L’avenir du Zero Trust et du SASE, c’est maintenant ! Regarder à la demande

fermer
fermer
  • Pourquoi Netskope signe chevron

    Changer la façon dont le réseau et la sécurité fonctionnent ensemble.

  • Nos clients signe chevron

    Netskope sert plus de 3 000 clients dans le monde entier, dont plus de 25 entreprises du classement Fortune 100

  • Nos partenaires signe chevron

    Nous collaborons avec des leaders de la sécurité pour vous aider à sécuriser votre transition vers le cloud.

Meilleure capacité d'exécution. Le plus loin dans sa vision.

Netskope nommé leader dans le rapport Magic Quadrant™️ 2023 pour SSE de Gartner®.

Recevoir le rapport
Netskope nommé leader dans le rapport Magic Quadrant™️ 2023 pour SSE de Gartner®.
Nous parons nos clients à l'avenir, quel qu'il soit

See our customers
Woman smiling with glasses looking out window
La stratégie de commercialisation de Netskope privilégie ses partenaires, ce qui leur permet de maximiser leur croissance et leur rentabilité, tout en transformant la sécurité des entreprises.

En savoir plus sur les partenaires de Netskope
Group of diverse young professionals smiling
Votre réseau de demain

Planifiez votre chemin vers un réseau plus rapide, plus sûr et plus résilient, conçu pour les applications et les utilisateurs que vous prenez en charge.

Obtenir le livre blanc
Votre réseau de demain
Introducing the Netskope One Platform

Netskope One is a cloud-native platform that offers converged security and networking services to enable your SASE and zero trust transformation.

En savoir plus sur Netskope One
Abstract with blue lighting
Adopter une architecture SASE (Secure Access Service Edge)

Netskope NewEdge est le nuage privé de sécurité le plus grand et le plus performant au monde. Il offre aux clients une couverture de service, des performances et une résilience inégalées.

Découvrez NewEdge
NewEdge
Netskope Cloud Exchange

Le Netskope Cloud Exchange (CE) fournit aux clients des outils d'intégration puissants pour optimiser les investissements dans l'ensemble de leur infrastructure de sécurité.

En savoir plus sur Cloud Exchange
Vidéo Netskope
La plateforme du futur est Netskope

Intelligent Security Service Edge (SSE), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Cloud Firewall, Next Generation Secure Web Gateway (SWG), et Private Access for ZTNA intégrés nativement dans une solution unique pour aider chaque entreprise dans son cheminement vers l'architecture Secure Access Service Edge (SASE).

Présentation des produits
Vidéo Netskope
Next Gen SASE Branch est hybride - connectée, sécurisée et automatisée

Netskope Next Gen SASE Branch fait converger Context-Aware SASE Fabric, Zero-Trust Hybrid Security et SkopeAI-Powered Cloud Orchestrator dans une offre cloud unifiée, ouvrant la voie à une expérience de succursale entièrement modernisée pour l'entreprise sans frontières.

En savoir plus Next Gen SASE Branch
Personnes au bureau de l'espace ouvert
La conception d'une architecture SASE pour les nuls

Obtenez votre exemplaire gratuit du seul guide consacré à la conception d'une architecture SASE dont vous aurez jamais besoin.

Obtenir l'EBook
Optez pour les meilleurs services de sécurité cloud du marché, avec un temps de latence minimum et une fiabilité élevée.

Découvrez NewEdge
Lighted highway through mountainside switchbacks
Permettez en toute sécurité l'utilisation d'applications d'IA générative grâce au contrôle d'accès aux applications, à l'accompagnement des utilisateurs en temps réel et à une protection des données de premier ordre.

Découvrez comment nous sécurisons l'utilisation de l'IA générative
Autorisez ChatGPT et l’IA générative en toute sécurité
Solutions Zero Trust pour les déploiements du SSE et du SASE

En savoir plus sur la confiance zéro
Boat driving through open sea
Netskope obtient l'autorisation FedRAMP High Authorization

Choisissez Netskope GovCloud pour accélérer la transformation de votre agence.

En savoir plus sur Netskope GovCloud
Netskope GovCloud
  • Ressources signe chevron

    Découvrez comment Netskope peut vous aider à sécuriser votre migration vers le Cloud.

  • Blog signe chevron

    Learn how Netskope enables security and networking transformation through security service edge (SSE)

  • Events and Workshops signe chevron

    Restez à l'affût des dernières tendances en matière de sécurité et créez des liens avec vos pairs.

  • Définition de la sécurité signe chevron

    Tout ce que vous devez savoir dans notre encyclopédie de la cybersécurité.

Podcast Security Visionaries

Élections, désinformation et sécurité
Cet épisode se penche sur les aspects de la sécurité électorale liés à l'inscription des électeurs et aux contrôles physiques dans les bureaux de vote.

Écouter le podcast
Blog : Élections, désinformation et sécurité
Derniers blogs

Read how Netskope can enable the Zero Trust and SASE journey through security service edge (SSE) capabilities.

Lire le blog
Sunrise and cloudy sky
SASE Week 2023 : Votre voyage SASE commence maintenant !

Retrouvez les sessions de la quatrième édition annuelle de SASE Week.

Explorer les sessions
SASE Week 2023
Qu'est-ce que le Security Service Edge ?

Découvrez le côté sécurité de SASE, l'avenir du réseau et de la protection dans le cloud.

En savoir plus sur Security Service Edge
Four-way roundabout
  • Entreprise signe chevron

    Nous vous aidons à conserver une longueur d'avance sur les défis posés par le cloud, les données et les réseaux en matière de sécurité.

  • Équipe de direction signe chevron

    Nos dirigeants sont déterminés à faciliter la réussite de nos clients.

  • Solutions pour les clients signe chevron

    Nous sommes là pour vous et avec vous à chaque étape, pour assurer votre succès avec Netskope.

  • Formation et certification signe chevron

    Avec Netskope, devenez un expert de la sécurité du cloud.

Soutenir le développement durable par la sécurité des données

Netskope est fière de participer à Vision 2045 : une initiative visant à sensibiliser au rôle de l'industrie privée dans le développement durable.

En savoir plus
Soutenir le développement durable grâce à la sécurité des données
Penseurs, concepteurs, rêveurs, innovateurs. Ensemble, nous fournissons le nec plus ultra des solutions de sécurité cloud afin d'aider nos clients à protéger leurs données et leurs collaborateurs.

Rencontrez notre équipe
Group of hikers scaling a snowy mountain
L’équipe de services professionnels talentueuse et expérimentée de Netskope propose une approche prescriptive pour une mise en œuvre réussie.

En savoir plus sur les services professionnels
Services professionnels Netskope
Sécurisez votre parcours de transformation numérique et tirez le meilleur parti de vos applications cloud, Web et privées grâce à la formation Netskope.

En savoir plus sur les formations et les certifications
Group of young professionals working

Who Do You Trust? OAuth Client Application Trends

Jun 15 2021

Introduction

Federated identity systems, such as Google Identity, bring security and convenience in the form of SSO for Internet or cloud applications. It is common to be prompted for authentication in order to grant various levels of access or permissions for applications ranging from Google Drive, Google Cloud SDK, Google Chrome plugins, Slack, Adobe, Dropbox, or Atlassian to numerous third-party apps.

This is all part of OAuth client application authentication, where a user can securely enter their credentials (which are not shared with the requesting application) and approve the privileges or access (scopes) requested by the application.

However, this set of trust relationships can cause security problems, such as data exposure/loss or data modification, if malicious applications or overly broad permissions are granted.

In this blog, we take a closer look at real-world user activity showing which applications are being trusted and which scopes (permissions) are being granted using Google Identity given its widespread adoption. We’ll analyze anonymized data from Netskope customers that includes 439 organizations, over 500,000 users, and over 60,000 applications. We will look specifically at:

  • Modify/write permissions most requested by applications
  • Which apps may pose more risk to users
  • Overly broad scopes that increase risk

It’s a wonderful application world

What kind of applications are being trusted by corporate Google identities, and therefore, likely being accessed from work computers/devices? 

Here are the top-12 applications that are trusted by at least 5% of the users:

List of the top-12 applications trusted by at least 5% of users

These 12 applications alone are trusted by 497,109 of the users (97% of the total users). Some of these might be official or de facto corporate standards such as Google Chrome (log into Chrome with your Google Identity), Zoom, Slack, Atlassian, or Adobe. Other applications such as iOS Account Manager or Android device or macOS, represent trust to native applications running on those operating systems (e.g. Mail, Chrome, Google Drive).

We also see specialized applications and personal applications:

List of specialized and personal applications trusted by at least 5% of users

Scope creep

What kind of permissions (OAuth scopes) are being approved by all these applications? 

Here are the top 10 scopes (ranked by # of users) that grant “manage” (modify) permissions:

List of top 10 scopes (ranked by # of users) that grant "manage" (modify) permissions

In this list, the “view and manage spreadsheets in Google Drive” scope is requested by the most applications: 11,124 (18.3% of all apps). Some questions that come to mind:

  • Do all of the apps requesting these scopes require “manage” as well as “view” permissions?
  • Does the “View and manage the files in your Google Drive” scope really require access to all files or could/should it be restricted to “View and manage Google Drive files and folders that you have opened or created with this app?”

From a security viewpoint, it would be ideal if application access was restricted to only the data they generate themselves. For these types of cloud apps, their scopes would have a narrow set of privileges such as:

  • View and manage Google Drive files and folders that you have opened or created with this app
  • View and manage forms that this application has been installed in
  • View and manage your data for this application

However, there are valid example types that require broader privileges such as general file sharing or search applications that might need access to your whole Google Drive, or a photo-editing application that needs access to all image/video file types regardless of origin.

It would be natural to focus on applications that request potentially broad scopes and that have higher risk due to the high number of users using those applications. This helps us identify risky applications. Many of these applications have high user counts because they are popular or are corporate standards.

However, we shouldn’t ignore applications with broad scopes that are only used by a few users. These applications may not be popular and may not be developed by well known vendors. However, if they have risk, it indicates that you may have users engaging in risky behavior. This helps us identify risky users.

In general, we can look at scope-based risk along two dimensions and locate applications within the matrix:

Matrix of application based Scope (narrow to broad) and number of users (few to many)

The scope dimension reflects the breadth of permissions allowed by the scope ranging from narrow to broad. The # of users dimension identifies the number of users that use a particular scope. High numbers of users using a particular scope is risky due to the wide usage, but often this is because an application has become a corporate or de facto standard by a well-known company, so the risk factor is more related to the application. Whereas, less-known applications used by few users tend to reflect individual choices and decisions to use applications that are not approved,which reflects more on risky user behavior.

Through this framework, we can start to identify the biggest risk areas to focus on for reducing risk, as we’ll attempt in the following sections.

Overly permissive scopes

Overly permissive scopes include unneeded manage/modify/write permissions or just extra permissions that an application may not require, for example:

  • A scope such as “View and manage the files in your Google Drive” raises the question of whether write access is required or would “View the files in your Google Drive” or “View and manage Google Drive files and folders that you have opened or created with this app” suffice?
  • Extra permissions or scopes being requested that are unexpected for that application could also raise questions (e.g. a spreadsheet application requesting access to contacts).

To gain a sense of higher impact applications, here are the top 20 applications in terms of users that request the “View and manage your mail” scope:

List of the top 20 applications in terms of users that request the "View and manage your mail" scope

As expected, most of the apps relate to email, but with less obvious applications, it’s worth reviewing, for example:

  • Adobe Acrobat is a well-known PDF read/write application, but why does it need read and write access to email? It turns out there is feature that could readily explain this scope request: Gmail integration to send PDFs by email. However, this shows how a convenience feature (being able to easily email PDFs), increases exposure because the application, Acrobat, has full access to your email. This could be acceptable but should be an explicit decision.

As a different example, in our dataset, there is one application trusted by one user, appears only in one organization. It appears to be an internal tool, its title relates to GSuite Security alerts and its list of scopes are:

Manage data access permissions for users on your domain
Manage delegated admin roles for your domain
Manage messages in groups on your domain
Manage the list of sites and domains you control
Manage your Google Classroom class rosters
Manage your Google Classroom classes
Manage your calendars
Manage your contacts
View and manage Google Apps licenses for your domain
View and manage customer related information
View and manage data transfers between users in your organization
View and manage organization units on your domain
View and manage the provisioning of calendar resources on your domain
View and manage the provisioning of domains for your customers
View and manage the provisioning of groups on your domain
View and manage the provisioning of user schemas on your domain
View and manage the provisioning of users on your domain
View and manage the settings of a Google Apps Group
View and manage your Chrome OS devices' metadata
View and manage your mobile devices' metadata
View audit reports of Google Apps for your domain
View the email addresses of people in your classes
View the profile photos of people in your classes
View usage reports of Google Apps for your domain
View your basic profile info
View your data in Google Cloud Storage
View your email address

This scope list approaches administrator control over the entire Google domain, so either it is misnamed or it’s clearly over-privileged. Regardless of the situation, this application design should be reviewed to determine whether isolation of privileges can be done so that a compromise of one user’s credentials or oauth tokens does not immediately expose the whole domain. Certainly tight controls like MFA help mitigate the risk, but hijacking of OAuth tokens bypasses MFA, so practicing minimal privileges (in this case, minimal scopes) is always a good idea. This is an example where the risk source is a combination of both application design and user decisions.

Sensitive data scopes and all files/data of type X

Email, spreadsheets, and Google Drive have higher chances of containing confidential information vs. other data such as your Contacts. Some scopes in this category are:

  • View your emails messages and settings
  • View the files in your Google Drive
  • View and manage your spreadsheets in Google Drive
  • View and manage your data in Google BigQuery

A specific case of sensitive data scopes includes scopes that allow access to all data/files of a certain type. Presumably the application uses this data/file type, which is also used by other applications, for example a spreadsheet application needs to read/write any spreadsheet files, not just the spreadsheets it created. Here are some common examples:

  • View the photos, videos, and albums in your Google Photos
  • View and manage your spreadsheets in Google Drive
  • View and manage your forms in Google Drive

Here are the top applications by user that have requested “View and manage your spreadsheets in Google Drive”:

List of the top applications by user that have requested "View and manage your spreadsheets in Google Drive"

In this case, when looking at broader scopes over more data, we would ask ourselves several questions:

  • Does the application require read/write access to everything in Google Drive? For “file-system management” applications, the answer could be “yes.” 
  • However, for an application that does “searching” of Google Drive, we might ask whether a “search-like” application requires write access. 
  • For any other applications that don’t seem to have features that require access to all of your Google Drive, we might need to investigate further determine if scopes should be more restrictive to data generated only by the application.

As a different example, the CamScanner application is only used by 219 users (.04% of 509.079) and requests “View and manage the files in your Google Drive,” one of the broadest data scopes for regular users. CamScanner was found by Kaspersky in August 2019 to contain malware and was banned by the Indian government over security concerns in June 2020. This reinforces the need to manage application trust and usage, and that risky behavior for a small number of users should also be analyzed, not just applications affecting the largest number of users.

Controls

To operationalize the use of application trust and scope information, we can take a structured approach with multiple defensive measures.

Application policies

One should start by creating policies that define which applications are allowed to be used/trusted by users in your organization. During testing/evaluation of new applications, the definitive application name and client id should be recorded (from the Google Workspace Admin Console > Reports > Audit log > Token report)—this information is crucial for accurate detection of these applications.

Prevention

Once policies are defined, you can enforce your policies upfront by preventing the trust of applications not allowed. The Google Workspace Admin Console allows various API controls to block all third-party API access and whether to trust internal, domain-owned applications:

Screenshot of Google Workspace Admin Console showing various API controls to block all third-party API access and whether to trust internal, domain-owned applications

Detection/Auditing

Ongoing auditing and detection of unauthorized applications can be done in several ways:

  • Audits can be done using the Google Workspace Admin Console > Reports > Audit log > Token report. This information can be programmatically retrieved via API.
  • Real-time Detection can be done by inline controls that can detect not only applications being accessed but also instances in order to distinguish access to personal vs corporate instances. Various proxies and CASBs can help here.

Mitigation

Should unapproved applications be trusted and detected after the fact, then revocation of the application can be done via Google Workspace Admin Console or API. In the Console, Users > users > Security > Connected Applications > Edit will allow disconnection (revocation) of any connected application for that user.

Conclusion

User trust of OAuth client applications that request broad scopes and privileges from the user, can increase risk of exposure of user data (privacy issues or data exfiltration by malicious applications). Understanding the web of applications trusted by users is difficult and there are likely unauthorized applications as well as over-privileged access in any organization. All of this increases the risk of exposure of malicious applications with overly broad data access.

In order to manage this risk better, it’s recommended to:

  • Create clear policies on approved/unapproved applications
  • Prevent unauthorized applications from being trusted by utilizing Google Workspace Admin security controls to control approvals.
  • Detect unauthorized applications in real-time through the use of proxies/CASBs such as the Netskope Cloud Security Platform.
  • Mitigate unauthorized apps by immediately revoking them in the Console or via API

Dataset and Methodology

Time Period: Google Workspace oauth audit logs were analyzed from April 18, 2021. 

Source: The analysis presented in this blog post is based on anonymized usage data collected by the Netskope Security Cloud platform relating to a subset of Netskope customers with prior authorization.

Scope: This dataset was drawn from 439 Google Workspace organizations, which included 509,079 users, and 60,875 unique applications.

author image
Jenko Hwong
Jenko has 15+ years of experience in research, product management, and engineering in cloud security, AV/AS, routers/appliances, threat intel, Windows security, vulnerability scanning and compliance. At Netskope, he researches new cloud attacks.

Stay informed!

Subscribe for the latest from the Netskope Blog