By
Guest Blogger: Anastasios Arampatzis
May 30, 2019
The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is the executive responsible for an organization's information and data security. Key responsibilities include data loss and fraud prevention while developing identity and access management procedures to ensure that only authorized people have access to restricted corporate information assets.
A CISO’s goal is to continuously improve the corporate security posture. In order to achieve this, he/she makes sure that all security driven initiatives are being integrated smoothly into the organization’s structure. PKI is one of the “weapons” a CISO can have in his cybersecurity arsenal, but he/she needs to understand how to manage it effectively in order to reduce risk, cost and time.
The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the set of hardware, software, policies, processes, and procedures required to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates and public keys. The PKI is the foundation that enables the use of technologies, such as digital signatures and encryption, across large user populations. PKIs deliver the elements essential to meet the needs for a secure and trusted business environment and the growing Internet of Things (IoT).
PKIs help establish the identity of people, devices, and services, enabling controlled access to systems and resources, protection of data, and accountability in transactions. PKI enables users and systems to securely exchange data over the internet and verify the legitimacy of certificate-holding entities, such as web servers, other authenticated servers and individuals. PKI enables users to authenticate digital certificate holders, as well as to mediate the process of certificate revocation, using cryptographic algorithms to secure the process.
Organizations are digitally transformed by incorporating machines into a wider variety of their corporate IT environments. They're doing so primarily as a means of adapting to an ever-evolving world. Indeed, many organizations look to a growing range of new devices and applications to boost business efficiency, deliver value to customers, gain competitive advantage, and enhance their agility. Each of these machines requires a unique identity to operate securely within the enterprise. As the number of these machine identities increases dramatically, so does the difficulty of managing and securing them.
IoT initiatives are the backbone of those efforts. Huge amounts of data are generated by, and collected from a rapidly growing number of IoT devices. But there’s no point in collecting and analyzing data, and making business decisions based on it, if you’re not able to trust the devices or their data. For safe, secure IoT deployments, organizations need to embrace time-tested security techniques, like PKI, to ensure the integrity and security of their IoT systems.
Machines aren't just increasing in number. They are also diversifying in nature. IoT has introduced new physical devices like sensors and actuators that generally transmit and do not store information. At the same time, the cloud has given rise to "virtual" machines, or software which emulates more traditional physical machines such as desktops and servers, while DevOps has accelerated the cloud with self-contained runtime environments known as containers.
The explosion in the number and type of machines creates risks. Organizations must be able to identify, authenticate, and secure all the machines as well as their communication with other machines across the IT environment. That's difficult when devices and applications converse across multiple network ecosystems. As the IoT grows and becomes increasingly diverse, trust is paramount not only in industry and corporate applications, but also in consumer deployments.
While in the past PKI was used to identify humans, nowadays it is used primarily to identify an ever growing number of machines. As we haven already seen, there are many challenges and it is nearly impossible for PKI professionals to satisfy them manually, especially at the speed and scale of today’s machine identities.
According to many studies, a worrying percentage of companies experience problems protecting machine identities. While these companies see machine identity protection capabilities as important, they struggle to execute on those capabilities because machine identities are not being tracked, and insufficient tools are being used to protect them. Without the right technology solutions in place, such as enforcing policies, effective machine identity lifecycle management, and responding to machine identity security incidents at enterprise scale, this rapidly fluctuating environment can be perilous.
Traditional certificate management doesn’t meet the requirements of protecting today’s avalanche of machine identities. Orchestrating the creation, provisioning, rotation, renewal, and replacement of machine identities tasks manually is nearly impossible, given the rapid increase in volume of machine identities and the velocity of changes affecting them.
It is important to be understood that protecting machine identities is as important as protecting human identities. Manual PKI implementation is a weak PKI implementation. The hard truth is that if your PKI is poorly implemented, it can be easy for cyber attackers to access your sensitive data and wreak havoc.
While in-house PKI seems like the best solution in cybercrime prevention since PKI certificates can be issued and managed in a very efficient and effective manner, it has to be supported by automation. Automated provisioning of those PKI certificates, securely, without human intervention is the best solution to address the challenges discussed above. Certificates are like blood cells in a real biologic organism—they are being created, and they live and die. Their life should follow specific rules, be consistent and shouldn’t take up too much resources. Otherwise the whole organism gets sick or dies.
Automation can help companies alleviate their current challenges with protecting machine identities by enabling firms to reap the following benefits:
Learn more about Venafi PKI and machine identity protection solutions today!
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