Automated least privileges in cloud-based web services

Abstract

The principle of least privilege is a fundamental guideline for secure computing that restricts privileged entities to only the permissions they need to perform their authorized tasks. Achieving least privileges in an environment composed of many heterogeneous web services provided by a third party is an important but difficult and error prone task for many organizations. This paper explores the challenges that make achieving least privileges uniquely difficult in the cloud environment and the potential benefits of automated methods to assist with creating least privilege policies from audit logs. To accomplish these goals, we implement two frameworks: a Policy Generation Framework for automatically creating policies from audit log data, and an Evaluation Framework to quantify the security provided by generated roles. We apply these frameworks to a real world dataset of audit log data with 4.3 million events from a small company and present results describing the policy generator's effectiveness. Results show that it is possible to significantly reduce over-privilege and administrative burden of permission management.