Tackling the Fastest Growing Attack Surface in the Enterprise

Written by Murali Palanisamy, Chief Solutions Officer at AppViewX

With the rapid expansion of cloud services, cloud-native applications, and IoT devices in virtually every industry, the rise of non-human identities has created a new frontier in cybersecurity. While these non-human entities are integral to modern digital infrastructures, they also introduce significant risks, especially in digital certificate management.

Consider a mid-sized enterprise that has recently adopted microservices architecture to enhance its agility. This shift leads to a dramatic increase in non-human identities, with each microservice requiring its own certificate for digital trust, encryption, and secure communication. Suddenly, the IT team manages thousands of certificates, each with its own lifecycle and security requirements.

In this scenario, the surge in non-human identities—resulting from IoT devices, cloud-native applications, and APIs—introduces a manually overwhelming security challenge. For example, the company’s IoT devices, ranging from smart thermostats to industrial sensors, require digital certificates to authenticate and securely communicate with central management systems. With the proliferation of these devices, the organization must manage an ever-growing inventory of certificates, each with an expiration date, renewal requirements, and potential for compromise.

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Real-World Security Challenges

Let’s delve into a specific use case where the lack of proper certificate management led to a security breach. A global financial services firm, managing hundreds of APIs for client transactions, failed to renew a certificate for a critical API. This expired certificate allowed attackers to intercept communications between the firm’s online trading platform and its clients, leading to significant financial losses and reputational damage.

This incident highlights the stark reality: A lapse in managing digital certificates for non-human identities can have dire consequences. Attackers are increasingly targeting these identities through vectors such as expired certificates or compromised API keys. For instance, supply chain attacks can exploit non-human identities within vendor networks, allowing attackers to move laterally across systems undetected. The proliferation of non-human identities amplifies these risks, as each unmanaged certificate becomes a potential attack vector for adversaries.

Digital Certificate Dilemmas

Digital certificates are the backbone of trust, encryption, and secure communication for non-human identities, but manual management approaches, as seen in the earlier example, are fraught with risks. In a cloud-native environment, where microservices are dynamically created and destroyed, the manual tracking of certificates is not only impractical but also a significant security vulnerability.

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Take, for instance, a healthcare provider that adopted a hybrid cloud strategy to manage patient data. The provider uses Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to secure and encrypt communications between its on-premises data centers and cloud services. Without centralized certificate management, the IT team struggles to maintain visibility into the certificate lifecycle, leading to a near-expiration certificate that, if left unchecked, could disrupt critical patient care systems.

Practical Alternatives

To address these challenges, enterprises must embrace proactive strategies for digital certificate lifecycle management. It starts with visibility, automation, and control. For example, consider a multinational retailer using automated certificate management to handle its extensive IoT ecosystem and ensure that certificates are renewed well before they expire. By integrating this capability with their existing DevOps pipelines, the retailer achieves seamless management of certificates across its global operations, from point-of-sale systems to inventory management platforms.

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Orchestration tools are also essential in managing certificate lifecycles across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. A telecommunications company, for example, might deploy an orchestration platform that centrally manages all certificates across its cloud services and on-premises infrastructure. This platform provides a unified view of all certificates, ensuring that any anomalies—such as an unauthorized certificate issued by a compromised system—are immediately flagged and addressed.

Centralized management platforms enhance security by integrating with identity and access management (IAM) systems. For instance, a financial institution with numerous non-human identities across its trading platforms could use a centralized certificate management solution tightly coupled with its IAM system. This integration enables the institution to enforce strict policies for certificate issuance and renewal, ensuring that only authorized identities can request or use certificates.

Finally, regular audits and continuous monitoring are non-negotiable components of a robust certificate lifecycle management strategy. A zero-trust architecture, adopted by a leading technology firm, illustrates this approach. By enforcing stringent verification for all non-human identities, the firm ensures that no entity—whether an application, workload, API, cloud service, microservice, or IoT device—can access resources without undergoing rigorous authentication checks. This zero-trust framework, combined with real-time monitoring of certificates, allows the firm to quickly detect and respond to potential threats, minimizing the risk of a breach.

The rise of non-human identities in today’s enterprises presents opportunities and challenges. While these identities are essential for modern digital operations, they also introduce significant security risks if not managed properly. By adopting proactive strategies—such as visibility, automation, centralized control, orchestration, and a zero-trust approach—CISOs and IT security executives can mitigate these risks and protect their organizations from potential data breaches and service outages.

About the Author

Murali Palanisamy is Chief Solutions Officer at AppViewX where he is responsible for overall product vision, development, and technical direction. Before joining the company, he served as senior vice president at Bank of America, where he led an architecture and engineering team for e-commerce application delivery. Prior to that, Murali was vice president of architecture and product engineering at Merrill Lynch. He has designed and developed automation and integration solutions for servers, application delivery controllers, IP services, and networking. Murali is an electronics and communication engineer from Bharathiyar University in India. Currently, he is based out of New York.