Identity Security

Overview

Identity security covers the full path by which a person, service, device, or workload proves identity and receives authority. It includes enrollment, authentication, federation, credential storage, authorization, session control, recovery, monitoring, and deprovisioning.

Attackers target phishing, password reuse, token theft, support processes, excessive privileges, dormant accounts, misconfigured federation, and service credentials. Strong login alone cannot prevent abuse when authorization is broad or recovery lets attackers replace protected factors.

Organizations should use phishing-resistant authentication, least privilege, short-lived credentials, device and behavior signals, access reviews, and rapid revocation. Controls need consistent coverage across cloud, applications, infrastructure, vendors, and automation identities. Emergency access should be temporary, monitored, and independently reviewed.

For Identity Security, end-to-end validation must therefore include both mechanism and business meaning.

Identity Security is a security mechanism or control discipline that protects human and machine identities, credentials, sessions, privileges, enrollment, and recovery from impersonation, theft, misuse, or takeover. Identity security protects the entire authority lifecycle, not just login, because enrollment, recovery, sessions, privileges, and revocation are equally exploitable.

For Identity Security, the trust decision should establish protection of human and machine identities, credentials, sessions, privileges, enrollment, and recovery from impersonation, theft, misuse, or takeover and bind the result to the requested action and protected resource. Teams should test issuance, storage, validation, expiry, revocation, recovery, and privileged override for human and machine identities, credentials, and sessions, rather than checking only a successful request. Logs concerning the Identity Security context and human and machine identities, credentials, and sessions should support investigation without exposing reusable secrets or unnecessary personal data.

Review of Identity Security should compare permitted and rejected actions related to human and machine identities, credentials, and sessions, confirm that recovery cannot bypass the primary safeguard, and remove obsolete access promptly.