Michael Roman
CYSE 201S
11/10/22
Prof. Armistead
Article Review 2
For article review number 2 I chose a slightly different path that is less talked about and not a major problem until this year and the upcoming years. This problem and article that I want to talk about are about machine identity management and how fast it is growing. Now to explain what exactly this is it all starts really with Covid-19, once the coronavirus struck a lot of companies had their employees start working from home or having a hybrid schedule where they work from home a certain amount of days and then the office. Now the one huge difference this made was the number of machines that are now online and connected to multiple different servers. This creates a lot more vulnerabilities within the company because now you have one person in California working for your company and the other person in Texas working for you. Having more machines means more problems as well as having to identify all of your working machines and monitor them. In the article, they said, “there were 20 billion devices connected to the internet in 2021, and this number will jump to 29 billion by 2023”. If you think about that are an insane amount of machines to identify and protect from cyber attacks. This is the problem companies are having now how to be able to identify and protect themselves from all these different vulnerabilities. With that being said this is still a very new problem that they are figuring out but, at least it is on the radar now and is being worked on as we speak. It is also very hard because some companies’ machines are connected to serverless cloud functions that also need to be protected but in a different sense. Some of the other problems for machine identity is the physical security of these machines. With there being so many machines yes cybercrime is something to worry extremely about but so is the physical security of these machines, with there being so many it is hard to watch over all of them and have proper physical security layers to some of the more expensive machines. Although, expensive machines aren’t the only things to worry about the article said earlier with a lot of people working from home that is a scary easy vulnerable side for a company. All it takes is one employee’s computer to be stolen and broken into in order to see possible classified information about whatever company it is. That is harder to protect than having to protect a giant server room. You have to count on your employees to be able to protect the equipment from being broken into or stolen when it is in their personal living areas. Toward the end of the article, they talk about zero trust security. What is zero-trust security? Zero-trust security is where you have to be authenticated, authorized, and always validated no matter what. That’s why it is called zero trust because no matter who or where you are there is no excuse and you have to validate yourself multiple times in order to access whatever it is you are trying to login to. This process eliminates a lot of unwanted users from accessing any information about the company or whatever it is they are trying to get into. I really enjoyed this article because it talked about a problem that I wouldn’t consider “mainstream”. It is an interesting topic that could take some serious time to try and figure out due to the amount of hardware there actually is in the world that needs more physical security which at the same time is also a good thing because it does create more jobs. Overall this was a great article to read and talk about. Hopefully, this problem gets brought up more and is solved as soon as it is able to, with how fast technology is growing this could be a serious problem if not looked at sooner.
References
05, Maria Korolov | May. “Machine Identity Management: A Fast-Growing Frontier of Security.” ITPro Today: IT News, How-Tos, Trends, Case Studies, Career Tips, More, 5 May 2022, https://www.itprotoday.com/security/machine-identity-management-fast-growing-frontier-security.
“What Is Zero Trust Security? Principles of the Zero Trust Model.” Crowdstrike.com, 13 Oct. 2022, https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/zero-trust-security/.