The First Form of Security

In the beginning – or at least near the beginning – there was the password. This rudimentary method of security pre-dated computers by at least two millennia, and was commonly utilized by militaries like the Roman Legion to maintain secure access to bases, resources and other high-ranking officers across a wide swath of newly conquered territory.  

As we fast forward to the 20th Century and the advent of the computer, passwords became the primary method of personal identification and access to systems, applications, networks…you name it. As computers became increasingly integrated into the daily lives of people both at work and at home, passwords became even more prevalent and served as the de facto method of security. 

Password Management Today

Today, much to our chagrin, we all juggle passwords across our laptops, tablets and phones in work and personal lives. Remembering the multitude of passwords needed to access different areas of our digital existence has become an onerous, often screen-punching task. It has also become a task rife with security vulnerabilities – particularly at the corporate level. Everyone is now required to remember so many passwords that they resort to insecure practices like writing them down, using easy-to-guess passwords, or using the same password over and over again. 

Most security experts see passwords as one of the weakest links in the security system, but many of the procedures that IT teams undertake with the intent of improving security – like requiring frequent password changes – makes the problem worse. If a hacker guesses a password or gains access to a password from one breach, they can try it again across other applications. Such tactics became household names in IT. For example, inputting a bunch of common passwords is known as “password spraying,” and reusing previously breached passwords is known as “credential stuffing.” 

Password-focused attacks are extremely common. For instance, in the well-publicized campaign of attacks on SolarWinds and many other vendors in 2019, the US  Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) noted that “incident response investigations have identified that initial access in some cases was obtained by password guessing, password spraying…” 

The Move to Single Sign-On (SSO)

As corporate employees found themselves needing to log into more and more different devices, applications and network types, IT teams began leveraging SSO technology to help simplify the process and eliminate the need for people to remember every single password use. At its core, SSO intended to allow employees to have one password that provided them access to all necessary corporate resources.   

For several few years, while most applications still resided inside of a local IT datacenter, many organizations turned to tools like Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) to manage user identity and access policies. The rise of AD adoption pushed other application vendors to support AD, further supplanting SSO as the then go-to method for password management and access security. 

Then along came Software as a Service (SaaS), and the game changed. SaaS apps went from novel to common incredibly quickly thanks to the simplicity, efficiency and cost effectiveness they promised. As cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure made it easier to build SaaS apps, these tools went from common to ubiquitous. Today, most companies have so many SaaS applications in use that their IT teams need to subscribe to other SaaS apps to help them discover and manage their active SaaS app portfolio.  

Every one of these new SaaS apps now in use utilized passwords. While early on some of these apps supported MS AD or its successor, Microsoft Azure AD (Azure AD), most did not at first. A such, it quickly became clear that successfully rolling out SSO universally was a daunting undertaking for most mid-sized businesses with complex IT environments and limited internal IT resources. After all, a company-wide password manager doesn’t eliminate the proliferation of passwords, and compromised SaaS apps can serve as gateways into the larger corporate network. 

The Rise of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

The explosion of passwords and password-based attacks has created a market for password management software. There are a plethora of vendors who deal solely with simple passwords (e.g., LastPass, Keeper Security, Dashlane), SSO (e.g., Okta, SailPoint, One Identity), or the third and most recent phase in the evolution of the password: MFA (e.g., Cisco Duo).   

Out of SSO emerged MFA, which compliments and strengthens password management and network security efforts by introducing another means of identity verification on top of a person’s username and password. Most MFA vendors today provide mobile-based authentication, which can include methods such as push-based, QR code-based, and one-time password authentication (event-based or time-based), as well as SMS-based verification.  

MFA, like SSO, has its own shortcomings. Mobile-based authentication is particularly vulnerable as mobile devices can be cloned, and apps often run simultaneously across several mobile devices. Advanced hackers can, in theory, intercept an MFA code sent via SMS or email. While this added layer of security raises the necessary skill level to execute a successful attack against a company’s network, critical vulnerabilities still exist. 

The Gold Standard: Network Access Control (NAC)

With enterprise SaaS adoption and corporate networking eco-systems expanding and becoming more complex, MFA alone simply isn’t equipped to provide the secure access and authentication functionality needed to maintain an effective network security posture. 

As we enter a period of unprecedented device proliferation, network expansion, and increased threat sophistication, NAC has emerged as the gold standard for establishing secure access and authentication to corporate networks, applications and other internal resources. NAC, for lack of a better word, has raised the bar and left hackers with their work cut out for them.  

NAC systems evaluate whether a user and their device should be allowed onto a network, based on a series of security checks, MFA included. NAC combines MFA with other unique data points, such as the location of the device or the MAC address of the device to either grant or block their access to the network. Once connected, a NAC goes a step further by continuously measuring the security posture of each device, taking steps to either quarantine or boot the device off the network should it surpass the organization’s desired risk threshold. Additionally, a NAC can control which segment of the network a device can access, further limiting any impact of an intrusion.  

As such, a NAC is a strong addition to tighter password management and MFA because its security controls are complimentary rather than overlapping. NACs were once thought to be powerful, yet complex and hard to manage. With the advent of cloud-native NAC such as Portnox CLEAR NAC-as-a-Service, however, companies can access that power without the hassle. 

The Future of Password Management

While there are efforts to eliminate the need for passwords altogether, most business software will continue to require a username and password to gain access. Therefore, businesses must do more to secure their environments in the face of so many passwords.  

No combination of security controls can guarantee protection, but if an organization operates with a limited IT budget and staff, a combination of password management, MFA, and cloud-native NAC will substantially reduce its risk of cyberattacks. 

Enhanced IoT Fingerprinting & Security with Cloud-Native DHCP Listening

More Like the Internet of Everything

With the explosion of new devices connecting to the internet, IoT (or, the Internet of Things) really might as well be called IoE (or, the Internet of Everything.) The use cases for always-connected devices span across industries – from facilities that can now better manage energy usage according to peak customer traffic, and medical devices that can adjust medication levels in seconds, to retail warehouses that can track inventory down to the last widget. It’s undeniable that IoT has been a game-changer.

That’s not to say, however, that IoT does not present some unique challenges – specifically for network security professionals.

Who Are You?

The devices themselves tend to run on extremely lean operating systems, which means they don’t run typical monitoring protocols like SNMP. There’s also no possibility of installing extra software like agents. They’re designed to be easy to set up; just point them at an internet connection, which means any user can add an IoT device.

This creates an especially tough situation for IT administrators. After all, an essential part of zero trust security is knowing what is on your network, which means you need to make sure operating systems and firmware are patched and up-to-date to close the gap on any known vulnerabilities. But how can you know what’s on your network if the devices don’t report back specific identification in any way?

This problem has become so common it has a name – “Shadow IoT” – and it’s so prevalent that 80% of IT leaders found devices on their network they didn’t know about.

IoT Fingerprinting to the Rescue!

To combat this, several companies that make security tools like Network Access Control software have begun offering IoT Fingerprinting. This is a way to gather information about IoT devices like model, OS or Firmware, and manufacturer without requiring the devices to report in. While an absolute game changer for helping secure these devices, it is not without its challenges.

The biggest issue is that there is no real standard across devices – most don’t support Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) or Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Some devices support Universal Plug & Play (UnPNP) or Bonjour, but typically you only find that on consumer devices like a Roku or an AppleTV. Some Cisco devices support CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol), but that doesn’t cover other vendors; some may use LLDP instead (Link Layer Discover Protocol) but typically you will find that only on phones, video conferencing equipment, and commercial IP surveillance cameras.

Port scanning via Nmap & TCP have more drawbacks – they scale very poorly. Also, with increased pressure on IoT manufacturers to pay more attention to security, more and more devices are being shipped with all ports turned off. And of course, the most basic firewall will raise alarms when a port scan is detected.

MAC address will get you some information, but they pose some challenges too. The first six hexadecimal digits of a MAC address are called the OUI and they identify the manufacturer. This is useful, but also not super accurate in the sense that if you find an HP device on your network, that does little to tell you what it exactly is. It also does not tell you any information about operating systems or firmware.

DHCP at first seems like a great option – when a device connects to a network, its first step is typically to request an IP from a DHCP server. During the DORA process (Discovery, Offer, Request, Acknowledge) much information is passed back and forth, including information to fingerprint the device. Many enterprise switches support a process called DHCP Gleaning, where the switch listens for DHCP requests Switchport interfaces and is then captured as a device sensor and sent along with RADIUS accounting info.

The problem here is that not all switches support DHCP Gleaning. For the ones that don’t, how do you get the information collected by the DHCP server to your network access control software to do the actual fingerprinting? Some solutions have you install an on-prem DHCP forwarder, which signs your IT team up to deal with deploying and maintaining yet another server, upgrades, patches, etc. Even worse, this separate forwarder creates overhead on your network that may impact your users and sensitive traffic.

So, all hope is lost, and there’s no reliable way to accurately fingerprint all your IoT Devices, but there’s great news coming.

Portnox’s DHCP Listener Heads to the Cloud

Keep all the magic of a cloud-based solution – vendor agnostic, no maintenance, no upgrades, no worries – AND get the most accurate fingerprinting of all your IoT devices as part of your comprehensive zero-trust solution!

You can easily configure your network devices to send the data your DHCP server already gathers throughout the course of handing out IP Addresses to the Portnox SaaS DHCP listener.

All you need to enable is a layer 3 device on the same subnet as the devices you want fingerprinted, that is NOT also acting as a DHCP server. You will need to configure the DHCP helper, which will forward this information to us. Most devices support using a DHCP helper – in fact, most devices support running multiple, so no need to sacrifice anything in your current architecture. The helper will forward DHCP and BOOTP broadcasts on directly connected subnets and relay them to the Portnox DHCP listener on port 67.

If you have bandwidth considerations, you can lay them to rest – DHCP is a very lightweight protocol, consuming less than 350 bytes per request on average. Since we are not making DHCP offers, the only bandwidth is from the clients DHCP request that is forwarded from the clients.

So let’s say you have 500 clients. A DHCP lease is typically 24 hours, with clients renewing at 12 hours. That means you’d spend 175 kilobytes of total data every 12 hours…even a 28.8 baud modem could handle that request.

We use this formula to calculate bandwidth:

(((TOTAL # OF DHCP CLIENTS X 350BYTES) X2 FOR 24 HOURS) X8 CONVERT TO BITS)/ 86400 SECONDS IN A DAY

IN EXCEL THE EQUIVALENT FORMULA WOULD READ: =(((500 *350)*2)*8)/86400

This first-of-its-kind SaaS DHCP listener is easy to set up, and opens a whole new world of accurate fingerprinting for IoT Devices.