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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: