoD engine supports:
- Policy definition:
- An SoD rule is defined as a toxic sets of entitlements.
- Entitlements that participate in the SoD rule may themselves be roles, login IDs on specified target systems or membership in specific security groups.
- Users who have at least N of the M SoD entitlements are considered to be in violation.
This is a very general model. It supports rules such as "No user shall belong to more than 2 of these 30 groups."
- Approved exceptions:
- Users may be allowed to violate SoD rules, so long as an authorized person has approved the violation.
- Access certification is used to periodically renew approved SoD exceptions.
This is a practical model. It allows organizations to knowingly violate rules where there is a strong business reason to do so and where suitable compensating controls are in place.
- Proactive enforcement:
- Identity Manager's SoD engine is an integral part of the workflow engine.
- All change requests that pass through the Identity Manager workflow
engine must either:
- Satisfy all SoD rules (i.e., violate none); or
- Include a request for an approved exception to every violated rule.
- Requesters -- via the Identity Manager UI, API or automation engine -- simply cannot ask for violations without also asking for an approved exception.
SoD should be proactive rather than after-the-fact, wherever possible. This is supported by Identity Manager.
- Reporting on out-of-band and pre-existing violations:
- There are several ways to bypass the Identity Manager pro-active
SoD enforcement engine:
- Pre-existing conditions, where a user violated the SoD rule before Identity Manager was implemented.
- Pre-existing conditions, where a user violated the SoD rule before the rule was added to Identity Manager.
- Out of band changes, made by administrators outside of Identity Manager.
- In these cases, there is no general way for Identity Manager to know which of the offending entitlements is inappropriate, so it cannot automatically remediate the violating users.
- Instead, Identity Manager includes reports to identify violating users and help security staff make appropriate remediating changes.
SoD reporting is the defense of last resort.
- There are several ways to bypass the Identity Manager pro-active
SoD enforcement engine:
- Deep inspection:
- Consider an SoD rule: "no user may have roles R1 and R2."
- Now assume that role R1 contains entitlements E1 and E2, while role R2 contains E3, E4.
- Next, consider a user who already has E1, E2 and E3, but has never been explicitly assigned R1. This user effectively has R1. If this user requests E4 or R2, the request should be flagged as an SoD violation.
- The Identity Manager SoD engine, perhaps uniquely in the marketplace, will detect such violations. In general, it supports enforcement where SoD rules may cover any combination of individual entitlements and nested roles.
To the best of Hitachi ID Systems' knowledge, no other SoD engine will detect SoD violations where the SoD rule is defined in terms of one level of the role hierarchy but the violation takes place at another level. This means that other SoD engines in reality only give organizations a false sense of security!
