Login
In an ever-evolving digital landscape, cybersecurity has become the cornerstone of organizational success. With the proliferation of sophisticated cyber threats, businesses must adopt a multi-layered… Read more on Cisco Blogs
Providing secure access and a frictionless user experience are typically competing initiatives, but they don’t have to be! Read on to learn why.
In our world today, context changes quickly. We work from home, coffee shops and the office. We use multiple devices to do work. And on the flip side, attackers are becoming increasingly savvy, getting around security controls, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), to gain unauthorized access.
To quote Wendy Nather, Cisco’s head of Advisory CISOs, “Trust is neither binary nor permanent.” Therefore, security controls must constantly evaluate for change in trust, but without adding unnecessary friction for end-users.
It’s no surprise that the recently published Cybersecurity Readiness Index, a survey of 6,700 cybersecurity leaders from across the globe, revealed that more progress is needed to protect identity, networks and applications.
To address these challenges and to make zero trust access for the workforce easy and frictionless, Cisco Duo announced the general availability of Risk-Based Authentication and enhancements to our enterprise ready Single Sign-On solution at Cisco Live EMEA 2023 earlier this week.
Risk-Based Authentication fulfills the zero trust philosophy of continuous trust verification by assessing the risk level for each access attempt in a manner that is frictionless to users. A higher level of authentication is required only when there is an increase in assessed risk. Duo dynamically detects risk and automatically steps up authentication with two key policies:
The Risk-Based Factor Selection policy detects and analyzes authentication requests and adaptively enforces the most secure factors. It highlights risk and adapts its understanding of normal user behavior. It does this by looking for known attack patterns and anomalies and then allowing only the more secure authentication methods to gain access.
For example, Duo can detect if an organization or employee is being targeted for a push bombing attack or if the authentication device and access device are in two different countries, and Duo responds by automatically elevating the authentication request to a more secure factor such as phishing resistant FIDO2 security keys or Verified Duo Push.
The Risk-Based Remembered Devices policy establishes a trusted device session (like “remember this computer” check box), automatically without asking the user the check a box, during a successful authentication. Once the session is established, Duo looks for anomalous IP addresses or changes to a device throughout the lifetime of the trusted session and requires re-authentication only if it observes a change from historical baselines.
The policy also incorporates a Wi-Fi Fingerprint provided by Duo Device Health app to ensure that IP address changes reflect actual changes in location and not normal usage scenarios such as a user establishing an organizational VPN (Virtual Private Network) session.
Duo uses anonymized Wi-Fi Fingerprint to reliably detect whether the access device is in the same location as it was for previous authentications by comparing the Wi-Fi networks that are “visible” to the access device. Further, Duo preserves user privacy and does not track user location or collect any private information. Wi-Fi Fingerprint only lets Duo know if a user has changed location.
A typical organization uses over 250 applications. Single sign-on (SSO) solutions help employees access multiple applications with a single set of credentials and allow administrators to enforce granular policies for application access from a single console. Integrated with MFA or passwordless authentication, SSO serves as a critical access management tool for organizations that want to implement zero trust access to corporate applications.
Duo SSO is already popular among Duo’s customers. Now, we are adding two new capabilities that cater to modern enterprises:
An increasing number of applications use OIDC for authentication. It is a modern authentication protocol that lets application and website developers authenticate users without storing and managing other people’s passwords, which is both difficult and risky. To date, Duo SSO has supported SAML web applications. Supporting OIDC allows us to protect more of the applications that our customers are adopting as we all move towards a mobile-first world and integrate stronger and modern authentication methods.
Password resets are expensive for organizations. It is estimated that 20-50% of IT helpdesk tickets are for password resets. And according to a report by Ponemon Institute, large enterprises experience an average loss of $5.2 million a year in user productivity due to password resets.
When logging into browser-based applications, Duo SSO already allows users to reset passwords when they have expired in the same login workflow. And we heard from our customers that users want the option to proactively reset passwords. Now, Duo SSO offers the convenience to reset their Active Directly passwords before they expire. This capability further increases user productivity and reduces IT helpdesk tickets.
Risk-Based Authentication and enhancements to Duo SSO are available now to all paying customers based on their Duo Edition. If you are not yet a Duo customer, sign up for a free 30-day trial and try out these new capabilities today!
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Cisco Live is the premier destination for Cisco customers and partners to gain knowledge and build community. Our teams work hard to deliver education and inspiration, ignite creativity, deliver practical know-how, and accelerate the connections that fuel your digital future.
The Cisco Secure team is excited to share our expertise to help power the strategies – and safety – of your organization.
In 2023, the threat landscape will evolve to one that sees attacks on every surface, from criminals who are opportunistic, yet laser-focused on their goal. The attacks themselves could be email-borne, directly targeted, socially based, or a mix of all three.
Criminals will target vulnerabilities, operational deficiencies, suppliers, and business partners, as a means of accomplishing their goals. They will use the target’s own environment and take advantage of existing people and technology problems, including alert fatigue and staffing shortages.
To face this reality and address the needs of organizations both large and small, Cisco will continue to focus on education and innovation in the areas of preventing insider threats, providing consistent and informed alerts, enabling actionable intelligence, and delivering solutions to implement a zero-trust security framework.
As the organization that pioneered networking, we are driven to secure every connection, providing end-to-end protection for users and devices across multiple clouds and networks with a seamless experience.
As our vision for the integrated Cisco Security Cloud evolves, we’re continuing to challenge existing models and unify security and networking, with foundational elements that execute on this vision. From verified push – which protects organizations from MFA-focused phishing attacks – to Wi-Fi Fingerprint, and Remembered Devices, the performance enhancements with Enterprise Single Sign-on and Cisco+ Secure Connect, we continue to meet our customers where they are, offering true zero trust, with frictionless experiences for the hybrid workforce.
We’re excited to celebrate the following innovations and updates announced at Cisco Live EMEA:
Finding the balance between usability and security is now easier than ever. With Risk-Based Authentication, users have the access they need, secured by real-time contextual signals. Organizations can increase security efficacy by dynamically adjusting authentication requirements based on risk levels and by enabling safer end-user behavior. Risk-based authentication now includes wi-fi fingerprint, remembered device, and verified push features, which work together to reduce risk while preserving user experience by only requesting additional interaction for suspicious logins or a change in risk.
Our Enterprise Ready Single Sign-on expands Duo SSO with three new capabilities to easily connect single sign-on to modern apps and empower end users. By adding major protocol support, improved admin tooling, and SSO on demand password resets, organizations enable easier and more secure access from anywhere.
Cisco SD-WAN customers can now enjoy all the benefits of a turnkey, single-vendor SASE solution that brings together industry-leading networking with security: Cisco+ Secure Connect. This new integration gives Cisco SD-WAN (powered by Viptela) customers fast, secure private application and internet access, enabling them to deliver a secure experience, anywhere work happens.
We are also announcing the introduction of industry-first Business Risk Observability, an enhancement of our Full-Stack Observability application security solution. Available through Cisco Secure Application, which is integrated into Cisco AppDynamics, it provides a business risk scoring solution which brings together Kenna Risk Meter score distribution and Business Transactions from Cisco AppDynamics and integrates with Panoptica for API security and Talos for threat intelligence.
The initial findings from our first Cybersecurity Readiness Index reveal that while technology to devices is widely adopted, more progress is needed to protect identity, networks and applications. The report assessed the preparedness of companies around the world to safeguard against cyber threats in the current environment. See our key findings and security readiness trends, with the full report launching in the coming weeks.
As we navigate 2023, we will continue to face uncertainties and challenges. We are fully committed to our customers and partners in the journey to provide security resilience, supporting a frictionless user experience, and solutions threat intelligence that work to continually minimize risk.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
At Cisco Duo, we continually strive to enhance our products to make it easy for security practitioners to apply access policies based on the principles of zero trust. This blog highlights how Duo is achieving that goal by simplifying user and administrator experience and supporting data sovereignty requirements for customers around the world. Read on to get an overview of what we have been delivering to our customers in those areas in the past few months.
Duo strives to make secure access frictionless for employees while reducing the administrative burden on IT (Information Technology) and helpdesk teams. This is made possible thanks to the strong relationship between our customers and our user research team. The insights we gained helped us implement some exciting enhancements to Duo Single Sign-On (SSO) and Device Trust capabilities.
Duo SSO unifies identities across systems and reduces the number of credentials a user must remember and enter to gain access to resources. Active Directory (AD) is the most popular authentication source connected to Duo SSO, accounting for almost 80% of all setups. To make Duo’s integration with AD even easier to implement, we have introduced Duo SSO support for multiple Active Directory forests for organizations that have users in multiple domains. Additionally, we added the Expired Password Resets feature in Duo SSO. It provides an easy experience for users to quickly reset their expired Active Directory password, log into their application, and carry on with their day. Continuing the theme of self service, we introduced a hosted device management portal – a highly requested feature from customers. Now administrators no longer need to host and manage the portal, and end users can login with Duo SSO to manage their authentication devices (e.g.: TouchID, security keys, mobile phone etc.) without needing to open IT helpdesk tickets.
We are also simplifying the administrator experience. We have made it easy for administrators to configure Duo SSO with Microsoft 365 using an out of the box integration. Duo SSO layers Duo’s strong authentication and flexible policy engine on top of Microsoft 365 logins. Further, we have heard from many customers that they want to deliver a seamless on-brand login experience for their workforce. To support this, we have made custom branding so simple that administrators can quickly customize their end-user authentication experience from the settings page in the Duo Admin Panel.
Device Trust is a critical capability required to enable secure access for the modern workforce from any location. We have made it easy for organizations to adopt device trust and distinguish between managed and unmanaged devices. Organizations can enforce a Trusted Endpoint policy to allow access only from managed devices for critical applications. We have eliminated the requirement to deploy and manage device certificates to enforce this policy. Device Health application now checks the managed status of a device. This lowers administrative overhead while enabling organizations to achieve a better balance between security and usability. We have also added out-of-box integrations with unified endpoint management solutions such as Active Directory domain-joined devices, Microsoft Intune, Jamf Pro and VMware Workspace ONE. For organizations that have deployed a solution that is not listed above, Duo provides a Device API that works with any enterprise device management system.
To support our growing customer base around the world, Duo expanded its data center presence to Australia, Singapore, and Japan in September last year. And now Duo is thrilled to announce the launch of the two new data centers in the UK and India. Both the new and existing data centers will allow customers to meet all local requirements, all while maintaining ISO27001 and SOC2 compliance and a 99.999% service availability goal.
The launch of the new data centers is the backbone of Duo’s international expansion strategy. In the last two years, Duo has met key international growth milestones and completed the C5 attestation (Germany), AgID certification (Italy) and IRAP assessment (Australia) – all of which demonstrate that Duo meets the mandatory baseline standards for use by the public sector in the countries listed above. Check out this Privacy Data Sheet to learn more about Cisco Duo’s commitment to our customer’s data privacy and data sovereignty.
That is a summary of what we have been up to here at Cisco Duo in the past few months. But we are not done yet! Stay tuned for more exciting announcements at RSA Conference 2022 next week. Visit us at our booth at RSAC 2022 and World of solutions at Cisco Live 2022.
In the meanwhile, check out this on-demand #CiscoChat panel discussion with real-world security practitioners on how they have implemented secure access best practices for hybrid work using Duo. And if you do not want to wait, sign-up for a 30 day trial and experience how Duo can simplify secure access for your workforce.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Sometimes in order to move forward effectively, it’s good to take stock of where we’ve been. In this blog, we’ll review a concept that has been foundational to networking and cybersecurity from the beginning: the session. Why focus on the session? As the philosophy of Zero Trust is adopted more broadly in the security industry, it’s important to understand the building blocks of access. The session is a fundamental component of access to any resource.
To get things started, let’s start with a definition. A simple definition of a session might be: “a period of time devoted to a particular activity.” Not so bad, but the complexity for internet and network security springs from scoping the “particular activity.”
The internet exists on top of a standardized suite of protocols that govern how data can be transmitted or exchanged between different entities. This suite, now generally referred to as the TCP/IP stack, is comprised of four distinct layers that delineate how data flows between networked resources. This is where the scoping of a session becomes obscure. The “particular activity” could refer to the network layer, which is responsible for establishing communications between the actual physical networks. Or, perhaps the activity refers to the Internet layer, which ensures the packets of data reach their destinations across network boundaries. The activity could also be the transport layer, responsible for the reliability of end-to-end communication across the network. It could also be referencing the application layer, the highest layer of the TCP/IP stack, which is responsible for the interface and protocols used by applications and users. For the familiar, these layers were originally defined in the OSI model.
This layering framework works well for establishing the distinct session types and how we can begin to protect them. However, the rise of cloud-based services means we must now also look at how sessions are defined in relation to the cloud — especially as we look to provide security and access controls. At the application layer, we now have client devices with web browsers and applications that communicate to a cloud service. Additionally, cloud services can be one or a combination of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, each defining their own session and thus access.
With all the different classes of sessions, there are different mechanisms and protocols by which authentication and authorization are employed to eventually provide that access. All sessions use some type of account or credential to authenticate and evaluate a set of variables to determine authorization or access. Some of these variables may also be similar across different sessions. For example, an enterprise may evaluate the device’s security posture (e.g. it is running the latest OS patches) as a variable to grant access at both the network and application layer. Similarly, the same username and password may be used across different session layers.
However, each layer might also use distinct and specific variables to evaluate the appropriate access level. For instance, the network interface layer may want to ensure cryptographic compliance of the network interfaces. A cloud service may evaluate geographical or regional compliance. The common practice today is to have every session layer act alone to make its own access decision.
Let’s take a step back and review.
Now, let’s explore something new: what if the variables and access evaluation outcomes were shared seamlessly across session layers?
What if recent network context and activity were used to inform cloud access decisions? Or, recent user access decisions across the network layers be used to inform cloud application controls? Think about the enhanced resilience provided if network-based risk signal like packet information could be appropriately mapped and shared with the cloud application layer. Sharing information across session boundaries provides more robust fulfillment of Zero Trust principles by striving to evaluate security context as holistically as possible at the time of access.
In order to build a future where security decisions are informed by broader and continuous context, we’ll need tools and protocols that help us bridge tools and map data across them. To provide improved access and security, both the bridge and the correct mapping must be in place. It’s one thing to get the data transferred to another tool, it’s quite another to map that data into relevance for the new tool. For example, how do we map a privileged application credential to a device? And, then how do we map relevant context across systems?
The good news is that work is starting to enable a future where regardless of session definition, security context can be mapped and shared. Protocols such as the Shared Signals and Events and the Open Policy Agent are evolving to enable timely and dynamic signal sharing between tools, but they are nascent and broader adoption is required. Cisco has already contributed a technical reference architecture as a guide for Shared Signals and Events. We hope that by accelerating the adoption of these standards the industry gets one step closer to actively sharing relevant security context across OSI layers. While the road ahead won’t be easy, we think the sharing signals will make for a more resilient and robust security future.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
FreshRSS 