IAM

The majority of the features making B2B users happy will be implemented by the IAM perimeter.

“Overly permissive AWS IAM policies that allowed s3:GetObject to * (all) resources”, led to $80 million fine for Capital One. The only reason why you can't overlook IAM as a business owner.

A little click-baity, but author admit that “It depends on how much you trust them to 1. Stay in business; 2. Not jack up your prices; 3. Not deprecate services out from under you; 4. Provide more value to you in business acceleration than they take away in flexibility.”

Mozilla's security and access guidelines.

“This document divides cloud vulnerabilities into four classes (misconfiguration, poor access control, shared tenancy vulnerabilities, and supply chain vulnerabilities)”.

A Neo4J-based tool to map out dependencies and relationships between services and resources. Supports AWS, GCP, GSuite, Okta and GitHub.

A meta-critic of account management, in which features expected by the business clash with real user needs, in the form of user stories written by a fictional project manager.

In the same spirit as above, but broader: all the little things we overlook as developers but users really care about. In the top of that list lies account-centric features, diverse integration and import/export tools. I.e. all the enterprise customers needs to cover.

Sound advice to lay down the foundation of a future-proof IAM API.

On the concept of usernames as identifiers, and the complexities introduced when unicode characters meets uniqueness requirements.

User login, user registration, 2FA and profile management.

Automatically secures secrets used by privileged users and machine identities.

Open-source project for login and session management which supports passwordless, social login, email and phone logins.

Modern PHP user login and management framework.

An up to date set of recommendations for developers who are not cryptography engineers. There's even a shorter summary available.

Aims to bring together cryptography researchers with developers, focusing on uses in real-world environments such as the Internet, the cloud, and embedded devices.

“This paper has two major purposes. The first is to define some of the terms and concepts behind basic cryptographic methods, and to offer a way to compare the myriad cryptographic schemes in use today. The second is to provide some real examples of cryptography in use today.”

Foundational papers of cryptography.

“If you are using compare-by-hash to generate addresses for data that can be supplied by malicious users, you should have a plan to migrate to a new hash every few years”.

“The phrase ‘random number generator’ should be parsed as follows: It is a random generator of numbers. It is not a generator of random numbers.”

“Do not assume that UUIDs are hard to guess; they should not be used as security capabilities (identifiers whose mere possession grants access)”. UUIDs are designed to be unique, not to be random or unpredictable: do not use UUIDs as a secret.

A benchmark of all identifier formats.

Funny take on the global aspect of unique identifiers.

Quick overview of Google's Zero-trust Network initiative.

More companies add extra layers of VPNs, firewalls, restrictions and constraints, resulting in a terrible experience and a slight security gain. There's a better way.

Identity & Access Proxy and Access Control Decision API that authenticates, authorizes, and mutates incoming HTTP requests. Inspired by the BeyondCorp / Zero Trust white paper.

BeyondCorp-inspired Access Proxy server.

An identity-aware proxy that enables secure access to internal applications.

A cloud-native, identity-aware proxy and policy enforcement point that orchestrates authentication and authorization systems via versatile rules, supporting protocol-agnostic identity propagation.

An overview and comparison of all token-based authentication schemes for end-user APIs.

In the same spirit as above, but this time at the service level.

How-to in a nutshell: 1. Small root of trust; 2. TLS isn't enough; 3. Certificate-based tokens; 4. Crypto Auth Tokens (CATs). See the slides for more details.

A summary of NIST Special Publication 800-63B covering new password complexity guidelines.

The only way to slow down offline attacks is by carefully choosing hash algorithms that are as resource intensive as possible.

Recent scientific research calls into question the value of many long-standing password-security practices such as password expiration policies, and points instead to better alternatives such as enforcing banned-password lists and MFA.

This study recommend the association of: blocklist checks against commonly leaked passwords, password policies without character-class requirements, minimum-strength policies.

“Arbitrary low limits on length and character composition are bad. They look bad, they lead to negative speculation about security posture and they break tools like password managers.”

Shaming sites with dumb password rules.

A collection of password rules, change URLs and quirks by sites.

Specification defining site resource for password updates.

Good news: you're not stuck with a legacy password saving scheme. Here is a trick to transparently upgrade to stronger hashing algorithm.

The primary source of account hacks is password spraying (on legacy auth like SMTP, IMAP, POP, etc.), second is replay attack. Takeaway: password are insecure, use and enforce MFA.

An excellent walk-trough over all these technologies.

Key take-away: “schemes based on email and SMS are more usable. Mechanisms based on designated trustees and personal knowledge questions, on the other hand, fall short, both in terms of convenience and efficiency.”

“Our analysis confirms that secret questions generally offer a security level that is far lower than user-chosen passwords. (…) Surprisingly, we found that a significant cause of this insecurity is that users often don't answer truthfully. (…) On the usability side, we show that secret answers have surprisingly poor memorability”.

Google security team's data shows 2FA blocks 100% of automated bot hacks.

Same conclusion as above from Microsoft: “Based on our studies, your account is more than 99.9% less likely to be compromised if you use MFA.”

Probably on the verge of paranoia, but might be a reason to rate limit 2FA validation attempts.

Or why you should not rely on automated phone calls as a method to reach the user and reset passwords, 2FA or for any kind of verification. Not unlike SMS-based 2FA, it is currently insecure and can be compromised by the way of its weakest link: voicemail systems.

On the UX aspects of 2FA.

“When my 2FA code is entered incorrectly I'd like to know about it”.

Doesn't work because there are no cellphone towers at stations in Antarctica.

Open-source authentication and authorization server providing two-factor authentication and single sign-on (SSO) for your applications via a web portal.

Simple, secure and fast identity management platform.

NIST has said that 2FA via SMS is bad and awful since 2016.

Definitive research project demonstrating successful attempts at SIM swapping.

Passwords are not the be-all and end-all of user authentication. This article tries to tell you why.

What are magic links, their origin, pros and cons.

Introduce WebAuthn as a standard supported by all major browsers, and allowing “servers to register and authenticate users using public key cryptography instead of a password”.

Or why passkeys are not worse than passwords.

Describe how authentication works with security keys, details the protocols, and how they articulates with WebAuthn. Key takeaway: “There is no way to create a U2F key with webauthn however. (…) So complete the transition to webauthn of your login process first, then transition registration.”

A practical guide to stay safe online and prevent phishing with FIDO2, WebAuthn and security keys.

Open-source implementation for security keys written in Rust that supports both FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards.

Guide to using YubiKey as a SmartCard for storing GPG encryption, signing and authentication keys, which can also be used for SSH. Many of the principles in this document are applicable to other smart card devices.

Quick overview of the important stuff.

PKI lets you define a system cryptographically. It's universal and vendor neutral.

Acts as a broker between CAs and environments, providing a central portal for developers to issue TLS certificates with 'sane' defaults.

A swiss army knife for PKI/TLS by CloudFlare. Command line tool and an HTTP API server for signing, verifying, and bundling TLS certificates.

A suite of network fingerprinting methods to facilitate threat-hunting and analysis.

Get up to speed on JWT with this article.

Learn how to use JWT to secure your web app.

Compared to API keys, JWTs offers granular security, homogeneous auth architecture, decentralized issuance, OAuth2 compliance, debuggability, expiration control, device management.

A good recap of all JWT pitfalls.

On token invalidation.

And why your "solution" doesn't work, because stateless JWT tokens cannot be invalidated or updated. They will introduce either size issues or security issues depending on where you store them. Stateful JWT tokens are functionally the same as session cookies, but without the battle-tested and well-reviewed implementations or client su…

A signed JWT is known as a JWS (JSON Web Signature). In fact a JWT does not exist itself — either it has to be a JWS or a JWE (JSON Web Encryption). Its like an abstract class — the JWS and JWE are the concrete implementations.

The standards are either completely broken or complex minefields hard to navigate.

Allows you to decode, verify and generate JWT.

Because it needs multiple tradeoffs on Enforcement which is required in so many places, on Decision architecture to split business logic from authorization logic, and on Modeling to balance power and complexity.

How a simple authorization model based on roles is not enough and gets complicated fast due to product packaging, data locality, enterprise organizations and compliance.

How we got from DAC (unix permissions, secret URL), to MAC (DRM, MFA, 2FA, SELinux), to RBAC. Details how the latter allows for better modeling of policies, ACLs, users and groups.

Discuss the limitations of RBAC and how ABAC (Attribute-Based Access Control) addresses them.

The historical origins of authorization schemes. Hints at the future of sharing, trust and delegation between different teams and organizations.

The minutiae of permission design in GCP improves the developer's experience.

Zelkova is how AWS does it. This system perform symbolic analysis of IAM policies, and solve the reachability of resources according user's rights and access constraints. Also see the higher-level introduction given at re:inforce 2019.

An in-depth, vendor-agnostic treatment of authorization that emphasizes mental models. This guide shows the reader how to think about their authorization needs in order to make good decisions about their authorization architecture and model.

Discover how assigning identities to services (non-user principals) can simplify authentication, enhance security, and streamline authorization in complex distributed systems. A useful guide for IAM teams managing microservices and APIs.

Set of services and libraries supporting service authentication and role-based authorization for provisioning and configuration.

Biscuit merge concepts from cookies, JWTs, macaroons and Open Policy Agent. “It provide a logic language based on Datalog to write authorization policies. It can store data, like JWT, or small conditions like Macaroons, but it is also able to represent more complex rules like role-based access control, delegation, hierarchies.”

An authorization endpoint to write context-aware access control policies.

Self-hosted, open-source, RBAC system written in Rust.

Policy decision point. It uses a set of access control policies, similar to AWS policies, in order to determine whether a subject is authorized to perform a certain action on a resource.

Access control library, inspired by AWS.

Open-source access control library for Golang projects.

An open-source general-purpose decision engine to create and enforce ABAC policies.

Scales to trillions of access control lists and millions of authorization requests per second to support services used by billions of people. It has maintained 95th-percentile latency of less than 10 milliseconds and availability of greater than 99.999% over 3 years of production use. Other bits not in the paper. Zanzibar Academy is a site dedicated to explaining how Zanzibar works.

An open source database system for managing security-critical application permissions inspired by Zanzibar.

Another open-source authorization as a service inspired by Google Zanzibar, and see how it compares to other Zanzibar-inspired tools.

An open-source project which combines the policy-as-code and decision logging of OPA with a Zanzibar-modeled directory.

Open Source administration layer for OPA, detecting changes to both policy and policy data in realtime and pushing live updates to OPA agents. OPAL brings open-policy up to the speed needed by live applications.

A relationship based access control (ReBAC) engine (inspired by Google Zanzibar) also capable of enforcing any authorization paradigm, including RBAC and ABAC.

A comprehensive list of (maintained) tools for AWS IAM.

“In my nearly 5 years at Amazon, I carve out a little time each day, each week to look through the forums, customer tickets to try to find out where people are having trouble.”

The history of fast-growing AWS explains how the current scheme came to be, and how it compares to GCP's resource hierarchy.

Writing security-conscious IAM Policies by hand can be very tedious and inefficient. Policy Sentry helps users to create least-privilege policies in a matter of seconds.

AWS IAM policy statement generator with fluent interface. Helps with creating type safe IAM policies and writing more restrictive/secure statements by offering conditions and ARN generation via IntelliSense. Available for Node.js, Python, .Net and Java.

GitOps for IAM. The Terraform of Cloud IAM. IAMbic is a multi-cloud identity and access management (IAM) control plane that centralizes and simplifies cloud access and permissions. It maintains an eventually consistent, human-readable, bi-directional representation of IAM in version control.

If I'm given a Macaroon that authorizes me to perform some action(s) under certain restrictions, I can non-interactively build a second Macaroon with stricter restrictions that I can then give to you.

Google's original paper.

As a consumer/verifier of macaroons, they allow you (through third-party caveats) to defer some authorization decisions to someone else. JWTs don't.

High performance rate-limiting micro-service and library.

A curated list of providers, services, libraries, and resources for OpenID Connect.

Explain how these standards work using simplified illustrations.

A reference article describing the protocol in simplified format to help developers and service providers implement it.

Starts with an historical context on how these standards came to be, clears up the innacuracies in the vocabulary, then details the protocols and its pitfalls to make it less intimidating.

A nice summary card.

Got multiple legacy systems to merge with their own login methods and accounts? Here is how to merge all that mess by the way of OIDC.

OAuth2-friendly adaptation of the Central Authentication Service (CAS) protocol. You'll find there good OAuth user flow diagrams.

“Updates and extends the OAuth 2.0 Security Threat Model to incorporate practical experiences gathered since OAuth 2.0 was published and covers new threats relevant due to the broader application”.

How to identify and exploit some of the key vulnerabilities found in OAuth 2.0 authentication mechanisms.

“PKCE is used to provide one more security layer to the authorization code flow in OAuth and OpenID Connect.”

Open-source OIDC & OAuth2 Server Provider.

Open-source Identity and Access Management. Supports OIDC, OAuth 2 and SAML 2, LDAP and AD directories, password policies.

A UI-first centralized authentication / Single-Sign-On (SSO) platform based. Supports OIDC and OAuth 2, social logins, user management, 2FA based on Email and SMS.

Open-source Identity Provider similar to Keycloak.

An Open-Source solution built with Go and Angular to manage all your systems, users and service accounts together with their roles and external identities. ZITADEL provides you with OIDC, OAuth 2.0, login & register flows, passwordless and MFA authentication. All this is built on top of eventsourcing in combination with CQRS to provide a great audit trail.

A simple authentication system which only implements the relevant parts of the OAuth2 standards.

An IAM infrastructure for modern apps and SaaS products, supporting OIDC, OAuth 2.0 and SAML for authentication and authorization.

Open-source authentication-as-a-service solution. It includes the code for the server, AuthUI, the Portal, and Admin API.

“OAuth is a protocol for authorization: it ensures Bob goes to the right parking lot. In contrast, SAML is a protocol for authentication, or allowing Bob to get past the guardhouse.”

“Even though SAML was actually designed to be widely applicable, its contemporary usage is typically shifted towards enterprise SSO scenarios. On the other hand, OAuth was designed for use with applications on the Internet, especially for delegated authorisation.”

Identity is hard. Another take on the different protocol is always welcome to help makes sense of it all.

Overview of the how and why of SSO and SAML.

Another naive explanation of SAML workflow in the context of corporate SSO implementation.

SAML is arcane at times. A another analogy might helps get more sense out of it.

Not only weird, SAML is also insecure by design, as it relies on signatures based on XML canonicalization, not XML byte stream. Which means you can exploit XML parser/encoder differences.

On the technical and UX issues of single logout implementations.

A documented rant on the excessive pricing practiced by SaaS providers to activate SSO on their product. The author's point is, as a core security feature, SSO should be reasonably priced and not part of an exclusive tier.

Solution based on blind signatures. See the slides.

Not GCP's KMS, but the one at the core of their infrastructure. See the slides.

Secure, store and tightly control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, encryption keys.

An alternative to HashiCorp Vault.

Editor of encrypted files that supports YAML, JSON, ENV, INI and BINARY formats and encrypts with AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, age, and PGP.

Audit git repos for secrets.

Searches through git repositories for high entropy strings and secrets, digging deep into commit history.

Really basic overview of HSM usages.

AWS CloudHSM Classic is backed by SafeNet's Luna HSM, current CloudHSM rely on Cavium's Nitrox, which allows for partitionable "virtual HSMs".

Open-source project for building trusted execution environments (TEE) with secure hardware enclaves, based on the RISC-V architecture.

A specification and a reference implementation for the secure transfer, storage and processing of data.

A case study of vulnerability and exploitability of a HSM (in French, sorry).

A great introduction on the domain and its responsibilities.

A couple of real use-case to demonstrate the role of a TnS team.

Section dedicated to fraud management for billing and payment, from our sister repository.

Is this paper aims at identity metasystem, its laws still provides great insights at smaller scale, especially the first law: to always allow user control and ask for consent to earn trust.

“To limit "friction" Uber allowed riders to sign up without requiring them to provide identity beyond an email — easily faked — or a phone number. (…) Vehicles were stolen and burned; drivers were assaulted, robbed and occasionally murdered. The company stuck with the low-friction sign-up system, even as violence increased.”

Customer name matching has lots of application, from account deduplication to fraud monitoring.

Wordlists for creating statistically likely usernames for use in username-enumeration, simulated password-attacks and other security testing tasks.

Some groups and content are illegal in some juridictions. This is an example of a blocklist.

An open-source infrastructure for user identity and risk management.

Hunt down social media accounts by username across social networks.

Why background check are sometimes necessary.

A really detailed analysis of suspicious contributor signups on OpenStreetMap. This beautiful and high-level report demonstrating an orchestrated and directed campaign might serve as a template for fraud reports.

A proposed method to “detects microcluster anomalies, or suddenly arriving groups of suspiciously similar edges, in edge streams, using constant time and memory.”

Open-source platform for visualizing and manipulating large graphs.

“If you host an online community, where people can harm another person: you are on the hook. And if you can't afford to be on the hook, don't host an online community”.

“You can think about the solution space for this problem by considering three dimensions: cost, accuracy and speed. And two approaches: human review and machine review. Humans are great in one of these dimensions: accuracy. The downside is that humans are expensive and slow. Machines, or robots, are great at the other two dimensions: cost and speed - they're much cheaper and faster. But the goal is to find a robot solution that is also sufficiently accurate for your needs.”

Moderation of huge social networks is performed by an army of outsourced subcontractors. These people are exposed to the worst and generally ends up with PTSD.

A documentary on these teams of underpaid people removing posts and deleting accounts.

“A concise definition of Threat Intelligence: evidence-based knowledge, including context, mechanisms, indicators, implications and actionable advice, about an existing or emerging menace or hazard to assets that can be used to inform decisions regarding the subject's response to that menace or hazard.”

An open source intelligence (OSINT) automation tool. It integrates with just about every data source available and uses a range of methods for data analysis, making that data easy to navigate.

Open standards, tools and methodologies to support threat intelligence analysis.

Tags to organize information on “threat intelligence including cyber security indicators, financial fraud or counter-terrorism information.”

Fingerprints can be used as a source of signals to identify bots and fraudsters.

At one point you will let users upload files in your system. Here is a corpus of suspicious media files that can be leveraged by scammers =to bypass security or fool users.

Collection of multiple types of lists used during security assessments, collected in one place. List types include usernames, passwords, URLs, sensitive data patterns, fuzzing payloads, web shells, and many more.

CSV database of email addresses used by threat actor in phishing kits.

Tools to scan phone numbers using only free resources. The goal is to first gather standard information such as country, area, carrier and line type on any international phone numbers with a very good accuracy. Then search for footprints on search engines to try to find the VoIP provider or identify the owner.

Homoglyphs is a common phishing trick.

Reference all open-source captcha libraries, integration, alternatives and cracking tools.

reCaptcha is still an effective, economical and quick solution when your company can't afford to have a dedicated team to fight bots and spammers at internet scale.

Starts with a rant on how the service is a privacy nightmare and is tedious UI-wise, then list alternatives.

An open-source solution to protect upstream resources from scraper bots.

Captchas solving service.

Perfect for this use-case, as bloom filters are designed to quickly check if an element is not in a (large) set. Variations of bloom filters exist for specific data types.

Radix trees might come handy to speed-up IP blocklists.

Consolidates reputable hosts files, and merges them into a unified hosts file with duplicates removed.

Extensive collection of list for security, privacy and parental control.

Mozilla's registry of public suffixes, under which Internet users can (or historically could) directly register names.

CIDR country-level IP data, straight from the Regional Internet Registries, updated hourly.

Subdomain denylists: #1, #2, #3, #4.

Top-5000 most common domain prefix/suffix list.

NSA's XKeyscore matching rules for TOR and other anonymity preserving tools.

Official French denylist of money-related fraud sites.

A list of temporary email providers. And its derivative Python module.

Cross-language temporary (disposable/throwaway) email detection library.

A list of domains for disposable and temporary email addresses. Useful for filtering your email list to increase open rates (sending email to these domains likely will not be opened).

“A ruby gem to check if the owner of a given email address or website is working for THE MAN (a.k.a verifies government domains).” Good resource to hunt for potential government customers in your user base.

This is a general list of words you may want to consider reserving, in a system where users can pick any name.

List of all the names that should be restricted from registration in automated systems.

Profanity blocklist from Shutterstock.

Uses a linear SVM model trained on 200k human-labeled samples of clean and profane text strings.

A collection of scientific studies of schemes providing privacy by design.

Data breach index.

Most privacy breaches were allowed by known vulnerabilities in third-party dependencies. Here is how to detect them by the way of CI/CD.

As the world becomes increasingly connected, the email marketing regulation landscape becomes more and more complex.

Hashing is not sufficient for anonymization no. But still it is good enough for pseudonymization (which is allowed by the GDPR).

“Hashed email addresses can be easily reversed and linked to an individual”.

Explain the intuition behind differential privacy, a theoretical framework which allow sharing of aggregated data without compromising confidentiality. See follow-up articles with more details and practical aspects.

Context aware, pluggable and customizable data protection and PII data anonymization service for text and images.

Europe's reference site.

Best practices for developers.

A one-page summary of the above.

This paper demonstrates that, because of the lack of GDPR law enforcements, dark patterns and implied consent are ubiquitous.

List of GDPR fines and penalties.

Covers all the important facets of user onboarding.

A huge list of deconstructed first-time user signups.

From Leaked Screenshots & A/B Tests.

A collection of tactics to increase the chance of users finishing the account creation funnel.

Some basic tips on the login form.

Create login forms that are simple, linkable, predictable, and play nicely with password managers.

To support both SSO and password-based login. Now if breaking the login funnel in 2 steps is too infuriating to users, solve this as Dropbox does: an AJAX request when you enter your username.

“In this post we will look at the humble <input> element and the HTML attributes that will help speed up our users' two factor authentication experience”.

Summarizes the results from an academic study investigating the impact removing password masking has on consumer trust.

Notifications are hard. Really hard.

Ranking, popularity and activity status of open-source digital identity projects.

The source of all new features added to the IAM perimeter.

Also of note: Identity Platform, Resource Manager, Key Management Service/HSM, Access Context Manager, Identity-Aware Proxy, Data Loss Prevention a…

Relevant keywords: IAM and Security.

All the latest accounts updates on DO.

Help makes sense of their huge service catalog. In the same spirit: AWS In Plain English.

Describe all GCP products in 4 words or less.

Cypherpunks overlaps with security. This wiki compiles information about the movement, its history and the people/events of note.