Reduce permissions continuously

To maintain a secure environment, it’s essential to continuously review and reduce permissions, ensuring that all identities (human and machine) have only the access they need. By regularly removing unneeded permissions and establishing ongoing review processes, you can achieve and maintain least privilege access, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access to your resources.

1. Review and remove unneeded permissions: Regularly audit permissions to identify unnecessary or excessive access for both human and machine identities. As access requirements change over time, permissions should be updated to reflect the current needs, removing any that are no longer required.
2. Establish a permission review process: Implement a process for regular reviews of access policies, roles, and permissions. This can be done quarterly or during significant organizational or project changes to ensure that permissions remain aligned with the principle of least privilege.
3. Monitor for unused identities and permissions: Continuously monitor AWS CloudTrail and other tools to identify unused identities, roles, and permissions. Remove any permissions or accounts that are no longer active or necessary to reduce the risk of accidental or malicious access.
4. Use access analysis tools: Leverage tools such as AWS IAM Access Analyzer to identify permissions that may be overly permissive or unused. This helps in pinpointing unnecessary access and ensures that all permissions are scoped appropriately.
5. Automate permission removal where possible: Use automation to remove unused or inactive permissions. For example, IAM policies can be automatically updated to revoke permissions after a set period of inactivity, ensuring that access is only available when needed.
6. Enforce least privilege for new roles: As new roles and policies are created, enforce the least privilege principle from the start. Ensure that all new access is carefully reviewed and limited to what is absolutely necessary for the role or identity.

Supporting Questions:

• What processes are in place to review and remove unneeded permissions?
• How do you monitor for and identify unused identities and permissions in your AWS environment?
• What tools or automation do you use to continuously enforce least privilege?

Roles and Responsibilities:

Security Officer:

• Responsibilities:
  • Define and enforce the permission review process to ensure least privilege is maintained across the organization.
  • Collaborate with teams to audit permissions and ensure unneeded access is removed promptly.

Cloud Administrator:

• Responsibilities:
  • Use AWS IAM Access Analyzer and other tools to identify and remove excessive or unused permissions.
  • Monitor identity activity through AWS CloudTrail to detect unused accounts or permissions, removing them when necessary.

Artefacts:

• Permission Review Logs: Documentation and reports of periodic permission reviews, highlighting changes and removals made to maintain least privilege.
• IAM Access Analyzer Reports: Outputs from tools such as IAM Access Analyzer showing potential over-permissioned roles and recommendations for reductions.
• Audit Reports: Logs from AWS CloudTrail tracking usage patterns and identifying unused identities and permissions that require removal.

Relevant AWS Services:

AWS Identity Services:

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM): Use IAM to define and manage access policies, ensuring permissions are reviewed and reduced over time to maintain least privilege.
• AWS IAM Access Analyzer: Analyze permissions and policies to identify overly permissive roles or unused permissions, enabling continuous access reduction.
• AWS Organizations with Service Control Policies (SCPs): Apply SCPs across accounts to enforce least privilege and ensure unused permissions are automatically restricted.

Monitoring and Compliance Services:

• AWS CloudTrail: Continuously monitor access to resources and identities, helping to detect unused permissions and roles that need to be removed or adjusted.
• AWS Config: Tracks changes to IAM policies and permissions over time, helping ensure compliance with least privilege access principles by detecting over-permissioned identities.