Latest / Identity at the Center / #239 - Authenticate 2023: Machine Identity with David Mahdi of Transmit Security
Transcript
- 0:05This is identity at the center. If it has anything to do with
- 0:10IAM, this is the go to podcast now your hosts Jim McDonald and
- 0:17Jeff Stedman. Welcome to the Identity at the
- 0:23Center podcast. I'm Jeff and that's Jim.
- 0:25Hey, Jim. Hey, Jeff, How's it going?
- 0:27Not so bad yourself. It's going great.
- 0:29Did you know that I was on stage for the keynote here at
- 0:32Authenticate today? I did 'cause you were sitting
- 0:35right next to me. Pretty fantastic, huh?
- 0:38Yeah, it was cool. Yeah, good time.
- 0:40First time having done that. A little bit rushed, but I think
- 0:43that's just the nature of going last in a long sequence of
- 0:45activities. But yeah, pleased with the way
- 0:48it turned out about yourself. Yeah, it was fantastic.
- 0:50It was a lot of fun. I think that we're going to save
- 0:55that. We're going to get the recording
- 0:56of that. And then drop that as the last
- 0:59episode from Authenticate. We'll do that at the end of next
- 1:02week. So anybody who's interested in
- 1:05listening to that, we had a, you know, it's a pretty short, power
- 1:08packed episode, really focused on past key deployment.
- 1:11Yeah, it was like the Cliffs Notes version of an Identity at
- 1:14the Center podcast. Yeah, very much so.
- 1:17But it was fun. It was like.
- 1:19Big crowd. I think it was the we set the
- 1:21record for the most people listening to our podcast at one
- 1:25time. Yeah, which wasn't probably too
- 1:26hard, I don't think. But no, probably not.
- 1:28Hey, we got to start somewhere. I at least I'm, I'm happy
- 1:30because I got my shout out to Nick, the Segway camera guy who
- 1:33is, I'm sorry, Andrew and Megan and Adrian others, but he's the
- 1:36reason I really came to authenticate.
- 1:38The guy's a star. I mean, he's on a Segway.
- 1:40He's got like this gimbal with like cameras and stuff like
- 1:43that. He's zooming all around the
- 1:45room, back and forth. I mean, that's that guy's a
- 1:47superhero right there. But it's not even like it's not
- 1:49even like a Segway like you see in San Francisco with handles.
- 1:53It's more like one of those things that preteens stand on
- 1:58and zoom all over your house in. What does this ball and hit
- 2:00their face on hoverboard? I mean, I don't think they call
- 2:02them hoverboards, but it's not, it's not a hoverboard.
- 2:04I saw Back to the Future. That's not a hoverboard.
- 2:08So what are you thinking about the conference overall?
- 2:12That's good. I'm glad to have gotten through
- 2:14our thing, and now I can feel like I can enjoy the conference.
- 2:18Yeah, it feels like I, I say probably true for anybody.
- 2:23When you're getting on the keynote stage is a little nerve
- 2:25wracking, so. Yes.
- 2:29So we've got also a guest here sitting with us in this room,
- 2:33couple of fine folks also watching us, staring in
- 2:35intently. We got David Mottie, He's the
- 2:37CIO for Transmit Security. He's been on a show with us
- 2:39before. Hey, David.
- 2:40Hello. How's it going?
- 2:42It's going and and I just wanted to make a comment about the
- 2:46gentleman that's on the the Segway, Nick.
- 2:49Yeah, respect his name. Nick, I'm going to go well, I
- 2:52haven't met him personally, so so I so I appreciate that.
- 2:55But I'd say maybe it was almost like the thing in Aliens, but
- 2:58not. Yeah, like the exoskeleton it
- 3:01seems. Like an exoskeleton to me, and
- 3:04I'm just waiting for him to press the button and to turn
- 3:06into something. Much more.
- 3:08You guys are so sci-fi I. Don't know what you're talking
- 3:12about. Yeah, that's.
- 3:14What they meant. Well, maybe that's why I got in
- 3:16the identity space because I thought, you know all the
- 3:18biometric scanners and everything they had in in all
- 3:21the sci-fi movies in the 60s and the 70s, you know, we would get
- 3:24that eventually. Yeah, you can make it real.
- 3:26We're actually here now, we're actually here with biometric
- 3:29scanners and passkeys and all these types of things, so.
- 3:32Yeah. I spent an awful lot of time at
- 3:35a conference last week. At any week that was.
- 3:37Almost 100% like retina scan. Oh, really?
- 3:40That was like that. I mean, it's a big kind of used
- 3:41to be government conference. I think they're trying to branch
- 3:43out more. But yeah, lots of retina scan
- 3:46products on offer for whatever authentication needs you need.
- 3:52I mean that's we've come a long way in a short period of time
- 3:57and just how all the stuff is in like these consumer devices when
- 4:00not long ago you'd see them in movies and go, Oh my gosh,
- 4:03there's Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible One.
- 4:06And he can't set off the biometric scanner or else the
- 4:08room is going to explode, right? And now you can just go and buy
- 4:11a phone that has that in there, so.
- 4:13Yeah, Can you imagine how ridiculous of a hack that would
- 4:15be? And, like in the real world, Tom
- 4:18Cruise coming down through a vent, right?
- 4:20Dodging the fans and then can't hit the laser floor?
- 4:23Like, no, today it's just someone stole your password
- 4:25because you used it at Instacart.
- 4:26Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. It doesn't need to be that
- 4:30elegant. It never is.
- 4:31The movies always do that and someone calls the help desk.
- 4:34Initiates a reset and bang, you're done so.
- 4:38Or your slot machine's not working anyway.
- 4:41So tell us about your role as a CIO.
- 4:43You've been on the show before. It's not going to have you
- 4:44rehash sort of like your entire identity origin story.
- 4:48But one of things that we have started getting to more is about
- 4:51roles within identity organizations, York or transmit
- 4:54security and you're the CIO. We also were kind of jokingly
- 4:58talking about the Chief Identity Officer.
- 5:00Cheeto is, we're starting to call it, at least I am anyway.
- 5:03And so is Jim. Tell us a bit about your
- 5:05day-to-day as a CIO of a security company like Transmit.
- 5:09Yeah, so. So the CIO of security company,
- 5:13I mean obviously the dynamics are a little bit different.
- 5:17I know things like machine identity are really important to
- 5:20us because we see that as protecting the identity
- 5:23infrastructure. That we host for clients and
- 5:27especially building identity security solutions.
- 5:30Attackers are looking at all this stuff more and more and
- 5:33more. We see that with Okta,
- 5:34unfortunately and others and Pam Dingell from Microsoft.
- 5:37Today at Authenticate, she talked about that.
- 5:40She talked about how identity infrastructure itself is being
- 5:44weaponized against us. So as the CIO of a security
- 5:47company, you know myself and the team, we take it seriously,
- 5:51right? So just practicing everything
- 5:53that we're preaching with customers.
- 5:55But it goes beyond you know technology it it goes along with
- 5:59your people and your process and and how you drive all those.
- 6:02So, so kind of being in that type of role, I look at kind of
- 6:05all three of those areas and you know, I don't always look for a
- 6:09technology to solve the problem, right?
- 6:12Sometimes it's just changing a process or improving a process
- 6:16or having someone do another review making sure it goes
- 6:19through certain gates right and there's a consistent workflow
- 6:23all the way through. Again, almost like the Tom
- 6:25Cruise thing, it's not always the elegant things that you
- 6:28think are going to save the day. It's sometimes just actually
- 6:31taking a look at a a workflow and improving it and kind of
- 6:34going from there. So, so in in this kind of role
- 6:36it's it's kind of neat because I get to have this internal focus,
- 6:39but I think where I have a lot of fun also is.
- 6:42The external part of my role kind of doing activities like
- 6:45this with with you guys and and evangelizing all of these things
- 6:48as well, 'cause I don't think Transmit would be able to keep
- 6:51my mouth shut, 'cause I'm the kind of person that I'm like,
- 6:54hey, I discovered these really cool ways of of of dealing with
- 6:58problems or you know, our threat research lab is seeing evidence
- 7:02of some more AI fuelled fraud. I feel like I I should go and
- 7:07talk to the market about that, especially when.
- 7:11You know, I talk about things like authorized push payment
- 7:13fraud, which, you know, I talked to someone about that.
- 7:16I don't know if you know anything about it, but it's
- 7:17interesting it's being able to attack you without doing an
- 7:21account takeover. So anyway.
- 7:26I thought about Pam's presentation today was she was
- 7:29talking about the evolution of the Microsoft Authenticator and
- 7:34I thought. That's exactly what technology
- 7:37companies need to be doing, right?
- 7:38They need to see put something out there and see what the
- 7:42challenges are and they need to just keep improving, keep
- 7:45improving. Is that something you're finding
- 7:47as well? Yeah, so, so I, I also take it
- 7:51upon myself and my role as well to see that.
- 7:53So it's not just, you know, going out and evangelizing and
- 7:56pushing. It's also pulling and.
- 7:58And working with a lot of identity practitioners,
- 8:00cybersecurity leaders as well, because cybersecurity pros and
- 8:04identity pros, we need to come together because attackers
- 8:07don't. They don't care if you're an
- 8:08identity person or a cybersecurity person or a
- 8:11network infrastructure person. They'll get it in however way
- 8:13they they can. So I think as as in terms of,
- 8:18you know, thinking about what the problems and the outcomes
- 8:22that customers need, right, don't just go and say here's an
- 8:25identity verification solution. It's like, well, why does the
- 8:28customer need that? Oh, because they're trying to
- 8:31securely on board their, their clients and they want to reduce
- 8:34fraud and they want to also make it easy for their clients to
- 8:37securely create accounts, right. So, OK, well, maybe we come up
- 8:41with a product to solve part of that because that's all we can
- 8:44do today and maybe that's all the market will bear.
- 8:47But over time, talk to these customers, see what the market's
- 8:50doing, but then also going back to like APP fraud and all this
- 8:53looking at what the fraudsters are doing.
- 8:56And also trying to incorporate that stuff in your product as
- 8:59well. So it's not just the customer
- 9:01saying, oh, we see this. We also have to take it upon
- 9:04ourselves to say what types of threats are out there and how
- 9:08can we, how can we mitigate and and productize that to help
- 9:12protect the market. So you do a podcast also, right?
- 9:16Yes. Yes.
- 9:17This Week in Identity, Yes, with Simon Moffett from Cyber Hut.
- 9:21Tell us a little bit about that podcast.
- 9:22Yeah, that's awesome. So Simon, we, you know we're,
- 9:26we're, we're fans of you guys too.
- 9:27And you know for us, I think Simon is an analyst, I'm a
- 9:32former analyst. So I think when I left Gartner
- 9:35and and Simon kind of left the vendor space and he got into the
- 9:39analyst space, you know, we kind of got together.
- 9:43He was at Ford Rock. Yeah, yeah.
- 9:45And so it's kind of interesting because as I was leaving the
- 9:49analyst life behind me. And he was picking that up.
- 9:53We had a, we had a a talk. I gave him some pointers on, you
- 9:56know, good things and bad things about being an analyst, just
- 10:00pointers, things I've learned over the years as in terms of
- 10:03what what works. And and we just said, hey, you
- 10:06know what, Let's just. Why don't we just record this
- 10:09right? I I think it's not on like both
- 10:11of you. Right.
- 10:13And then we just decided to record it and I I honestly just
- 10:18see it as a way of us just catching up every, every week
- 10:21and hey what happened in, in the industry you know typically
- 10:24focused on news, you know acquisitions or you know new
- 10:30protocols or specs or? Last week, we talked about NSA
- 10:34and Cisa's top 10 misconfigurations.
- 10:38I listened to part of that and then I was listening in my
- 10:40browser and somehow lost the page.
- 10:43But I'll get back to it. Don't worry, it was a good one.
- 10:45Yeah, right. So it's just stuff like that and
- 10:47and I think it's we try to keep them short.
- 10:50So you could just, yeah, listen, listen on a quick walk or or
- 10:53something like that. So yeah.
- 10:55Yeah, I have a question for you. So we've been podcasting.
- 10:57We're up to. Episode 230 XI Think it's. 238
- 11:01went out this morning. OK.
- 11:03So this will be 239. It's a lot harder than you
- 11:07thought it was going to be. That's a good question.
- 11:12Now I should say Simon, Simon does some of the heavy lifting
- 11:16as in terms of recording and everything else.
- 11:18So I'm just a pretty voice that shows up so.
- 11:22You're the easy. Part Why?
- 11:24Yeah, that should be a question I'm asking.
- 11:26Simon actually had this. I do all the scheduling.
- 11:29Scheduling is a lot of work, that is.
- 11:31A lot of work, especially when your Co host travels all the
- 11:34time. Yes, he does dirty laundry.
- 11:37Coming out, but let me just say for the audience, because we're
- 11:39not on video. Jeff Jeff is surrounded by all
- 11:42kinds of devices, not unlike Nick who is on a Segway with all
- 11:46sorts of contraptions around him.
- 11:47No, but. But I I appreciate.
- 11:49I appreciate it for sure. So your topic this week here at
- 11:54Authenticate. Why don't you tell us what it is
- 11:57and why you chose it, why you're talking about it?
- 11:59Yeah. So the topic is an area that I'm
- 12:03super passionate about. It was an area that myself and
- 12:07Eric Wahlstrom, who's a Gardner analyst, we.
- 12:10Kind of help define this space and it's machine identity
- 12:13management. Specifically the presentation
- 12:17I'll be doing on Wednesday at Authenticate is Rise of the
- 12:20Machines. Why Authentication is needed for
- 12:22both humans and machines. And really the the thought there
- 12:27is that we've spent a lot of time with identity as and as we
- 12:33should focus on humans. And totally makes sense, right.
- 12:37All all this, all these types of authentication factors, how we
- 12:40use them when we talk about UX, user experience, but the users
- 12:44have been human, right. And so when we, when we think
- 12:49about machines really what what those are, it's it's there's
- 12:54kind of software and hardware, right.
- 12:56There's kind of two flavors. So if we say hardware, you're
- 12:58talking I0T, 0T0 T would be operational technology, so MRI
- 13:04machines or? Other types of manufacturing
- 13:06equipment, ultrasound machines, you name it, that's OTIOT.
- 13:12You know, different types of sensors, all all sorts of
- 13:13things. That's on the hardware side.
- 13:15Oh, I should also say laptops, desktops, mobile devices.
- 13:18Devices. Devices on the software side
- 13:21though, that's where things get really interesting.
- 13:23And not to say that the hardware side isn't interesting, but
- 13:26software side, you've got virtual machines.
- 13:30You've got containers, you've got workloads, you have
- 13:32software, you've got, you know all.
- 13:34Kinds of structure and software. Exactly right.
- 13:38So if you just think about the. Good old fashioned service
- 13:41accounts. Service accounts.
- 13:43All kinds of things that aren't, quote UN quote, human right Now
- 13:47there's a couple flavours of that too, I should say.
- 13:49There's supervised and unsupervised.
- 13:53So what do I mean by that? So a supervised machine.
- 13:58You could think of it this way. So if Jeff creates a script to
- 14:04run on your machine that's that's or on your say your
- 14:07laptop, that's a machine. But that machine effectively is
- 14:11borrowing Jeff's rights and entitlements, right?
- 14:14It's it's ceiling would be whatever access you have.
- 14:17And I have to initiate it at some level to start the work,
- 14:20correct? Or you could create a bot.
- 14:23Yeah, right. Like where I could learn, but
- 14:26it's it's it's going to be like a derivative of your identity.
- 14:28So it's kind of like it's, it's it's Jeff, but just a robot
- 14:32version of you. And so we say it's kind of
- 14:34supervised. You're not going to really let
- 14:36it do anything crazy. Hopefully not.
- 14:38Hopefully not that's supervised, unsupervised could be like a
- 14:42chat bot on a website, say you go to like, I don't know,
- 14:45T-Mobile or Verizon's website. And just by virtue of you going
- 14:48there, it's typically event driven.
- 14:50The event is a new user goes to website and boom, a chat bot
- 14:53pops up. Hey Jeff, last time you were
- 14:55here, maybe use a cookie. You had a problem with your
- 14:59bill, right? So that machine didn't exist
- 15:03before you went to the website, and now it exists.
- 15:05It's taking signals from whatever trans whatever transmit
- 15:10of data is coming from your browser or whatever signals
- 15:12right to drive that. For the record, I hate those
- 15:14chat bots that pop up automatically.
- 15:15They are the most annoying thing in the world.
- 15:18They, you know, they some of them, I won't name the
- 15:21providers, but some of them at some providers have actually
- 15:23gotten much, much better and I would say they've definitely cut
- 15:27down on my stress having to call into call centers.
- 15:30If they're helpful, yes. I run into so many of that.
- 15:33It just sends you a loop and loop and loop.
- 15:35It's like, OK, well, I could have just, I could have just
- 15:37made a phone call. Yeah, and you know the How many
- 15:40questions do they actually solve?
- 15:43I mean, they're basic, right? I think if you're thinking about
- 15:45a chat bot. As it stands today, they are
- 15:49event driven to you're saying and they are basing off of a
- 15:53specific challenge response. Essentially that's coming from
- 15:57the user. They're looking for keywords.
- 15:58They're saying oh you typed in bill and problem.
- 16:03So therefore you must mean this help desk article that is you
- 16:07know Dash 4657, whatever maybe And then it starts going through
- 16:10that script right of things. The challenge becomes, well, I
- 16:14think it's the challenge is. You're trying to deal with a
- 16:16whole bunch of humans and a bunch of different ways of
- 16:18saying I need help with my account.
- 16:21Yes, yeah. But I mean, I won't get too far
- 16:24ahead, but if you take that notion, Jeff, and you connect it
- 16:28to a large language model. Baby, that's what I'm talking
- 16:30about. So before they didn't really
- 16:32have much to reference when that bot was right.
- 16:35So. So I think, I think, Jim, a
- 16:37basic script and whatever. And if it goes off that script,
- 16:39the thing just doesn't know what to do.
- 16:42And so you get frustration on the consumer side.
- 16:44Plus, you know. Who knows what goes on the other
- 16:46side, but if you couple that with an LLM, now you get
- 16:49something interesting. So that being said, going back
- 16:52to machines, this is also, you know, this is also why I think
- 16:58just before the session, by the way, for our audience, Simon
- 17:00Moffett went over some data. Survey data and machine
- 17:04identities is one of the thing he talked about.
- 17:06And and I know we can get to that, but I'll I'll just say
- 17:10this is also I believe at least what Simon's thinking is in
- 17:13terms of this is. Machine identities are just
- 17:15going to explode when you think about containers and all that
- 17:18stuff. But not only that, I also think
- 17:20about that that robotic process automation use case, the chatbot
- 17:23use case, and how many agents, you know, autonomous agents
- 17:27we're going to see deployed in those scenarios tied with LLMS.
- 17:32That's only going to fuel more machine identities.
- 17:34So I'll cover this in my presentation, but you're looking
- 17:37at, you know, at least 50 X. The number of machines you have
- 17:43running in your environment over humans today.
- 17:46I do worry about the large language model with the chat bot
- 17:50if you need to have good security about around it, right?
- 17:53Or others. Otherwise, someone may just
- 17:55start attacking that thing with an AI bot, trying to see what
- 18:01kind of data could farm from that chat bot. 100%, right.
- 18:05So it's not unlike when you think about the early days of.
- 18:10Web applications being put up and then people just putting in
- 18:14you know. Yeah strings of text.
- 18:16Sequel injections commands. And then if they didn't filter
- 18:20those, it would just run those commands.
- 18:21I mean a machine is a machine. A machine's not smart on its
- 18:24own. It's just going to you give it
- 18:26something to to execute and if it's in the confines, that's
- 18:29fine, it'll do it. So that that led to the birth of
- 18:32the web application firewall filtering all those out.
- 18:34I think we're, you know we're we're we're at the place where.
- 18:38There are some interesting companies that are looking at
- 18:41that type of concept, you know to to front load and filter
- 18:45those LLMS, the inputs and even the outputs.
- 18:49But I think I think Jim we're still very early on in those
- 18:52days. But it it does if I just tie it
- 18:55back to machine identities, you know it it does come with if
- 18:58you, you know, if you think about the notion of having good
- 19:01IAM with your humans, if you've if you went to bat for that at
- 19:05your company. You should be going to bat for
- 19:08that for your machines. You know, I feel like at least
- 19:1210 years ago we were defining I am as ensuring that the right
- 19:17people have the right access to dot, dot, dot and it's like that
- 19:21was the huge miss, right. It wasn't just people, it was
- 19:24people and things. We kind of eventually got to
- 19:27that. But you know, one of the things
- 19:29that I find is like the the things that you almost forgot
- 19:33are the machine accounts. You almost forgot to get to
- 19:36where. The service accounts, right,
- 19:38Because they've been around for so long, it's like that's not
- 19:41the exciting thing anymore. The organizations have 20 years
- 19:45of machine accounts that they've been carrying through their
- 19:47Active Directory, and they don't even know which ones they can
- 19:50turn off. It's kind of scary.
- 19:53They've got the whole clean up of that.
- 19:55And if they don't get their arms around the accounts for
- 19:57Terraform, the accounts for Docker, the accounts for GitHub.
- 20:03It's going to be, they're going to have clean up for all that
- 20:05too. And they're just like you said,
- 20:07the attack service is going to grow exponentially.
- 20:10Exactly. And and yeah, so that's that's
- 20:13part part of some of the recommendations I get into in my
- 20:15presentation there this week. That's actually step one is
- 20:20discovery. So you can't manage what you're
- 20:23not measuring. And a lot of people have
- 20:25machines all over the place, right?
- 20:28You know, So there's there's service accounts.
- 20:30If they're using AWS and GCP and Azure, right?
- 20:35And some other cloud service providers and maybe fragmented
- 20:38across different regions. If they're a global
- 20:39organization, they're going to have all kinds of machines
- 20:42everywhere. So you have to run some kind of
- 20:45discovery process in order to say, OK, what machines do we
- 20:48have out there. So we can at least size the
- 20:51problem and then you can determine how can we monitor
- 20:54these things and then manage and so on and so forth.
- 20:57I think also there's the difference between identities
- 21:02and accounts, right? There's certainly that when you
- 21:04think about people. I'm Jim.
- 21:07I have an AD account. Maybe I'll have multiple AD
- 21:10accounts. Maybe there are multiple a DS.
- 21:12Maybe there are applications that fit outside of my IDP
- 21:16landscape. Machines are even more complex
- 21:19because you have a machine that could have multiple accounts.
- 21:23There's a machine, the identity or is it the human who runs the
- 21:27machine, and if you make it, the human who runs the machine when
- 21:31they leave the organization? From a governance perspective,
- 21:34how do I handle that? I don't think those rules of
- 21:37engagement are are cleared today.
- 21:39I think it's just you. You kind of come up with it.
- 21:43It's almost like you need a creative solution.
- 21:45Yeah, yeah I I you there's a lot on pack Jim what you just said.
- 21:49So first I'll just, I'll all these tackle you know the
- 21:53maturity side of it. We are very early on with
- 21:57machine identity management. There's a lot of different kinds
- 22:00of solution. Let me just say this, almost
- 22:03every client that I know, both of you work with and probably a
- 22:06lot of our listeners as well. Everybody has some kind of
- 22:09machine. First of all, everyone has
- 22:11machine identities accounts all over the place.
- 22:14That's anyone who says they don't.
- 22:15They're lying or they don't understand or they don't
- 22:18understand. They also, surprisingly, do have
- 22:22some machine identity management tools.
- 22:24If you've got a certificate authority and some certificate
- 22:27management, you're managing some kind of machines there you have
- 22:29code signing products that that's also machine stuff.
- 22:33You've got some cloud, cloud, security, posture management,
- 22:37you might have some there, right, Pam solutions, Cyber Ark,
- 22:41Delineia, right. They all have some kind of
- 22:45layers to this, but right now it's a mess from a functional
- 22:50perspective. And then going back to what you
- 22:52said from a again, remember I always think of the world as.
- 22:54People process and technology. So we have a lot of the
- 22:57technologies, but they're fragmented.
- 22:58So that's 1-2. We don't have people that are
- 23:02explicitly like, oh, I'm an an identity architect, but I
- 23:06guarantee you the majority of identity architects you talk to
- 23:09are on human identity. They focus on human identity.
- 23:13We need to get them focused more on a machine identity, but you
- 23:16might argue that could be some developers but but then the
- 23:19process, I think that's also where we're we're immature to.
- 23:21So we're very early in that maturity curve.
- 23:25And I've worked with thousands of companies around the world,
- 23:28you know, in this topic over the years.
- 23:30And I would say, you know, I don't think, you know, I don't,
- 23:33I don't. I don't say, hey, you are all
- 23:36behind. No, no, no, absolutely not.
- 23:38This is just the evolution of the space.
- 23:40So don't, I wouldn't beat yourself up if you're too, too
- 23:42early. But going back to the, the other
- 23:46point you made accounts versus identities themselves.
- 23:50Yeah, absolutely. It depends again on the use
- 23:53case. If there's a human involved, it
- 23:56could be Jim's account. But you're managing potentially
- 23:59thousands, maybe even millions of machines.
- 24:02If you're the the, say, a website operator or you're a big
- 24:04part of running a digital business and you're creating
- 24:07those chat bots or you're creating all those, those could
- 24:09be tied to accounts that you manage or monitor because maybe
- 24:12you're the privileged user behind them.
- 24:14And that's also why we see some, like vendors like Cyber Ark and
- 24:19others talking about machine identities.
- 24:21Because they see that as well. I think coming into the market
- 24:25anyway I'll, I'll stop there. That was a lot, that's a lot.
- 24:28But the other observation that I have and I see this say 90% of
- 24:35the clients who have are moving into the cloud.
- 24:38Is that developers? Or maybe a non strategic
- 24:44approach to moving out to the cloud, starting up applications,
- 24:49maybe doing DevOps, being done by teams who have to deploy some
- 24:54functionality not by, you know the CISO.
- 24:59So then by the time the CISO says hey I've got something I
- 25:02need to get my arms around, it's already built, it's already
- 25:06doing things. So you know you don't want to be
- 25:08the progress prevention department, but at the same time
- 25:12your your cloud infrastructure has to all of the same controls
- 25:17the rest of your enterprise does.
- 25:19So I think that's one of the big challenges is that a lot of this
- 25:23is springing up for organizations and maybe it's
- 25:26it's happened in the past. It really depends on where the
- 25:28organization is in their cloud life cycle.
- 25:32But they've got this situation that's been created for them.
- 25:37So they're they're stepping into it and like now having to get
- 25:39control over the environment. So take Terraform for example,
- 25:43you know it goes out and creates accounts.
- 25:46So as it destroy the accounts that provide it provisions the
- 25:49self rolls, OK, you know do you go in there and say stop using
- 25:55Terraform? No, you say, OK, well how do we
- 25:58do this in a way that's controlled and that so then I
- 26:02think the Infosec group becomes like oversight kind of making
- 26:06sure that it's not breaking rules or that at least can be
- 26:12monitored and managed. What do you think?
- 26:15Let me add one more wrinkle to that too, because I think
- 26:18there's two things. There's one is the creation of
- 26:20those accounts. Definitely an issue.
- 26:23The destruction of those accounts, I think are just as
- 26:25important because. In the automated world, these
- 26:28things might only live for fractions of a second or a
- 26:30millisecond. They conduct a very specific
- 26:32transaction and then poof, they're gone.
- 26:35And I think if if you try to draw a line to this, it might
- 26:39simple brain. All I think about is, yeah, it's
- 26:42just like on boarding and off boarding for a human person,
- 26:44it's just a whole lot faster. And we, we were not built yet to
- 26:50manage that volume and that time.
- 26:55And I think those are the, I think that's I try to make it as
- 26:58simple as I can and that's I keep going back to that idea.
- 27:01OK, I just need to say to our audience, I swear that Jim and
- 27:06Jeff have not seen my slides. One of my slides is I have a
- 27:10graphic of a human identity life cycle and then the slide right
- 27:15after is a similar graphic where I contrast it with the machine
- 27:20identity life cycle. Actually looks the same.
- 27:23But you're absolutely right. The volume, velocity and the
- 27:27variety of these machines, it depends on their use case.
- 27:30If it's one of those chat bots and you get a million people
- 27:33coming to your website and it's all and a chat bot's triggered,
- 27:36let's just say every time a new visitor comes, you might get a
- 27:39million bots right now at time one.
- 27:43And then at time three, you know, maybe 750,000 of them are
- 27:48dead because people close the browser and walk away and
- 27:50they're not going to let that process run.
- 27:52They're going to. Hopefully they would it would be
- 27:54killed off. You would hope.
- 27:55Right. So absolutely there, there has
- 27:58to be, first of all, you know you, you have to think through
- 28:00all those different types of machines.
- 28:01Is it hardware, is it software? Then what type is it?
- 28:04And based on that you know your risk profile, what are the risks
- 28:10of these machines, right? Are they dealing with sensitive
- 28:12information or are they not? Right.
- 28:15And then that should lead you to them say, OK, what is that
- 28:19creation process? Do I have to tie back to you
- 28:24know, one client I talked to they wanted to mirror PIV, you
- 28:28know, personal identif identical verification, right.
- 28:32They wanted to mirror that and use digital certificates for
- 28:35each and every machine they create.
- 28:37But then they also said you know, but we if we have these
- 28:39like you know, public, non classified, you know, bots that
- 28:45are accessing, you know, public information.
- 28:48We don't care. We we're not even going to give
- 28:50it a strong identity. We'll we'll just manage how many
- 28:53there are just for costs, you know consumption for our cloud
- 28:56usage. But other than that we don't
- 28:58really care. So I thought that was really
- 29:00interesting. It's going to always come back
- 29:02to that you know your risk tolerance.
- 29:04Do they have to adhere to any compliance standards?
- 29:07And then you need to determine like, yeah, we need to either go
- 29:10hardcore and and and issue certificates for each and every
- 29:14identity. And that might have an impact on
- 29:17what that creation process looks like, the authorization process
- 29:21and and and so on. But it really goes into all
- 29:23that. But there are a couple other
- 29:25things that that that you mentioned it's it's it's not
- 29:28just security as well. Security is a big, a big part of
- 29:32identity of course, right. Knowing who and what you're
- 29:35dealing with and then you can determine OK, these are the
- 29:38areas you can play and you can access and these are the areas
- 29:41that you can't. OK.
- 29:42That's a big part of security. But we also have to think about
- 29:47even just identifying these these things for also cost
- 29:52optimization and just overall operations.
- 29:55So if, if, if so, you can not only think of it as a security,
- 30:00you know, mitigating security, doing your compliance, all that
- 30:03kind of stuff, but also if you've got a good machine
- 30:06identity practice. I guess what I'm asserting is
- 30:09that it can also benefit you from an operations perspective
- 30:12because now. Let's just say it is the golden
- 30:15standard, it's hybrid, it's multi cloud.
- 30:18Now you can actually take a look and say you know what Jim, this
- 30:22month we had a lot more machines that we generated in Google
- 30:26Cloud than we did in AWS. Does that mean we need to adjust
- 30:29our contracts in one or the other?
- 30:31It could very well be. So now if you actually have and
- 30:34it's not, again it's not unlike good human IAM, it can actually
- 30:38give you some really good data that can help you make.
- 30:42Infrastructure decisions, cloud investment decisions and even
- 30:45just good business decisions because you now have data.
- 30:49So I would even argue if your company values data and
- 30:52analytics and you've justified for Chief Data officer, Chief
- 30:56Data Officer can work really well with this data because it
- 30:59could be really good consumption.
- 31:00And then I'll just say one last other use case, how many chat
- 31:03bots are you generating? How many people are coming to
- 31:05your website? Right.
- 31:07If marketing's generating all these campaigns and now
- 31:09everyone's like, hey, I'm going to go to this mobile operator's
- 31:12website because let's say it's Mint mobile and Ryan Reynolds is
- 31:15doing a big push on Mint Mobile and all of a sudden they're
- 31:19getting a lot. They could track that and they
- 31:21can track it with really strong confidence because they actually
- 31:25are identifying the machines properly.
- 31:27And it's not just text based stuff.
- 31:30Yeah. One more follow up and it's like
- 31:33the human identity management flows now.
- 31:36Seems so easy, right? I mean, there was a time where I
- 31:40was like, oh really? I have to wrap my brain around
- 31:42this. But now it just seems like it's
- 31:44black and white. There's an authority to source
- 31:48for employees. That's the human resource system
- 31:51and then it flows through your governance process.
- 31:55Contractors are a little more difficult, but if they're in the
- 32:00HR system it's still better or if it's in some kind of third
- 32:04party system. I know I'm not trying to step in
- 32:08on a landmine here, but authoritative source and the
- 32:12control around employees is like people make sure they get
- 32:16disabled when they leave the organization because we don't
- 32:19want to pay them. We may have strong policies
- 32:22around contractors, but it's like, you know, this person's
- 32:26the manager. They know when that person's no
- 32:28longer here, so ultimately they're accountable to get that
- 32:31person shut off. Now, when it comes to machines
- 32:35like, there's no authoritative sources there.
- 32:38Should there be? So one should there be 100%,
- 32:43because look, the world already runs on machines anyways, and
- 32:46it's only going to continue to run, you know, furthermore on
- 32:50machines. I mean, I know both of you flew
- 32:53here. We're in Carlsbad.
- 32:54California, The San Diego area. And they're bragging now because
- 32:59you didn't fly. Here.
- 33:00No, I did not fly here. I drove here, but I won't say
- 33:02anything else. The but there was all software
- 33:06on those planes. The military is using drones and
- 33:10all kinds of things that get updates every day.
- 33:12And software your cars are. You know what?
- 33:15The average car has 250 plus computers on it.
- 33:19So the world is run by software and that is only going to
- 33:23increase. And all of this is just machines
- 33:25and these machines need identity.
- 33:26So you know, I I think, Jim, you bring up a good point.
- 33:32When we see something in front of us, like a human being, you
- 33:36know, it's much easier to say, OK, you're an employee, you're a
- 33:40contractor, you're a business partner or you're a consumer.
- 33:45Identity, identity, identity, identity.
- 33:46Maybe I use this system or that system or whatever, but machines
- 33:51are a little bit more tricky because OK, maybe the physical
- 33:54ones. We could say, hey, I've got
- 33:56these MRI machines and I need to put them on the network and
- 33:59Cisco's telling me I need to put a certificate on it so I can do
- 34:02cert based offs. OK, what about all this funky
- 34:06stuff in the cloud? What about all these bots that
- 34:09are running? No one's really there right now
- 34:12as like, a regulatory force. Forcing organizations to do
- 34:16this? Am I advocating for that?
- 34:18I don't want to make life harder for our community, but at the
- 34:22same time, I think it might need that.
- 34:23I think we might need, you know, folks to do this because I'll
- 34:27give you another example of a a machine identity risk.
- 34:30Code signing, right? Applications need identities
- 34:34too. And So what if I'm able to
- 34:37actually hack into a software developer like, oh, this
- 34:41happened to Asus? And get into their environment
- 34:47and I could get access to their code signing cert.
- 34:50And then I start signing malicious code.
- 34:52And you have an Asus machine, and your Asus update application
- 34:56engine just downloads the malware and deploys it on your
- 34:59machine. And it doesn't really know any
- 35:01better because it goes, oh, it's it was signed by an authorized
- 35:03source, right? So that's that's an example.
- 35:06So should there be an authoritative source in your
- 35:10organization for all of your machine identities?
- 35:13Yes. Should we start thinking about
- 35:15it now? Yes.
- 35:17Is there technology available for them to do it in one like we
- 35:20do that would mirror human identity?
- 35:23Not really. I thought you were going to say
- 35:24yes. Not maybe.
- 35:27Yeah, it. Depends on the use case and I
- 35:29think the types, right? Correct.
- 35:30Yeah. Correct.
- 35:31We we see some interesting things with secrets managers
- 35:34again Pam this area. That traditional service account
- 35:39management type thing? Correct, correct.
- 35:43And then you have on the certificate side there I see
- 35:46some interesting things there. You have companies like Venify
- 35:50and Key Factor and others we're talking about machine identity,
- 35:52but that's a little bit more on the crypto space.
- 35:54But there hasn't been this leap to connect those dots with the
- 35:58service account side to to all this.
- 36:00But I think if you, if you go back and look at Gartner,
- 36:03Gartner's talking about this more and more, good, right?
- 36:06It's going to be an expensive problem to solve.
- 36:09I think there are folks whose mindset is don't sell things on
- 36:14FUD factor and it's like we're going to need a lot of money to
- 36:18solve this problem. It's a very real problem.
- 36:21The results are, you know, these major breaches that you're
- 36:25seeing. It's like that could happen to
- 36:28us. It's not FUD factor.
- 36:31No, no. I mean, I've been in this space
- 36:35for two decades now. And you know, I started out
- 36:40doing more like social hacking and all that.
- 36:42It was BBS stuff, IRC, you know, we're not getting more origin
- 36:46story. But.
- 36:48And then when I got into this field, it was cybersecurity.
- 36:51It's just folks I would talk to and say you're always scaring
- 36:53us. You're scaring us, you're
- 36:54scaring us. And and I don't think, Jim, now
- 36:56today I've heard anyone say that to me.
- 36:59I mean, if you are tripping over yourself and trying to scare
- 37:03someone with data, look at this breach.
- 37:04Look at that breach, OK, you know, just lay off.
- 37:08But again, going back to what Pam Dingell said, everyone in in
- 37:12in our space really needs to take note.
- 37:14Because as someone who was like formerly an attacker, it's like
- 37:18we have to get out of the mindset of joiner mover lever
- 37:21and think joiner mover lever adversary.
- 37:23Because attackers do not care if it's a machine, if it's a human,
- 37:30or if that machine identity or human identity is owned by this
- 37:34group in your company, that group or or or.
- 37:37You're an identity expert and this person is a is an endpoint
- 37:40security expert. They don't care about those
- 37:42roles or responsibility and they also don't have compliance.
- 37:45They don't have to adhere to anything.
- 37:46They'll just try and get in. So all this infighting we might
- 37:50have as as a community or as an organization, attackers love
- 37:54that, you know. And so I think that we are, you
- 37:58know number one, we need to plan on more attacks happening on our
- 38:02machines. It's only going to happen.
- 38:04Pam talked about identity infrastructure.
- 38:07Identity infrastructure is run by machines.
- 38:09Humans write the code, but it's the machines that are executing.
- 38:12It's containers and workloads in the cloud that allow you to
- 38:16authenticate, that allow you to do that SSO.
- 38:19And if someone compromises that because they stole a cert or
- 38:22they did whatever, they now own your identity infrastructure and
- 38:27they can do lots of things. Now you're in big trouble.
- 38:30Exactly. So I totally agree with you.
- 38:32This is a. I I think Simon said in the last
- 38:35session, he's like, this is going to be a Titanic problem to
- 38:38solve. Yeah, we've already talked about
- 38:40like the separation of duties within the hacker community,
- 38:45right? Some people go and steal the
- 38:47credentials with fishing or whatever method they use and
- 38:51sell them. The people who buy them just
- 38:54know how to run scripts. Once they get in, it's like, OK,
- 38:57I'm on this machine now. I'm going to try these 10 or 15
- 39:01things I can do to escalate my privileges or see how I can move
- 39:06laterally. Exactly.
- 39:08I I didn't go to cooking school. I'm not going to say if I'm a
- 39:10good cooker or bad cook, but I can follow a recipe.
- 39:14I can follow a recipe. Makes them feel a good cookie
- 39:16would have, said Chef. There we go.
- 39:19There we go. But I mean you know we could if
- 39:22you break it down and and people can follow recipes.
- 39:25And I, I, I, I know one of the talks today.
- 39:29When? When I can't remember the
- 39:31speaker's name. It drogged my memory.
- 39:33It's been a long day but when she was going through all the
- 39:37stuff with ChatGPT and she showed an Icelandic banking
- 39:42attack and it's like, hey, I think there was only what, few
- 39:45100,000 people who could speak Icelandic.
- 39:47But now with the advent of ChatGPT, everyone can, everyone
- 39:50can. I can make a phishing campaign
- 39:53that's in a that's in a that's in Icelandic.
- 39:56Sorry. And.
- 39:58Now as a result, a lot some of the Icelandic banks are like,
- 40:01wait a minute, are the number of phishing attacks just increased?
- 40:04You know, it's like, well ChatGPT made it easy.
- 40:07So I think to Jim's point, you know, unfortunately a lot of
- 40:11these things are getting easier for attackers to take advantage
- 40:14of. And I think machines, just
- 40:17machines give them a massive attack surface.
- 40:19We thought humans were of decent size attack surface.
- 40:22Machines are even bigger. Is that Rachel Toback?
- 40:25Yes. So, yeah.
- 40:26Credit where Credit's. Yes.
- 40:28Yes. Sorry, my brain is my brain's
- 40:31fried today, but. Well, if your if your security
- 40:34strategy relies on people not knowing how to speak your
- 40:36language you know, you probably should be thinking of other lay
- 40:41other layers to that security onion.
- 40:43You should be building exactly exactly.
- 40:45We've been talking a lot about Pam as sort of like one of the
- 40:49areas of solving this. But is it Pam?
- 40:51Maybe this is more like IGA considering the life cycle looks
- 40:54a lot like a human. Gardner has a market guide that
- 40:58talks about matching up machine accounts and to machine
- 41:01identities. Maybe IGA is we should be
- 41:04starting this if if IGA's root, you know capabilities to know
- 41:10who has access to what, how difficult is it to turn into
- 41:14what has access to what? Doesn't matter if it's a human
- 41:18or non human. Is IGAA place that we should be
- 41:21looking at to store these accounts or at least to
- 41:23inventory them and start to at least try to manage or govern
- 41:26them. So I I actually do think IGA is
- 41:29so. So I agree with you.
- 41:30I think IGA is a a big part of the core.
- 41:34But again I think if you think about when I describe the
- 41:41identity life cycle, there's onboarding, there's the creation
- 41:45of this identity. IGA could play a role there, but
- 41:50it could also be IGA orchestrating a connection into
- 41:54let's just say the identity is deemed that it needs to be a
- 41:56certificate coming from a certificate authority.
- 42:00IGA doesn't traditionally do that.
- 42:02So you're going to need some kind of orchestration capability
- 42:05to call out to a certificate authority which could be on Prem
- 42:09or in the cloud and then you know pulls it in.
- 42:11So. So I agree that I think IGA is
- 42:13at the is that really when you distill it down is really the
- 42:16core because it is about governance and administration
- 42:19and all that. But I think what IGA is missing,
- 42:22the traditional part, which is there's going to be a lot of
- 42:25heavy lifting here is the orchestration side of it.
- 42:28There really has to be a lot of, again, you need to say what kind
- 42:30of machine is it. It's something that needs a
- 42:32certificate. We need certificate authority.
- 42:36It's this other kind of machine that just needs a secret, OK?
- 42:38It needs to go into some kind of secret manager to generate a
- 42:41secret and pull it out. That could be a Pam function,
- 42:44but it's IGA at the core. It could be a symmetric key, it
- 42:48could be, you know a whole variety of things.
- 42:50So I think it's it's it's we can take the classic notion of IGA,
- 42:55but it has to be augmented to in order to I I I think really
- 42:59fulfil the variety of the different types of use cases.
- 43:03And the last thing I'll say, Jeff is that you mentioned it
- 43:08earlier, but the velocity of these things is going to
- 43:13absolutely mean that anyone who's running this
- 43:17infrastructure that would create or destroy these machine
- 43:20identities, it really has to be like.
- 43:23Super critical. Now it's Tier 1.
- 43:26Whatever the highest thing is to make sure it's got the
- 43:29appropriate resources back up. You know recovery plant like all
- 43:33that stuff, it's, it's critical infrastructure for the
- 43:36organization, correct, Correct. And even if we look at, again, I
- 43:38keep coming back to certificates because certificates are
- 43:40actually a good, a good best practice for what When I was at
- 43:43Gartner, we talked about PKI and IoT authentication, digital
- 43:49certificates, that kind of form. And even when you think about
- 43:52Fido and passkeys, that's PKI based, that is the gold standard
- 43:56for authentication is using PKI. But you got to make sure that
- 44:00that is not only scalable, everyone can talk scale, it's
- 44:04response time. That's the thing that if a
- 44:07consumer is sitting there, what is that?
- 44:09Just type something in for this chat bot and it's supposed to be
- 44:11LLM based and it's taking 20 minutes to get back to me.
- 44:14They'll just kill the transaction.
- 44:16This is like when traders would buy, you know, land near.
- 44:20The circuits that were driving markets because they wanted a
- 44:23faster response time, is that where we're headed?
- 44:27We need to have your identity management nerve center next to
- 44:31wherever your bot plant is. I I will say we haven't gone far
- 44:34from that. My son who who's a teenager, he
- 44:38is big in a fortnight and we recently moved from Canada to
- 44:43the San Diego area and he's he's like, hey daddy, Oh my gosh like
- 44:49so the main servers are in Los Angeles.
- 44:50We're so close to these servers. We're so.
- 44:53Way down now, Yeah. So he's not on like those
- 44:55traders, he's he's and then he keeps riding me to keep bumping
- 45:00up our bandwidth, you know? Can we get T1 lines, Daddy?
- 45:06Yeah. You don't really need T1.
- 45:08What you need is is symmetrical speeds.
- 45:12Because everybody, for whatever reason, the US loves fast
- 45:16downloads and overhooks, fast uploads.
- 45:18So if you can get like fiber or at least a symmetrical.
- 45:21I saw like Comcast is running A2 Gigabit symmetrical through
- 45:24coax, which I don't think was possible to figure out a way to
- 45:28do it. So now you're talking about
- 45:30instantaneous responses back and forth, which is crazy.
- 45:33I I'm sure they'll charge an arm and leg for it, but for people
- 45:37like. Me and Jim and others and like
- 45:39yourself right, who are doing audio, video, that instantaneous
- 45:44transfer back and forth is it can be a big game changer for
- 45:47our use cases. A normal person.
- 45:49I say normal person because let's be honest, we're a bunch
- 45:51of weirdos in here, but a normal person probably isn't going to
- 45:54have that as a use case. But machines, well, they need to
- 45:57move quick, fast. You know, lift fast, die hard.
- 46:01Yes, all that stuff. I like what you did there.
- 46:03I like what you did there but but no but that that is a a
- 46:05straight up legit point because I mean what we also didn't talk
- 46:10about as well so far is the machine to machine
- 46:13communication. So imagine if you have like to
- 46:17an autonomous agent that's working for Jim and Jim has
- 46:20given it instructions to to to say OK I need you to do trades
- 46:24for me or do whatever for me and you give it its rules and you
- 46:28here is access to my my my bank account and when you see a stock
- 46:33do something just go you don't don't have to call me up.
- 46:37I gave you the rules of engagement go now that machine
- 46:40might talk to another machine that is actually doing maybe the
- 46:43buying and selling you know on on behalf.
- 46:47And so if you have those great connections it means that there
- 46:50shouldn't be there's that that symmetrical upload and download
- 46:54between the two because it could be I'm using just transaction
- 46:57triggers but there could actually be you know bulk
- 46:59content that could be shared could be you know different
- 47:02types of things that that could be shared.
- 47:04So I think we're entering a really I'm I'm I'm excited about
- 47:08where we are going with everything and I think just
- 47:12first everything has to start with recognizing a problem and
- 47:15and what I'm really happy about is that for years myself and a
- 47:21few others like Eric Wahlstrom and and and some other folks in
- 47:24the industry we've been talking about this this potential
- 47:29sleeping dragon of of issues that will happen with machines.
- 47:34But no one was really maybe there was a little bit of a
- 47:38there's that's fear, uncertainty, doubt.
- 47:40But I think we're getting to a place now where people start to
- 47:44see it and and my hope is is that the industry will rally
- 47:48together because it's not going to be 1 vendor that's going to
- 47:50be able to do this. It has to be all of us.
- 47:52The cloud providers I think are taking it seriously.
- 47:56For their cloud, for their. Well, no, I think I think you're
- 48:00touching on the top most important issues and this kind
- 48:05of starts back with Jeff's question around what's IG as
- 48:08role. Well, I think the IGA vendor
- 48:10thinks they can solve it, but they take on the piece where
- 48:13their tool works well, Privilege access management kind of the
- 48:17same thing. Access management vendors kind
- 48:20of say, well, the authentication is what really matters.
- 48:24OK. Well, there's all the other
- 48:25stuff too. Right now, you have new markets
- 48:28springing up with like the Kim or Keem, whatever you want to
- 48:31call it. So I'm not sure if if you have
- 48:37an answer for that or it's just like it's the evolving space.
- 48:40One of the things I wanted to do is recognize you like you're
- 48:43taking on this issue at a conference and it's not a solved
- 48:46issue. This is not.
- 48:49We're not at the space. We're like, yeah, we figured
- 48:51this out and here's the road map.
- 48:53Now I'm going to lay out the road map for you.
- 48:54What you're going to be talking through is like, there's a lot
- 48:57of hard problems. They're not solved by the
- 48:59industry. Here's I don't know how I think
- 49:02about them. Yeah, I I love that.
- 49:04So again, you know Gartner like really burnt in me the notion of
- 49:09like always leaving clients with recommendations and a path
- 49:13forward. So absolutely I'm not going to
- 49:15go up on stage today. OK, Doom and gloom everyone.
- 49:17I'm going to obsess about the problem and see your time.
- 49:19See you. Thanks for your time.
- 49:20Bye. No, in the presentation I have
- 49:24clear recommendations which I can, I can mention a few here
- 49:28and I I believe I did. But so you know, I'll reiterate,
- 49:34always start with discovery, enumerate and discover what
- 49:37machine. Well, first of all define
- 49:39machine identities. And if you're a Gartner client,
- 49:40look at Gartner's research. But there's more and more
- 49:42research out there that's, that's that or you can you can
- 49:45hit me up and ask me, right. But identify the machines in
- 49:49your environment do some kind of discovery process that's kind of
- 49:54you know, part of your you know your your first journey which
- 49:56would include some tooling and and so on and so forth.
- 50:02Start to think about the teams. Establish a physical and or
- 50:05virtual team. There might be some developers
- 50:07that might be in the group, maybe some of your IM team,
- 50:10maybe some of your cybersecurity team.
- 50:11Because inevitably there will be cryptography based machine
- 50:16identities. Is that someone that's
- 50:19traditionally in your IM group or are they in the cybersecurity
- 50:22group that maybe you've tagged a network infrastructure person to
- 50:26your PKI. Someone who knows PKI is
- 50:28probably a good person to have on that team.
- 50:30The other thing I mentioned too I alluded to is the risk.
- 50:34So when you identify what machines are in your
- 50:36environment, also segment them and prioritize them based on
- 50:40risks. So what machines have, you know,
- 50:44access to things that are really risky and what machines have
- 50:47access to things that are maybe somewhere in the middle and then
- 50:49stuff that, you know what if that got breached, it it's
- 50:52segmented out, it wouldn't be a problem.
- 50:54That's also handy too. So those are the first pieces
- 50:58that I would, I would recommend and just understand that it's
- 51:03totally a new space, so it's OK to be, you know, no one's behind
- 51:06here, we're all just learning here.
- 51:08If anything, we're we're keeping up just by even knowing and
- 51:12understanding that there is a problem here that we need to
- 51:14address exactly. I mean just you want Tactical 1,
- 51:16so this is something Simon mentioned.
- 51:19It's like 70% of respondents to a survey question was machine
- 51:24accounts should use multi factor authentication.
- 51:28Where do you stand on that? Yeah, 100%.
- 51:31We're getting to a point where something, let me just start
- 51:34this way as in terms of evolution, when you talked about
- 51:36Pam talking about the evolution of the Microsoft Authenticator,
- 51:40it's the evolution of thinking about machine identities.
- 51:42You know, when we think about Pam, you know, years ago it was
- 51:47just we had Pam on its own and then it's like, wait a minute,
- 51:51Pam needs to be bolted in with MFA and hopefully other
- 51:53passwordless strong Fido based methods, right?
- 51:57Because why would you have a privileged user that's not using
- 52:00that, right. So that that just is laughable
- 52:02at this point, right? We have to do that.
- 52:05We're not doing that for machines.
- 52:07So when I saw Simon's data, I I totally agree with that.
- 52:10I think machines have to have strong identities and with that
- 52:15it should come part and parcel with some kind of authentication
- 52:20risk, view cause like a machine again in that that journey, just
- 52:23because that machine exists and it's allowed to exist, and let's
- 52:26just say it's not ephemeral and it goes to authenticate to a
- 52:30certain resource, should it be allowed access to that resource
- 52:33at that time, Maybe there's an attack going on in the
- 52:35organization. It's like this bot that's a
- 52:39clone of Jim shouldn't be allowed to access the credit
- 52:42card database right now because we're under attack right now,
- 52:46right? So.
- 52:48So I think all these things need to start to come together, and
- 52:50we're just not doing that right now.
- 52:52If a machine wants has access in your environment and it wants to
- 52:55walk into a credit card database, it could do that,
- 52:57which is, by the way, that's malware.
- 52:59That's ransomware. Ransomware is a machine I was.
- 53:01Going to say you just described it.
- 53:02Yeah, ransomware is a machine. And in terms of managing machine
- 53:07accounts, you know we talked about AI, generative AI in terms
- 53:11of kind of the bots but. Did you see a role for AI
- 53:16relative to machine account management?
- 53:19Oh. The bots watching the bots.
- 53:22Is this how the matrix started? Yes.
- 53:24So so or or or Terminator with Skynet.
- 53:28Yeah. I mean you know it it's there is
- 53:32a point where the the look the bad actors are already starting
- 53:36to use you know evil GBT, fraud GBT like was discussed today in
- 53:40in in the keynote I I transmit our researchers are certainly
- 53:45seeing that like we're seeing the threat environment just
- 53:48really quickly has done a huge phase change and so they have
- 53:52this now access to all this stuff and we do have to fight
- 53:56fire with fire. It's all we it always has been
- 53:58and always will be an arms race and it's like the situation
- 54:02where if someone is firing tons of missiles at you or you gonna
- 54:05have humans on the ground you know shooting shooting them down
- 54:09manually. No you're going to need a system
- 54:11that is automated and is using AIML to fight back.
- 54:16So I'll I'll just say this legitimately.
- 54:18We saw how good that works if you ever played Missile Command,
- 54:21right? Well, yeah, exactly.
- 54:22Yeah, right. That's what you're going to
- 54:24lose. Yeah.
- 54:24I mean, well, so there's a couple ways I think about AIML
- 54:27and benefiting, let's just say, security and identity leaders.
- 54:31One is there's AIML tools that hopefully your vendors are
- 54:38starting to build to help with administering and managing the
- 54:41stuff, right? So think about access
- 54:44certifications when you think about governance, right?
- 54:46Like for years they talked about identity intelligence.
- 54:50I think now we have the technology for vendors to apply
- 54:54that to give you a better idea, be like anticipate all these
- 54:57recertifications I need to do so I don't have to do it manually.
- 55:01That would be nice. Or short circuit like can I
- 55:04interface with a chat bot where I'm like, how do I set up this
- 55:08certain policy within this product?
- 55:10And I can just type in two things and boom, it tells me
- 55:12what to do. So that's where I see the first.
- 55:16I've seen many. I've been briefed by many
- 55:18vendors and that's where I see a lot of the quote UN quote,
- 55:21innovation right now today. But the other aspect is how that
- 55:25technology can be used to fight bad actors.
- 55:29So monitoring machine identity behavior, and then if something
- 55:34happens it's weird. Then it can respond either by
- 55:37terminating that machine. Or pause the transaction, pause
- 55:41exactly or stop and get more information.
- 55:44So it's similar with like risk based authentication on the
- 55:47human side going back to what you're saying as well with with
- 55:51the, you know the the 70 some percent of of people saying
- 55:55machines should have MFA. Hopefully that's what what you
- 55:58know people were thinking as well they should have risk based
- 56:01kind of authentication for these machines as well and if
- 56:04something's weird they're just just stop it.
- 56:06That's where I see AI now, also helping the fight here.
- 56:10Excellent. So we'll start to wrap up
- 56:12because we're about to hit an hour here and I want to be
- 56:14respectful of your time, but you may be super jealous this
- 56:18morning when you started showing me some pictures on your phone.
- 56:20No, not like that. Star Wars Rise of the
- 56:24Resistance. You went to this?
- 56:27This is Disneyland. Disneyland.
- 56:30Yep. And I want to know everything
- 56:32about it. Yeah, yeah.
- 56:34So you give me two minutes. No, no, no.
- 56:37You got as much time as you need so recently did did a did an
- 56:40amazing family trip to to Disneyland and we were lucky
- 56:45enough to make it on the ride. I would actually say it's it's a
- 56:49ride. It's also an experience.
- 56:52Star Wars, Rise of the Resistance.
- 56:54I think I got the name right and it was Rise of the Resistance
- 56:56Usually it's a long wait you know we we we got in at with
- 57:01decent decent timing amazing ride.
- 57:04So it's themed after kind of the newer Star Wars movies.
- 57:08So like Kylo Ren and all that and the the story and I don't
- 57:11want to ruin it but the premise is, is that you you kind of come
- 57:15in and and the cast members at Disney, they're all in character
- 57:20and they don't break their character.
- 57:22You know you they're like, hey you you're thank you for joining
- 57:25the resistance. You're part of the Resistance.
- 57:26We're going to share with you a secret base location.
- 57:30And then you go on some, you go outside, you see all this cool
- 57:33stuff, you go on the ship, you're flying and then suddenly
- 57:37the Star Destroyers with Kylo Ren, they board you because they
- 57:40believe that you have the location of some base, but you
- 57:43deny it. Then you're on like a Star
- 57:45Destroyer with like hundreds of Stormtroopers on this.
- 57:47It's amazing. And then, you know, then you go
- 57:50on kind of the ride, if you will, so.
- 57:52So when you say on like you're you're not talking about like
- 57:56watching a video, right? You're in this thing or you're
- 58:00help me understand the perspective here.
- 58:02You're in this thing. You're seeing stuff.
- 58:06You're it's a blend of multimodal multimedia.
- 58:11Wind blows on you and stuff like, oh, you feel everything,
- 58:15See shakes, Yeah, you feel everything.
- 58:17It it it goes beyond just a ride that you get on it just it takes
- 58:22you somewhere or you sit in something and hear music and it,
- 58:25I mean it, it really does try to tap into all your senses and and
- 58:29everything. And I was blown away.
- 58:32Probably one of the most enjoyable experiences you know,
- 58:36I've had after. Honestly, after we did that, I
- 58:38think we did it around midday, a full day at Disneyland.
- 58:41I was like that's it. Everything right now, right?
- 58:44Yeah. I mean, everything else is
- 58:45great, don't get me wrong, but I was like, if we went home now, I
- 58:47I wouldn't be disappointed. That'd be fine.
- 58:49How long was the experience? That's a good question.
- 58:54It probably felt like it. If it, if it, if I feel like if
- 58:57it's a good experience and you're into it, it goes fast,
- 58:59right, 'cause you're engaged throughout the whole time?
- 59:02Is it 5 minutes? Is it like half an hour?
- 59:04To me it it felt so. I I I agree with you like it
- 59:07definitely had experiences where it felt you know like good ones.
- 59:11It felt like it went by fast. It didn't feel like it went by
- 59:13fast. It it felt to me like it was 15
- 59:19minutes long. It probably wasn't.
- 59:20It was probably like 5 but. You're so into it and it's such
- 59:23a good experience. Felt like 15 minutes and just
- 59:26everything that you're that, that that your senses pick up
- 59:29when your body picks up. It just was that.
- 59:31And if you love those movies and just Star Wars genre, not all,
- 59:36not only is that experience and ride great, but the whole
- 59:39environment around it because you you walk into Star Wars
- 59:42Galaxy edge and it's like it's a new world.
- 59:45Even the restaurants are seemed like indoor.
- 59:48We had Endorian chicken, which is another thing, right?
- 59:51It tastes like chicken and they have blue milk there too, like
- 59:53blue milk and everything. It's really, really cool.
- 59:56But when you when you when you go on it's like you're on the
- 1:00:00bridge of a or you're in you're in the hangar Bay of a Star
- 1:00:03Destroyer. It it's really cool and how the
- 1:00:06the backdrop behind the stormtroopers looks like a
- 1:00:08shield with space raw space behind them.
- 1:00:11They did a good job. I really have to applaud the the
- 1:00:14team at at Disney for for doing that because it you know, it it
- 1:00:18goes back to the, you know, the Imagineers I guess, right.
- 1:00:22And I just think you know, amazing amazing job.
- 1:00:25We need some Imagineers to come in and help us in the IM space.
- 1:00:28I think you know. Can you imagine an Identity and
- 1:00:31Access Management theme park? Oh yeah, that what that would
- 1:00:35even like. Yeah.
- 1:00:37Well, we would have, you know, Disney has the magic bands.
- 1:00:40We would have like our pass key bands, you know?
- 1:00:44What would be like the the top drawing ride?
- 1:00:46That's a good question, Jim. What do you think?
- 1:00:49I think humbersome, this is so lame.
- 1:00:54Although I will say my my son said he looked at me and he and
- 1:00:57again he's a teenager and he goes, hey daddy why don't why
- 1:01:01don't they have like Austin Powers land you know or like
- 1:01:04Towers Land, Beetlejuice Land or like he just started dropping
- 1:01:08these other like cool kind of movies like you know, I said
- 1:01:12what about Anchorman lands or you know.
- 1:01:14They spent a lot of money for the Star Wars.
- 1:01:17Be dead. It's unfortunate they shut down
- 1:01:19the the, the hotel. I think though there was like a
- 1:01:21hotel experience and I think I heard that they decided to shut
- 1:01:24it down. It wasn't, yeah, I think.
- 1:01:27I've heard really good things about it and I guess it was too
- 1:01:30expensive or something. I don't know.
- 1:01:32Just can't. I missed out on that one.
- 1:01:33I can't always have nice things. I know I missed out on that too.
- 1:01:36I remember talking about that. But then COVID happened.
- 1:01:39I don't know. I don't know if it had.
- 1:01:40Who knows? But But either way, I would
- 1:01:43highly recommend. I haven't been to Disney World.
- 1:01:47I haven't experienced their Star Wars thing.
- 1:01:50So it was just Disneyland. So that one's in kind.
- 1:01:52Of difference is Disneyland is in.
- 1:01:54California and Disney World is Florida, correct.
- 1:01:56So the weather is going to be a lot better in California, yes.
- 1:01:59But it's not as big. I mean, Disney World is huge.
- 1:02:01I've been to both. It's not even close.
- 1:02:04No, it's not even close. I think I've spent.
- 1:02:07More multiple parks. In in Florida, Yeah, you've got
- 1:02:11M was it MGM, Epcot, Disney itself, plus you got all the
- 1:02:15resorts things. I mean, it's a whole thing, but
- 1:02:18I think what? Between the two, I actually
- 1:02:21prefer Disneyland better because I think the quality is higher
- 1:02:25even though there's fewer things compared to Disney World in
- 1:02:28Florida, which is there's a ton of stuff to do, but the quality
- 1:02:31is very inconsistent. Like for me, Space Mountain and
- 1:02:35Disney World Classic, but I don't care about anything else
- 1:02:39there. When my.
- 1:02:39Kids were very young, was when Cars was the movie.
- 1:02:42Cars was hot, and there's Hollywood studios, and they had.
- 1:02:47Cars everywhere. It was like my.
- 1:02:49Kids were just drawn in, so they have that.
- 1:02:53So I actually, I should, I should say this, but it was kind
- 1:02:57of cool, ran into a YouTube in the park and he was like so Cal
- 1:03:01Disney dad. And we got so many great tips
- 1:03:04from watching his video in the lead up to us doing this trip.
- 1:03:07So it was like my kids were kind of excited when they saw him.
- 1:03:10You know, it's like, because he's like an influencer, much
- 1:03:14like you guys as well, right? And so it's no, it's it's true.
- 1:03:18It's right. You don't know.
- 1:03:19Go on. But it's really cool.
- 1:03:23And so so but what he said was he's like, you know, Disney
- 1:03:28World is very cool, but he's like one major pro when you come
- 1:03:33to California because it's California Adventureland and
- 1:03:38right across, like you could throw a football from one gate
- 1:03:43to the other. Disneyland's on the other side
- 1:03:46and downtown Disney's there. So you don't have to take all
- 1:03:49these shuttles everywhere. Like you can get a really nice
- 1:03:53Disney experience and I will, I will further it with Disneyland
- 1:03:57is the original Disney park and it's like one of the most
- 1:04:03original theme parks, I think in the world.
- 1:04:05I mean, someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but YouTube videos
- 1:04:08that I've watched on it, it's pretty amazing.
- 1:04:09And all the tricks that Disney had to do like that that used to
- 1:04:12be an orange Grove that was flat with nothing there and that was
- 1:04:16transformed and and I wish I remember the name, but there's a
- 1:04:19really, if you're really interested in Disney, the story
- 1:04:22I find of what Walt Disney went through to get that park there
- 1:04:27was incredible. Like he almost ran, ran out of
- 1:04:29money. Everybody said this is an insane
- 1:04:31idea. Why would people come to a theme
- 1:04:33park? Like what does that even mean?
- 1:04:35What is? What is the theme park?
- 1:04:37Yeah, and he almost ran out of money.
- 1:04:39We do the same thing in Orlando, right?
- 1:04:41It was the original drain, the swamp.
- 1:04:43It was like all swampland that you bought.
- 1:04:44That's right. Yeah, yeah, I don't think he
- 1:04:47even lived to see Disney World happen, right.
- 1:04:51But anyway, But yeah, no thanks for asking.
- 1:04:54It was unbelievable experience and highly recommended if you
- 1:04:57love Star Wars. Well, I do and I don't.
- 1:05:00And you don't. But I probably would enjoy the
- 1:05:02ride. I mean the experience, right?
- 1:05:04I mean, I think you can appreciate.
- 1:05:06I can appreciate experience. I'd like to go to a star Star
- 1:05:09Trek One star. Trek One, I'll go both.
- 1:05:12I don't discriminate. I'd like to go into the hollow
- 1:05:15deck. I mean, that's where we're going
- 1:05:17with things like VR and AR and things like that.
- 1:05:21Eventually, someday. That's it.
- 1:05:23You can have experiences with that without actually being
- 1:05:26there, Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right.
- 1:05:31Let's go ahead and wrap it up. David, thank you so much for
- 1:05:35taking time with us. Nice to see you.
- 1:05:37Looking forward to your talking. You can find us on the web,
- 1:05:41idacpodcast.com, Twitter at IDAC Podcasts.
- 1:05:45I have a link for David and his LinkedIn if you want to share
- 1:05:48Disney tips or machine identity tips or whatever, along with the
- 1:05:52link to transmit security so you'll learn more about stuff
- 1:05:55that he works on. What else?
- 1:05:57We're on Mastodon at IDAC podcast, at infosec dot
- 1:06:00exchange, connect with Jim and I at LinkedIn, like subscribe.
- 1:06:05That's all the stuff that people can do to help us out.
- 1:06:08Get us on the mainstage again at Keynote for for Authenticate,
- 1:06:11which is very cool. Definitely a podcast highlight.
- 1:06:14I think of kind of making it from 2 dudes in their basements
- 1:06:18to now or you know, on a stage somewhere.
- 1:06:21I think it's all of our Mastodon followers.
- 1:06:24Yeah, I don't know about that one.
- 1:06:25We have it out too. We have no, we've got several.
- 1:06:29By far, LinkedIn is the best way to you know that we get the most
- 1:06:32engagement. But I don't know.
- 1:06:34I think Mastodon came along at the right time, but the
- 1:06:37usability isn't quite there yet for the masses.
- 1:06:40Let's wrap it up. Thanks everybody for listening
- 1:06:43and we'll talk to everyone in the next one.
- 1:06:45You've been listening to Identity at the Center.
- 1:06:49We hope you've enjoyed the show. Make sure to like, rate and
- 1:06:53review and we'll be back soon. But in the meantime, hit the
- 1:06:56website at identity@thecenter.com and find
- 1:07:01us on Twitter at IDAC Podcast. See you next time on identity at
- 1:07:08the center.