Ephemeral Accounts
In the context of cybersecurity, ephemeral accounts are temporary user identities or credentials created for a specific, authorized purpose and a limited duration. The term "ephemeral" literally means "lasting for a very short time," which is the core principle behind this security approach. Once the defined task is completed or the time limit expires, the account is automatically deactivated, deleted, or rendered useless.
Ephemeral accounts are a key component of modern security models like Just-in-Time (JIT) access and the Principle of Least Privilege. They are in direct contrast to traditional, long-lived "standing privileges" where a user has continuous access to a system, even when they aren't actively using it.
Key Characteristics
Temporary Nature: Ephemeral accounts are designed to exist for a very short period, ranging from minutes to hours, depending on the task.
Just-in-Time (JIT) Provisioning: They are created only when a user or system needs them. This means no account exists until a specific, auditable request is made.
Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP): These accounts are provisioned with only the minimum necessary permissions to complete the specific task. They do not have broad or excessive access rights.
Automatic Revocation: The account and its associated credentials are automatically removed or disabled once the task is done or the time limit is reached, eliminating the risk of lingering access.
Benefits in Cybersecurity
The use of ephemeral accounts significantly enhances an organization's security posture by directly addressing common vulnerabilities.
Reduced Attack Surface: Because accounts are short-lived, the window of opportunity for an attacker to compromise and exploit them is drastically reduced. An attacker has to be in the right place at the right time.
Mitigation of Insider Threats: Ephemeral accounts limit the potential for malicious insiders or compromised users to misuse privileges over an extended period. Because access is temporary and scoped, there is less opportunity for unauthorized activity.
Enhanced Auditability: The creation, use, and termination of ephemeral accounts are typically logged in detail. This provides a clear, traceable audit trail for security teams, making it easier to investigate any suspicious activity or a breach.
Improved Compliance: Many regulatory frameworks and standards, such as GDPR and HIPAA, require strict access controls. Ephemeral accounts help organizations meet these requirements by enforcing the Principles of Least Privilege and Just-in-Time access.
Common Use Cases
Ephemeral accounts are handy in environments with many temporary users or automated processes.
Third-Party Contractors and Vendors: Granting a contractor a temporary account with specific access to a project for a set number of hours or days, after which the account is automatically removed.
Emergency ("Break Glass") Access: In an emergency, a system administrator can be granted a highly privileged, temporary account to perform a critical task. This prevents them from having permanent, high-level access that could be compromised.
DevOps and Cloud Environments: Automated scripts and pipelines can be given temporary, restricted accounts to deploy code or manage resources in a cloud environment. This prevents a compromised script from having persistent access to the entire infrastructure.
Ephemeral accounts, while critical for reducing standing privilege, introduce risk if their provisioning credentials or underlying infrastructure are exposed. ThreatNG focuses on the external, attacker-visible exposures that could compromise systems that provision or are provisioned by these temporary identities.
ThreatNG's Role in Protecting Ephemeral Accounts
ThreatNG’s entire platform, built on purely external unauthenticated discovery, simulates the reconnaissance an attacker would perform to find weaknesses that would allow them to either steal the mechanism used to create the ephemeral account or target the account during its brief existence. The platform maintains Continuous Monitoring to detect any temporary exposure related to ephemeral accounts immediately.
External Assessment and Examples
While ThreatNG doesn't directly assess the internal lifecycle of an ephemeral account, its ratings capture the critical external failures that could lead to its compromise:
Non-Human Identity (NHI) Exposure Security Rating: This metric quantifies the risk posed by high-privilege machine identities, which are often used to provision or manage ephemeral access (e.g., an IAM role or service account key).
Example: If an attacker compromises the static credentials of the central Secrets Management Solution (which provisions ephemeral accounts), the entire ephemeral account provisioning process is broken. ThreatNG flags this risk by identifying hardcoded secrets, such as an AWS Access Key ID or a Google Cloud Platform OAuth token, that are often used by the provisioning system itself.
Cyber Risk Exposure: This rating includes assessing Subdomains intelligence for Exposed Ports.
Example: Ephemeral accounts are often generated for remote access (e.g., JIT SSH access). If the underlying server is misconfigured and exposes an SSH port, ThreatNG flags it. This vulnerability compromises the infrastructure that the ephemeral access mechanism is meant to protect, weakening the overall security.
Sensitive Code Discovery and Exposure (Code Secret Exposure): This directly addresses the external leakage of core credentials used during the creation or access of the ephemeral account.
Investigation Modules and Examples
The investigation modules pinpoint the infrastructure and secrets related to ephemeral account systems:
Sensitive Code Exposure: This module is critical for finding the "keys to the kingdom" that manage ephemeral access. The Code Repository Exposure submodule discovers secrets in public repositories.
Example: ThreatNG identifies a public repository containing a Terraform variable config file or a Docker configuration file with hardcoded service account credentials. These files often define the roles and access that an ephemeral solution relies on, making their leakage a severe risk to the entire JIT process.
Subdomain Intelligence: This module discovers the infrastructure hosting the ephemeral service. It identifies subdomains hosted on PaaS & Serverless platforms like Heroku or Vercel.
Example: ThreatNG discovers a publicly exposed Development Environment subdomain running an ephemeral login service. This external exposure could allow an attacker to test exploit techniques against the service.
NHI Email Exposure: This module identifies role-based addresses (like devops, system, svc, and integration) that might receive alerts or management access to the ephemeral provisioning system, making them targets for compromise.
Intelligence Repositories and Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's intelligence provides crucial context for prioritizing ephemeral account risks:
Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture): If ThreatNG discovers a hardcoded credential, this repository immediately checks whether the same credential has been found in dark web dumps. This confirms active compromise risk for the provisioning system, which is vital since the ephemeral accounts themselves cannot be easily tracked on the dark web.
Context Engine™: The engine delivers Legal-Grade Attribution, converting technical findings (like a leaked service account key used to provision ephemeral access) into irrefutable evidence to justify immediate changes to the provisioning system.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG’s external findings can be powerfully used with internal systems that manage ephemeral accounts:
Privileged Access Management (PAM) Systems: When ThreatNG discovers a leaked SSH DSA Private Key in a public repository, it can send an external alert to the PAM system. The PAM system can then automatically use this external finding to disable the exposed key and force a re-enrollment of the corresponding machine identity, ensuring that only ephemeral, JIT access is granted going forward, and not the static, long-lived access represented by the key.
Secrets Management Solutions: When ThreatNG detects a hardcoded service credential, it sends an alert to the Secrets Management tool. The tool can then automatically use the alert to revoke the exposed key and ensure that all applications requiring this access are migrated to fetch ephemeral tokens from the vault, eliminating static, hardcoded credentials from the provisioning process.
Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platforms: A critical alert from ThreatNG regarding a significant Sensitive Code Exposure of a DevOps credential can trigger a SOAR platform. The SOAR platform can automatically use this external finding to open a high-priority incident ticket and initiate automated steps to quarantine the exposed code or asset, protecting the infrastructure that manages the ephemeral accounts.
