Business Case for Claims-Based Authorization

Jackson Shaw provided a great use-case for claims-based authorization this week. While I've always seen the value of the claims-based approach, I've always felt that the thing that's missing is the motivation. End-users and consumers are typically motivated by what is easier or cheaper. Corporations, similarly, are motivated financially and not, as we might hope, by security or privacy as an end in itself. But his example, which applies to any major corporation who gives discounts based on employer (hotels, car rentals, wireless phones, etc.) shows that there are millions of dollars on the line.

$$$ = motivation

It might be just what corporations need to push them toward adoption -- and that includes providing incentives for customers to move to a claims-based model. I think mobile phone companies are situated perfectly - they can provide the authentication mechanism built into the devices they sell, which makes it potentially easier for users to browse the web (could solve the 'numerous passwords' problem) - remember:

Easier = motivation

...and they have a huge financial motivator because many big companies negotiate mobile plan discounts for employees.

But perhaps budgets can be pooled together by a consortium of companies that are losing money to create a compelling solution that end-users will want to adopt. And in the end, we'll see better security and privacy as a result.

+1 for Continuous Compliance

Anton Chuvakin posted a blog entry today about Continuous Compliance. I've written on the subject in numerous places (here for example) and have even written a white paper and given a webinar on the topic.

As a software vendor, I often hear from organizations who are looking for the silver bullet. People actually say things like "your software is PCI compliant, right? ...because we need to be PCI compliant and I'm looking for software to get us there". It's not their fault. Apparently, the folks pushing down the requirements, despite their efforts, haven't done a great job at educating the people that need to be educated.

My paper and my responses explain that the idea isn't to find a piece of software or even a business process that will get you compliant for your audit next month and then you forget it until next year. The idea is to create what I've called a "culture of compliance" (a borrowed phrase) through which you remain in compliance continuously. Put controls in place, create a way to test controls, understand access rights, regularly monitor and review permissions, and you'll ultimately be able to respond to any new (related) regulation that comes at you.

Sure, I can map specific reports to specific subsections of a regulation or security framework, but that shouldn't be the goal. Take a look at our recent article on the topic: When compliance is at odds with security - sometimes focusing on the goal of point-in-time compliance can actually negatively affect your security posture. I hope Anton is right that the times may be upon us because I have to say that I often feel like people listen to what I'm saying but ultimately ignore it and really just want a set of reports labelled with the regulation du jour.

A new tool for Identity Management: AD Event Push SDK

I had a brainstorm last night. Most Identity Management systems poll Active Directory to pull changes on a periodic basis. And admittedly, that approach is often sufficient. But, here's an alternative that gets you real-time push updates from AD with the person who made the change (which is often useful for work flow/approval and audit trail purposes):

A small utility service that sits on the DC waiting for changes
Picks up events in real-time
Sends event info to a DLL that you compile

The DLL determines what to do with the info based on:
- Who did it
- What groups the person is a member of
- What happened (add/mod/del)
- Which object or object-type was affected (admin accounts, service accounts, etc)
- Which attributes changed
- In which OU the event occurred
- etc.

Possible outcomes may be to trigger an Identity Management process or work flow, open a help desk ticket, generate an alert, etc.

The programming would be very similar to building an ILM management agent.

So, IDM friends, would this be useful? If you have a project in mind or just want to play with it, let me know. NetVision has had this agent for years but we add a lot of capability around it. I'm wondering if there's some value for you if we strip it down to a single DLL that you would control. Let me know.