Entitlement Chains – The Key to Successful Data Risk Assessment

Compromised identities are one of the leading cybersecurity attack vectors facing businesses, with more than 80% of data breaches exploiting identity-based techniques. Given this threat landscape, a thorough entitlement chain analysis isn't just a nice-to-have—it's absolutely crucial for effective risk management. However, despite its undeniable importance, many businesses still find themselves struggling to properly implement this practice.

In this piece, we're diving deep into the world of entitlement chain analysis. We'll explore why it's so vital for your data security and management processes, and provide some practical tips on how businesses can seamlessly weave this critical practice into their existing security frameworks. The goal? To beef up your data protection and management, ensuring you're not just another statistic in the rising tide of identity-based breaches.

What is Entitlement Chain Analysis?

Entitlement chain analysis is a detailed examination and review of the access rights and permissions that users (humans) or systems (non-humans) possess over data and resources. It involves scrutinizing both explicit permissions directly assigned to users and inherited permissions that users receive by virtue of their roles or groups within an organization. 

The complexity of entitlements can vary significantly across different platforms, with some allowing for conditional access rules, such as restrictions based on the user's location. This granular approach helps ensure that the access rights granted are both necessary and sufficient, tailored to the specific needs and security protocols of the platform.

Entitlement chain analysis supports a range of valuable use cases. It underpins activities such as access rights reviews, where the appropriateness of granted permissions is verified against a user’s role, determining whether the access is suitable and if any non-human users (like automated systems or bots) should maintain access. Additionally, it supports the implementation of role-based access control systems, enforces security policies, and facilitates compliance audits. 

Why Entitlement Chain Analysis is Important 

At its core, entitlement chain analysis ensures that access to sensitive data and systems is meticulously controlled and restricted according to the principle of least privilege. This principle dictates that users and systems should only be granted the access that is absolutely necessary for them to perform their functions.

Key benefits of entitlement chain analysis include:

• Compliance Assurance: Helping organizations demonstrate compliance with stringent regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX by maintaining a clear, auditable trail of access rights, justifying the necessity of each granted permission.

• Operational Efficiency: Optimizing the provisioning and de-provisioning of access, reducing administrative overhead, and enhancing the speed and accuracy of security responses to incidents.

Entitlement chain analysis also enables effective risk mitigation through:

• Traceability: Allowing for the rapid identification of an attack's entry point and the extent of a breach, crucial for effective incident response.

• Overprovisioned Access Management: Identifying instances where individuals have access rights beyond what they utilize, reducing unnecessary risk exposure.

• Unauthorized Access Prevention: Detects situations where users can see sensitive data they shouldn't, safeguarding against internal and external threats.

• Service Vulnerability Identification: Highlights vulnerable services that could give attackers access if exploited, ensuring these potential entry points are secured.

Through these measures, entitlement chain analysis becomes an indispensable tool in the arsenal of data security and management strategies, safeguarding against a variety of threats while ensuring compliance and operational efficiency.

Why Businesses Struggle with Entitlement Chain Analysis

Businesses face significant hurdles when attempting to implement entitlement chain analysis effectively. These challenges can often be boiled down to issues with the tools, platforms, and the inherent complexity of managing entitlements themselves:

• Too Many Tools: The market is saturated with cybersecurity tools, each promising to streamline and secure aspects of network and data security. However, many of these tools focus only on single chain analysis or require manual efforts to connect various systems like ITDR, CNAPP, and SIEM, and can provide a skewed view of data exposure.

• Too Many Platforms: With the proliferation of identity providers such as AD, Azure AD, Entra, AWS, and others across various platforms like cloud services and BI tools, it becomes exceedingly difficult to correlate and analyze entitlements effectively. This creates complexity and often leads to gaps in visibility.

• Complexity in Management: The way entitlements are created, managed, or used can add further challenges. For example, entitlement chains can become convoluted with numerous role assumptions—where role X assumes role Y, which in turn assumes role Z that has access to certain data. Furthermore, multiple paths to the same data may exist, each with different permissions. This requires an analysis that considers the union of all permissions to understand the full scope of access and the associated risks.

Achieving full entitlement chain analysis through metadata lakes

Companies seeking to integrate entitlement chain analysis more effectively into their security and data management operations can turn to advanced solutions like Bedrock’s platform. Leveraging the patented Bedrock Metadata Lake, our platform captures comprehensive details on data access entitlements and associated cloud services. This approach enables full entitlement chain analysis by creating enhanced graph connections that map both human and non-human identity data access, pinpointing locations and exposure risks. The platform delivers vital insights into who has access to what data and where, assessing the risk posed by known and potential access points.

Bedrock’s thorough approach includes monitoring of both explicit and implied access privileges, common in enterprise environments with dynamically assigned roles. By analyzing the specifics of data access—identifying sensitive data and the actual accounts accessing it—Bedrock supports a least-privilege strategy. This not only tightens security but also significantly enhances data security posture management (DSPM).

With all entitlements mapped, the Bedrock platform identifies critical vulnerabilities such as unused sensitive data or overly expansive permissions. This proactive risk management leads to streamlined, risk-prioritized entitlement reviews, reducing the overall attack surface and slashing security response costs linked to data accessed by both human and non-human identities. Through these capabilities, Bedrock helps companies not just respond to threats but proactively manage and mitigate potential risks, securing a more robust and compliant operational framework.

Complete Entitlement Chain Analysis is Non-Negotiable

As we've explored, entitlement chain analysis has become absolutely critical for ensuring effective data security and management. In today's complex digital landscape, where the risks are as dynamic as the technology itself, having a precise understanding of who accesses what data and how is non-negotiable.

Bedrock stands out in this crucial area as the only data security vendor that offers complete entitlement chain analysis. With our comprehensive approach, Bedrock ensures the most accurate capture of data risk in the industry, providing businesses not just with protection but with the confidence to navigate their digital transformations securely. From bolstering your defenses to streamlining compliance, Bedrock’s platform is your go-to for mastering the complexities of entitlements and securing your critical data assets.