In this blog, we’ll dive into why locking down access is tough, the risks of getting it wrong, and a simple plan to get it right. I’ve pulled from real-world lessons to share a roadmap that keeps your supply chain safe while letting your team keep rocking. Let’s jump in.

Why Loose Access Is a Big Deal

Picture this: your software supply chain, code repos, build pipelines, and deployment tools are like a bustling kitchen. If everyone has access to every ingredient and burner, things can get messy fast. Developers might have admin rights just in case, or your CI/CD pipeline might have free rein across your systems. That’s a problem. It opens the door to attacks such as pipeline tampering, insider slip-ups, or stolen credentials, causing significant chaos. Rules like SOX, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA promote the principle of least privilege to mitigate these risks, but it’s not always easy. Many tools don’t let you fine-tune access, and managing it manually takes forever, still leaving gaps. This creates a larger target for attackers, slows down your team, and frustrates developers who just want to ship code. In today’s fast-paced DevSecOps world, where speed is everything, sloppy access controls are like a flat tire on a racecar.

Why You Need to Fix This Now

The pressure to tighten access is real, and it’s coming from all sides. Your supply chain spans a ton of tools, repos, CI/CD systems, and cloud platforms, and one wrong setting can expose everything. Teams are more dynamic than ever, with contractors and freelancers joining and leaving fast. Old-school access rules can’t keep up, leaving outdated permissions that hackers love to exploit. Meanwhile, hackers are getting craftier, using automation to find and attack overpowered accounts before you even notice. Plus, regulators are cracking down with tougher audits that demand solid controls. If you’re trying to ship software fast while keeping it secure, loose access is holding you back, and it’s time to act.

A Simple Way to Lock Down Access

So, how do you maintain tight access control without slowing down your team? The trick is to build a system that fits into your developers’ workflow and keeps security first. It starts with smart, automated policies powered by tools such as policy-based access control, automated role management, intelligent workflows, and proxy gateways. Require everyone to request access to repos or tools through a quick approval process, so no one gets in without a green light. Make policies flexible: a manager’s approval might be sufficient for read-only access, but admin rights require additional sign-offs. To avoid bogging things down, use smart workflows to auto-approve low-risk requests based on what similar team members have or how they’ve used access before. Policy-based access control makes real-time calls by checking things like a user’s role or task, ensuring they only get what they need right now.

Keep sensitive code secure by ensuring users only see what they’re authorized to access. Bundle permissions into roles tied to specific jobs, like code reviewer or pipeline operator, and assign them through automated role management tools to avoid giving too much access. Team leads can create these roles to match project needs, but resource owners should always have the final say to keep things in check. For high-risk access, like admin or write permissions, set an expiration date so it doesn’t linger. Low-risk access can stick around longer. To avoid the trap of managers rubber-stamping renewal requests, pair expirations with lightweight review mechanisms, for example, usage-based validation (has the access actually been used?) or automated just-in-time provisioning that grants elevated rights only when needed. This balances thoughtful retention with the speed and agility modern pipelines demand.  Proxy gateways double-check everything at the tool level, catching any unauthorized moves before they happen. This setup keeps your supply chain secure while letting your team move fast.

A Three-Part Plan to Make It Work

Here’s a straightforward, three-part system to bring this to life, blending governance, central control, and tool-level security.

First up is Identity and Access Governance. A solid IGA system builds and assigns job-specific roles based on policies. It automatically green-lights low-risk access but requires manual checks for sensitive information. Mixing role-based access control for simplicity with policy-based access control for smart, context-aware decisions gives you flexibility while keeping resource owners in the loop.

Next, a centralized supply chain platform ties everything together. Think of it not just as CI/CD automation, but as a single system that combines repository management, CI/CD workflows, project bundling, and access governance. From one place, admins can create and manage entities required by multiple tools in the supply chain, define approval and visibility policies, and bundle permissions around projects rather than scattered tools. The platform also enforces policy-based access over time, ensuring that access stays relevant as teams and projects evolve. A proxy gateway extends these controls down to individual tools, blocking unauthorized actions in real time and giving developers a single spot to request access or check pipeline status. This fills in the gaps where point tools fall short.

Finally, lock down your tools, like repos or CI/CD systems, so they only allow actions approved through the central platform. This prevents anyone from sneaking around policies or exploiting weak spots, maintaining tight control across the board.

Dealing with Real-World Hiccups

Getting least privilege right isn’t always smooth. New systems can throw developers for a loop, so clear training and a gradual rollout are key. Start with your power users to iron out kinks and get buy-in. Allowing teams to create their own roles enhances flexibility, but it can lead to overlap. To maintain organization, have resource owners approve all roles. Some tools don’t offer fine-tuned controls, but your platform’s gateway can enforce policies at a deeper level to fix that. Keeping the central platform running takes work, so build it to handle tool updates on its own to save your team headaches. Policies can get stale or clash, so review them regularly and use automation to spot issues early. Planning for these bumps keeps your system running smoothly.

Wrapping It Up: Security That Fuels Your Team

In today’s high-pressure software supply chain, least privilege is a must-have. Overpowered accounts are an open invitation for trouble, but you don’t have to slow your developers down to fix it. With smart policies, a centralized platform, and locked-down tools, you can protect your supply chain and keep things moving. Try starting with a key repo or pipeline, see how it goes, and scale up from there. If you’re tackling this at work, share your thoughts or reach out. Let’s swap tips on making least privilege work for you.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the content are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDPro organization.

About Author

VATSAL GUPTA is a cybersecurity leader with 13 years of experience in identity and access management (IAM). He currently works at Apple and has previously held roles at Meta and Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC), advising Fortune 100 companies on securing complex digital ecosystems. Gupta specializes in building scalable, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven identity solutions. He is an active contributor to IDPro and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and he also serves on technical committees for leading cybersecurity conferences. His research focuses on AI, large language models (LLMs), and policy-based access controls (PBAC) to modernize IAM and enhance threat detection.

The post Securing Your Software Supply Chain with Least Privilege appeared first on IDPro.

Many organizations hear from vendors, thought leaders, and perhaps strange women lying in ponds who distribute swords that they need to get to “Zero Trust.”  Zero trust as a marketing term has exploded over the past few years, and it feels like everywhere you look, the term is being used, but very little is being said on what it means—and indeed, what it means to identity. It would be prudent then to understand what is meant by zero trust, select a model that provides a basis by which a zero trust architecture may be achieved, and dig into the ramifications of the model chosen for identity.

What is Zero Trust?

Zero Trust is broadly defined by many sources. For instance, Gartner couches Zero Trust within the context of networks, stating, “Zero trust network access (ZTNA) is a product or service that creates an identity—and context-based, logical access boundary around an application or set of applications.” The UK’s NCSC also defines it within this context of networks-—they offer that “A zero trust architecture is an approach to system design where inherent trust in the network is removed.” If we are to believe NIST SP 800-207 (Zero Trust Architecture), it is “the term for an evolving set of cybersecurity paradigms that move defenses from static, network-based perimeters to focus on users, assets, and resources.” Given the spread of definitions, we should look to synthesize these definitions to provide a holistic perspective.

• Zero trust seeks to eliminate implicit trust.
• Zero trust seeks to make access determinations that are identity, context, and resource-driven.
• Zero trust seeks to move past using static network configurations as a defense.

What is Implicit Trust?

Implicit trust, put simply, is where actions taken between systems, users, and other resources are allowed due to some facet of their relationship with each other. In an extremely simple example, a database within a traditional, organizationally managed data center may have a line of sight from a network perspective to hundreds of other systems because of the tasks the database helps those systems perform. These in-datacenter systems may have a common set of administrators, and one of these administrators may have access to a laptop that uses a VPN client to get into the data center remotely for management, specifically that database. These systems then share a tremendous degree of implicit trust- an attacker who gets access to the administrator’s laptop could potentially do immense damage to a number of systems because each system in the chain has put some degree of faith in the next one down the line. Ransomware, in particular, exploits implicit trust, utilizing whatever tools it can to move laterally within an organization to cause as much damage as possible.

What Do Zero Trust Folks Mean When They Say “Identity,” “Context,” and “Resource”?

When we speak of identities in a zero-trust context, we refer to both traditional users (as in people) and non-person entities (such as machine accounts used for programmatic access). These identities must have appropriate context, meaning they must meet specific conditions (e.g., time of day, location, compliance to specific requirements identified by the organization, attributes, role-based access signifiers, etc.) to perform a given operation. Resources are objects an organization possesses that are subject to access determinations, such as applications, workflows, systems, assets that respond and conform to logical access (such as doors), and so on. We describe all of this to indicate that a user, in certain contexts, has access to perform actions on specific resources.

What Happens to the Network?

The network, as we understand it, still exists. However, the focus shifts from hardening the perimeter of a network to securing resources. Typical implementations focus on identities sufficiently authenticating and having sufficient authorization (by having appropriate context), with these entitlements being dynamic and assessed continuously such that if the identity no longer meets requirements, access is terminated immediately; if the identity is sufficiently authenticated and authorized, it is allowed access to the resource for that specific interaction. Each interaction with a given resource requires a new and separate assessment; prior successful assessments do not indicate future success. The common terminology used for the interaction of identity to resource under this model is “microsegmentation”—to effectively construct a network segment from resource to resource and dynamically assign it based on context.

What Models Are There of Zero Trust?

While vendors quickly provide their own view of zero trust, few (if any) have provided comprehensive models that outline critical functions necessary to achieve such a state in a distributed computing environment. Various countries and blocs, such as the UK and the EU, have offered either broad guidance (https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/zero-trust-architecture) or pay lip service to it in reports (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/A-9-2021-0313_EN.html) but few government-sponsored and independent reference models have been put forward. The US Government has offered some guidance on this across its agencies, notably NIST by way of its work in the NCCoE (https://www.nccoe.nist.gov/projects/implementing-zero-trust-architecture) as well as NIST SP 800-207, and the Department of Defense with its Zero Trust Reference Architecture (henceforth the DoD ZTRA). While all of the NIST SPs are great reading on this subject, let’s focus for a bit on the DoD ZTRA.

An Extremely High-Level View of the DoD ZTRA for Identity

The DoD ZTRA asserts that zero trust’s goal is to protect data. It does this through the interrelated nature of six separate focus areas: User, Device, Network/Environment, Applications/Workload, Visibility/Analytics, and Automation/Orchestration. The DoD ZTRA asserts that conditional authentication and authorization are critical to each focus area and provides a figure that offers capabilities related to those areas. See Figure 1 for their highlighted capabilities.

Figure 1: Authentication and Authorization Capability Taxonomy. Source: DoD ZTRA

A point that the DoD ZTRA really drives home with this figure, as well as the other capability taxonomies and capabilities outlined, is that authentication and authorization need to be driven into every decision possible, as close as possible to the point of decision. These authentication and authorization decisions need to be constant, fine-grained, adaptive, and provide rapid mechanisms for restricting access should it become incongruent with a user’s standard use patterns.

The DoD ZTRA indicates that a service external to the previously mentioned focus areas, known as the “Enterprise Identity Service” (EIS), should be utilized at the control plane to facilitate this. The EIS is made up of three capabilities: the Enterprise Federated Identity Service (EFIS), Automated Account Provisioning (AAP), and the Master User Record (MUR). At a high level, these capabilities map to federated authentication and authorization, identity governance/lifecycle management, and the aggregation of contextually important attributes for a given entity (person or otherwise) for the purposes of driving those authentication and authorization decisions. Examples include credentials, roles, attributes defining access classifications, policy/context-driving attributes (such as a risk score for a given user), and so on.

This begs a question of scale: is the DoD ZTRA meant to construct one system to rule them all?  Not necessarily. To quote the DoD ZTRA on this, “DoD enterprise ICAM service providers provide one or more services that support ICAM capabilities. A service is defined as DoD enterprise if it can be used by anyone across the DoD, and, for externally facing federation services, by any DoD mission partner”. The document goes on to define requirements for these service providers, as well as DoD component organization requirements. Ultimately, there will be many implementations of an EIS across the DoD. In these many implementations, they will be able to best meet the needs of the mission while still conforming to the goal of eliminating implicit trust wherever possible.

A goal of this externalized service is then to be reusable and interoperable- while the DoD does not provide specifics around each service, it is to be assumed that an EIS for a given DoD organizational component should be able to communicate effectively to every other DoD organizational component and mission partner as it needs to. If this were not the case, the DoD would be back to building stovepipe systems- systems with limited scope and function, possessing data that, by the nature of the system, is difficult to use outside of the system. Identity commonly falls into this trap, where a given system owner may wish to implement their own flavor of an identity capability with a custom schema or custom relationship model.

In Summary

There should be minimal surprise when we see that the DoD ZTRA offers no revolutions in security or identity thought. It is instead a synthesis of practices that identity and security practitioners have been pointing towards as being critical for years. Whether the people who perform integrations across the federal government take this guidance to heart remains to be seen. It is this author’s hope that given time and appropriate space the DoD ZTRA will not act as the final word on the topic but is merely the beginning of the conversation with respect to integrating sound identity practices into large and distributed organizations.

Author Bio

Rusty Deaton has been in Identity and Access Management for over a decade. He began in technology as a technical support engineer for a Broker-Dealer and has since worked across many industries, carrying forward a passion for doing right by people. When not solving problems, he loves to tinker with electronics and read. He currently works as Federal Principal Architect for Radiant Logic.

The post The Identity-Driven Reality of Zero Trust appeared first on IDPro.