How to Overcome Common SSH Machine Identity Risks with Automation

1. Collecting Risk Intelligence
   Prevent breaches by automating the collection of risk intelligence required to quickly identify and respond to SSH machine identity risks, weaknesses or security events. Automated policy enforcement and lifecycle management ensure orphan, duplicate or shared SSH keys can be easily decommissioned.
    
2. Accelerated Incident Response
   Accelerate incident response by automating the identification of impacted SSH keys as well as the actions needed to remediate large groups of these machine identities. Being armed with information on location and owner of SSH keys can dramatically increase the speed of your response to large-scale security events.
    
3. Streamline Operations
   Streamline operations by automating routine administrative tasks to eliminate manual, error-prone processes and reduce the expertise and resources needed to manage and protect the growing number of SSH machine identities.
    
4. Ensure compliance and passed audits
   Ensure compliance by automating policy enforcement to improve audit readiness, offering automated validation of SSH machine identity management and generating scheduled or on-demand compliance reports.

   Automation also makes it easy to implement role-based access controls that allow or block access to machine identities. Implementing change management and role-based access controls ensures you can effectively manage machine identities and demonstrate this control for audits.

Collaborative SSH Security Automation Solution

CyberArk and Venafi teamed up to offer an integrated solution for enterprise-wide governance and risk reduction by enabling easy and robust management of SSH keys. The integration with Venafi’s SSH Protect solution is designed to provide

• Higher levels of automation for system administrators
• Better visibility for InfoSec teams
• Fast, successful audits for GRC teams

In this integrated solution, CyberArk provides Privileged Access Management (PAM) for interactive human-user accounts including key management, session isolation and audit, while Venafi provides Machine Identity Protection for automated machine-to-machine connections. Together, encryption key governance is achieved across the entire enterprise, protecting the full life cycle of keys from creation to termination, including the storage and auditing of those keys.

Venafi’s integration with CyberArk further secures the key lifecycle by automatically placing private keys discovered by SSH Protect into CyberArk’s Privileged Access Manager and continuously monitoring those SSH sessions.

Learn more about this integration in the Venafi Marketplace.

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Weak SSH machine identities are a serious cybersecurity risk, but it’s one of many machine identity vulnerabilities that intelligence-drive automation can help mitigate. To further avoid the impact of these risks, here some best practices your team can achieve with automation: