IAST vs RASP and their blindspots in Non Human Identity Management

In the early days of application security, developers relied primarily on Static Application Security Testing (SAST) to scan source code for vulnerabilities and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) to probe running applications from the outside. While effective for their time, these methods struggle to keep pace today.

IAST and RASP, on the other hand, represent a significant leap forward, addressing the limitations of their predecessors while taking on the specific challenges of modern IT security.

What is IAST?

IAST, or Interactive Application Security Testing if you’re into unnecessary verbosity, is a bit nosy in the sense that it doesn’t just peek through the windows like DAST, or rummage through your trash like SAST. IAST sets up camp in your application’s runtime, and watches every move it makes. It does this by injecting ‘sensors’ into your runtime, which report back on everything: data flow, control flow, and even what APIs are being called.

When to use IAST for non-human identity management?

1. When your non-human identities are acting like teenagers with fake IDs; One of the primary advantages of IAST is that it can catch those authentication misconfigurations early on including coding bad practices such as hardcoding credentials, weak encryption algorithms, or improper session management for service accounts and APIs.

2. To flag vulnerabilities in resource access: IAST monitors how NHIs interact with application resources. It can detect unauthorized access attempts, potential SQL injection points, or insecure direct object references that could be exploited by compromised service accounts or malicious APIs.

3. To identify over-permissioned or misconfigured roles: In the test environment, IAST can track the permissions used by non-human identities and compare them against assigned roles which helps in identifying excessive privileges in a controlled setting.

Blindspots of IAST

With all its merits, IAST has got its own issues:

1. It’s got the observational skills of a hawk in a cage. To wit, IAST can’t see what’s happening in production. It’s all “testing this” and “analyzing that,” but ask it what your API is doing right now in the real world, and you’ll get a blank stare.

2. One of the biggest disadvantages of IAST is that its functionality is limited to the testing phase. Once an application is deployed, there’s just no way of implementing continuous monitoring. This means it can’t detect new vulnerabilities that might arise due to configuration changes or NHI behavior in the production environment.

3. While surely, IAST can tell you that your service account is acting weird, but it won’t know why. It lacks the capability to gather insights into patterns of behavior over time or correlate events across different parts of the application ecosystem.

What is RASP?

Runtime Application Self-Protection, or RASP, is a security technology that’s right there in the trenches, embedded directly into an application or its runtime environment. What makes it unique is that when it spots something fishy — like an API suddenly acting like it won the data lottery — it doesn’t just sound the alarm, it takes action. It’s like having a security expert on call 24/7, but without the attitude problem. Well, mostly without the attitude problem.

When to use RASP for non-human identity management?

1. To monitor non-human identities during runtime. RASP tracks how NHIs authenticate, what resources they access, and their interactions with other components in production which turns out to be particularly useful for spotting anomalies in behavior that could indicate a security breach.

2. To catch and block malicious behavior faster than you can say “API abuse.” For instance, RASP detects when a service account suddenly decides it wants to be an admin or when an API starts making it rain with sensitive data.

3. Providing real-time defense against token misuse is one of the many advantages of RASP since it can detect when tokens are being used in suspicious ways in real-time and prevent potential exploitation before it occurs.

Blindspots of RASP

Now, before we get too excited about RASP, let’s remember it’s not a magic wand for all your security woes. Here are some of the disadvantages of RASP being your whole security system:

1. Runtime tunnel vision: As established, RASP is great at runtime, but — and it’s a big one — it has no idea about how the various non-human identities were configured during the development phase. There’s this false sense of security that RASP can take care of everything we’ve missed. Don’t make that mistake.

2. Shallow role analysis: While RASP can detect misuse, it doesn’t perform an in-depth analysis of whether the roles and permissions assigned to non-human identities adhere to the principle of least privilege.

3. The “what” without the “why”:  RASP excels at identifying and blocking harmful actions, but it doesn’t offer any clues about what led to the same. This limitation can make it tough to determine if an NHI is misconfigured internally or actually compromised and under attack.

The need for a dedicated non-human identity management tool

Deciding which one you need IAST vs RASP? Not so fast. While effective in their respective domains, they both have quite a few blindspots when it comes to covering all the bases of non-human identity management. IAST is confined to the testing phase, while RASP focuses on real-time threat mitigation — both separately. Neither provides a complete solution for managing non-human identities throughout their lifecycle which brings us here and why we need a dedicated non-human identity management tool is necessary to address these gaps.

Context awareness

Talking about gaps, IAST and RASP have the contextual awareness of a goldfish. A dedicated NHIM tool, on the other hand, knows everything — API calls, access patterns, resource usage. Essentially, it’s building a psychological profile of your code.

Moreover, such a tool excels in role and permissions management, an area where both IAST and RASP fall short. The tool can conduct a thorough analysis of permissions assigned to different personnel, ensuring alignment with the principle of least privilege. Of course, this will cover continuous evaluation of access rights against actual usage patterns, identifying and even recommending the removal of excessive permissions. The tool can also implement automated policies for just-in-time access provisioning and de-provisioning, giving a major impetus to reducing the risk of privilege abuse.

Lifecycle management

While IAST and RASP offer valuable security insights, they fall short in terms of the big picture of complete lifecycle management of non-human identities. A dedicated tool fills this critical gap by providing end-to-end visibility and control from creation to deprovisioning. It’s annoyingly perfect.

During the development phase, such a tool can be seamlessly integrated with CI/CD pipelines, automatically provisioning and configuring non-human identities with appropriate permissions, baking security into the process from the start, rather than making it an afterthought.

Later, as these identities transition to production, the tool in question can keep an eye out, continuously monitoring for anomalies and ensuring overall NHI management. This includes automated secrets security including rotation both at predefined intervals and in response to potential security events. Now, we would also want the tool here to be compatible with various secrets vaults you already use so that we can maintain encryption both at rest and in transit.

Moreover, a specialized tool can implement adaptive policies based on the context of each non-human identity. This might include factors such as the resources it protects, its location, historical behavior patterns, and associated risk scores. It would honestly be a lot to expect such contextual intelligence from IAST and RASP alone.

Attack detection and response

A dedicated non-human identity management tool offers sophisticated attack detection and response capabilities that surpass those of IAST and RASP.

The context we gain paves the way for a sophisticated ML model to establish baseline patterns for non-human identities, monitoring factors like access locations, data access patterns, and API call frequencies. If and when deviations occur, such as a sudden spike in API calls from a machine account, the system flags it as suspicious, even if the individual actions appear legitimate. Mind you, it’s never a mistake to be more cautious.

Also, unlike RASP’s binary block-or-allow approach, a specialized tool can deliver adaptive responses. It can automatically prioritize high-risk anomalies, triggering graduated responses based on the severity and context of the detected behavior. These responses might include temporarily quarantining the entity, revoking specific permissions, or initiating a deeper investigation if deemed necessary.

Compliance and Auditing

You would also want the tool to offer more fine-grained auditing capabilities than what’s available off the shelf with IAST and RASP offerings, essential for meeting regulatory requirements like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC2. This software would analyze comprehensive logs your system already generates and pinpoint all the different access patterns, permission changes, and incident responses over time. This level of detail comes in handy when you’re asked to step forward and demonstrate your compliance with the set guidelines.

And while you’re at it, is it too much to ask for a bit of automation? Nope. The tool should be what you call a pro in implementing and maintaining policies that ensure non-human identities adhere to security and industry standards. For instance, it should automatically enforce least privilege access, enforce regular secrets rotation, and maintain proper vaulting practices.

Conclusion

Throughout my career, I’ve seen tools come and go. IAST and RASP are undoubtedly powerful in their own domains, but they fall short when it comes to offering 360-degree management of non-human identities. That nuanced oversight is simply missing. And it’s nobody’s fault, to be honest. These entities pose unique challenges that IAST and RASP weren’t designed to fully address.

I’ve seen many organizations make significant strides to up their game in terms of their security posture with only IAST and RASP offerings, and of late, they are finally accepting how it’s not enough. Speaking from personal experience, the most effective strategy out there integrates both IAST and RASP while also bringing into the fold a specialized management tool for NHIs.