Do You Know Who's Lurking in Your Cloud Environment?

Do You Know Who's Lurking in Your Cloud Environment?
A security researcher explains the dangers of poor visibility in the cloud and a new strategy to evaluate IAM exposure in Google Cloud Platform.

Most organizations don't have full visibility into what users can do in their cloud environment. They don't know who can assume other identities to escalate privileges or which permissions they'd be able to achieve – a lack of insight that could put the business at risk. 


Colin Estep, senior security researcher at Netskope, started researching potential security holes in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) about a year ago. In that time, he has sought to learn how more organizations can evaluate their full identity and access management (IAM) exposure to be able to answer the question: Do you know what all your users can do in your cloud environment? 


"Overall, for any cloud platform that's what's been intriguing to me: asking this really basic question that nobody really has the answer to," says Estep. "The answer to that is largely, 'No, I don't know what every single user can do. I don't know what their full capabilities are.'"


The general issue of IAM in the cloud stems from the dynamic nature of cloud environments, he continues. Fast-moving resources are constantly changing – people are working on different projects and spinning things up, and new services are emerging. The rapidly evolving nature of the cloud makes it difficult for organizations to stay informed on what these new services are, how they work, and what the implications are for permissions to various resources in the cloud.


"It's just this monumental thing to get a handle on," Estep explains. "Identity, in particular, is really one of the critical areas because … if you don't have your identity solution figured out, then you could exp ..

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