“Like any secret, SAS tokens need to be created and handled appropriately,” said the MSRC team. “As always, we highly encourage customers to follow our best practices when using SAS tokens to minimise the risk of unintended access or abuse.
lol - follow our best practices - ironic. Of course documented best practices don’t mean everyone follows them, even internally, but that statement still makes for humorous irony. Ambiguous, almost implies, “follow how we did it here” in my reading.
Among other things, their access levels can be easily and readily customised by the user, as can the expiry time, which could in theory allow a token to be created that never expired (the compromised one was in fact valid through to 2051, 28 years from now).
[…] it’s not easy to revoke the token either […]
Reading this, the drive to managed cloud and centralization feels like an effort to replace memory management issues as the top vulnerability cause. We - as an industry - are more aware of those as ever, and have interesting efforts like Rust adoption. And at the same time, hierarchical access tokens you can’t easily revoke, with arbitrary configured lifetimes and access, that are hard to monitor, track, and trace (from reading this article) are introduced as an entirely new set of risk and attack surface.
Yeah my ex makes a lot of money basically sitting down with companies and over years (because it’s such an arduous process to get managers to understand the importantance of) make them slowly, ever so slowly, do proper access or even identity management.
For all the criticism it gets, this is something that Common Criteria at EAL 3 and higher covers, and if your company can’t ensure secure development of a product, the product doesn’t get certified. At least my scheme is always very strict with life cycle aspects, and if you’re not getting a certificate for a market it’s required in, that’s money lost, and a huge motivator for management to implement changes.
