CIAM Attack Vectors and Protecting Against Them

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Ensuring the safety of online accounts has become a critical concern for businesses and consumers alike. The increasing prevalence of cyberattacks and data breaches makes it essential for organisations to adopt robust security measures to protect their users.

I’m Peter Fernandez, and in this article, I’m going to be looking at the various attack vectors and how protection strategies aimed at defending against a wide variety of these threats — targeting customer data as well as the typical authentication and authorization processes — can be leveraged as part of a Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solution.

Types of Attack

As discussed in my previous article (above), CIAM enables businesses to manage customer identities, authenticate users, and authorise access to digital resources or services. An effective CIAM solution balances convenience with security, ensuring that legitimate users can access their accounts and services with minimal friction while blocking malicious actors.

An effective CIAM solution not only provides a seamless user experience but also ensures that sensitive data remains secure by implementing attack protection in a proactive manner. Cyber-attacks targeting CIAM systems can take many forms, designed to either compromise user accounts, steal sensitive data, or gain unauthorised access to internal systems.

Credential Stuffing

Credential stuffing is a form of attack where cybercriminals utilise stolen username and password combinations from previous data breaches to try and gain unauthorised access to user accounts. Since many users reuse passwords across multiple platforms, credential stuffing is a common and highly effective method for hackers to exploit weak security practices.

In a CIAM implementation, credential stuffing can overwhelm the login process, especially if there are no protection mechanisms in place to detect and block repeated login attempts. As a result, this can lead to account takeovers, data theft, or service disruption.

Brute Force

Similar to credential stuffing, brute force attacks involve systematically trying every possible password combination until the correct one is found. Cybercriminals typically use automated tools to carry out these attacks, testing thousands or even millions of password combinations for a given user identifier in a short period of time.

The effectiveness of a brute force attack is greatly reduced by implementing countermeasures like rate limiting or account lockouts after a certain number of failed login attempts. Without these defences in place, a brute force attack could again result in unauthorised access to user accounts and/or account takeover.

Phishing

Phishing attacks involve tricking users into revealing sensitive information such as UserIDs and Passwords by impersonating legitimate entities. These attacks can take many forms, such as fake login pages, emails, or SMS messages designed to deceive users into entering their credentials.

CIAM implementations are often targeted by phishing schemes to steal login information or bypass authentication mechanisms. If a user is tricked into providing their credentials, it can ultimately lead to account takeovers or unauthorised access to sensitive data.

Man-in-the-Middle (MITM)

In a man-in-the-middle attack, the attacker intercepts communication between the user and the CIAM system. This type of attack can allow the attacker to steal login credentials, inject malicious code, or manipulate data without the knowledge of the legitimate user or the system.

MITM attacks are particularly dangerous in situations where sensitive data, such as financial transactions or personal information, is being transmitted. CIAM systems must ensure that data is encrypted during transmission to prevent interception and modification.

Account Takeover

Account takeover occurs when an attacker gains control of a legitimate user’s account, usually through methods like phishing, credential stuffing (often exploiting weak passwords) or brute force attacks. Once the attacker has control, they can access sensitive data, perform fraudulent transactions, or even alter account details.

Service Vulnerabilities

I recently came across an article on LinkedIn (below) which highlighted how ChatGPT was used to generate a vulnerability exploit. This got me to thinking about how AI can potentially increase the scale of magnitude when it comes to the threat landscape, giving malicious attackers the opportunity to uncover vulnerabilities when it comes to CIAM integrations, third-party SaaS CIAM solutions, and the like.

Attack Protection Mechanisms

CIAM solutions must have mechanisms in place to detect unusual account activity and prevent unauthorised changes to user profiles, especially in cases where an attacker has successfully obtained a valid set of credentials.

Not only that, but systems also need to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in the threat landscape; bad actors are constantly finding new exploits and new vulnerabilities to exploit, so both your B2C/B2B SaaS and the CIAM solution with which it integrates must be vigilant and evolving.

Given the variety of attacks targeting customer identities and data, security policies enforcing rules around password strength, multi-factor authentication, and other security protocols are important, and a multi-layered approach to attack protection is particularly beneficial.

When it comes to attack protection, effective measures not only secure sensitive data but also enhance the overall user experience by preventing unauthorised access without causing unnecessary friction for legitimate users.

Patching

Arguably, one of the easiest and most effective countermeasures is to ensure that the latest patches have been applied to the systems which which your B2C/B2B SaaS solution integrates. This includes applying the latest updates to SDKs — whether released by third-party SaaS CIAM vendors, or the like — and/or deployed implementations if you are taking the DIY (Deploy It Yourself) route to CIAM.

Being up-to-date with the latest releases is a great way to protect against service vulnerabilities, and the more responsible third-party SaaS CIAM vendors often provide a list of security disclosures, which include recommended remediation(s); the Auth0 website, for example, is home to the platform Security Bulletins page, which provides consumers with their latest information.

Additionally, the use of AI can offer a way to stay on top of the latest patch requirements and recommendations. Even something like the free tier of ChatGPT can produce meaningful results from a simple query (such as the example below, replacing <xyz> with the third-party CIAM vendor of choice), particularly if you are also able to cross-reference the result with whatever security advisory is also available:

list all vulnerabilities in the <xyz> platform 

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a security measure that requires users to provide two or more verification factors to authenticate their identity. In addition to something the user knows (like a password), MFA typically requires something the user has (such as a mobile device or hardware token) or something the user is (such as biometric data).

MFA significantly reduces the risk of unauthorised access because even if an attacker obtains a user’s password, they would still need to bypass the second factor to gain access. MFA isn’t necessarily fool-proof, particularly where factors can be targeted by MITM attack, but it is one of the most effective tools in preventing account takeovers, especially when combined with other protective measures.

IP Throttling

When attacks happen, they often come from a consistent IP address or IP address range. In many cases, these are also well-known as sources where attacks originate. Being able to identify such suspicious IP addresses (and do so in an autonomous fashion) provides signal information that can be used to dynamically restrict potentially dangerous traffic.

Rate Limiting

Rate limiting is the practice of restricting the number of attempts at something, i.e. login attempts, executed within a certain time frame. This can help defend against brute force and credential stuffing attacks by slowing down attackers who try to guess passwords or repeatedly submit login attempts.

CAPTCHA

The Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart — or CAPTCHA, for short — is often used in conjunction with rate limiting to differentiate between human users and automated bots. CAPTCHA challenges, such as identifying distorted text or images, make it much harder for automated scripts to execute mass login attempts.

Breached Password Detection

Reusing credentials where the Password has already been breached – i.e. cracked by one or more malicious actors – is far more susceptible to account takeover and/or loss of data. Detecting a breached password credential and preventing it from being used is critical to mitigating such an attack.

Behavioral Analytics

Behavioural analytics uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyse user behaviour and identify patterns indicative of suspicious activity. For example, if a user suddenly logs in from an unusual location or at an abnormal time, the system may trigger additional authentication steps to verify the user’s identity.

Risk-based Authentication

Risk-based authentication — another type of mechanism that can benefit from machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques — helps ensure that legitimate users have a seamless experience while adding extra layers of security for potentially high-risk actions or suspicious logins.

Encryption

To mitigate Man-In-The-Middle attacks, CIAM integrations must use encryption to protect data both at rest and in transit.

From a transit perspective, Transport Layer Security (TLS) — a.k.a. SSL or Secure Sockets Layer — is the standard protocol used to encrypt communication between user devices and back-end systems/APIs, ensuring that sensitive data and personal information cannot be intercepted by attackers.

From a data storage/data at rest perspective, implementations should ensure that security-sensitive information, such as passwords, is stored securely using encryption techniques such as hashing (which converts passwords into a secure, irreversible format).

Monitoring

Continuous monitoring of user accounts for signs of unusual activity can help identify and mitigate potential account takeovers before they escalate. CIAM systems can employ protection measures such as alerting users to suspicious activity, requiring additional verification steps if abnormal login attempts are detected, or even temporarily locking accounts to prevent further damage.

Best Practice Adoption

This might seem obvious, but adopting best-practice recommendations, such as the use of MFA, and staying up to date with them, is an excellent way of protecting you and your customers from malicious attacks.

Doing so, however, can be difficult to justify — especially if you’re integrating CIAM within an existing SaaS application where your consumers have become familiar with a particular user experience. Even if you’re integration is a green-field one, the pressures from other aspects of the software development process might mean it’s too time-consuming or less than cost-effective to comply with best practices.

Besides, best practices often change over time. For example, guidance provided regarding the OAuth 2.0 Resource Owner Password (a.k.a. Resource Owner Password Grant) flow leveraged by many early CIAM integrations, and flows similar to it — such as the embedded flows provided by Auth0 Lock — has changed, and the use of these technologies as a general practice is no longer recommended.