Protect user accounts with strong authentication methods

Implementing strong authentication methods is essential to protect your systems and data. Strong authentication methods help ensure that only authorized users can access your systems, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and potential security breaches.

Why implement strong authentication methods

Implementing strong authentication addresses the following challenges:

• Prevent credential theft and phishing attacks: Password-only authentication allows attackers to gain access through phishing, keyloggers, or password reuse from data breaches. Multi-factor authentication requires attackers to compromise multiple verification methods, significantly increasing the difficulty of unauthorized access even when passwords become compromised.

• Reduce impact of weak password practices: Users often choose weak passwords or reuse passwords across multiple systems to avoid forgetting them. Strong authentication methods like hardware tokens and biometric verification reduce reliance on password strength, ensuring security even when users follow poor password practices.

• Detect suspicious authentication attempts: Single-factor authentication provides no context about who is attempting to access systems or whether access requests are legitimate. Adaptive authentication analyzes user behavior, location, and device characteristics to identify suspicious authentication attempts and require additional verification when risk increases.

• Meet compliance and regulatory requirements: Security frameworks like NIST SP 800-63, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA require organizations to implement multi-factor authentication for accessing sensitive systems and data. Without strong authentication methods, organizations fail compliance audits and face regulatory penalties.

What are strong authentication methods

Strong authentication methods involve a combination of techniques and technologies to verify a user's identity before granting access to systems. Strong authentication methods typically consist of the following:

• Something you know: such as a password or passphrase.
• Something you have: such as a hardware token or smart card.
• Something you are: such as a fingerprint or facial recognition.

Strong authentication methods include:

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA): Combination of one or more sign-in factors to verify a user's identity.
• Biometric authentication: Use of unique biological traits, such as fingerprints or facial recognition, to verify a user's identity.
• Adaptive authentication: Contextual authentication that adjusts the level of verification based on user behavior and risk factors.

How strong authentication protects systems

Writing policies that follow least privilege ensures that an authorized user does not have access to systems or data they should not have access to. It does not, however, ensure that unauthorized users have not improperly gained access to credentials that allow authentication to those systems or data.

When you implement strong authentication methods, you add another layer of security by validating the identity of users before granting access. When you combine strong authentication methods with centralized identity management, you have an authentication model that ensures authorized users have access to systems.

HashiCorp tools and services like the HashiCorp Cloud Platform, Vault, and HCP Terraform support both centralized identity management and strong authentication methods using multi-factor authentication. Other tools like Nomad and Boundary support multi-factor authentication through integration with third party identity providers like Okta.

HashiCorp Consul service mesh allows you to securely connect services across multiple runtime platforms. Consul supports mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) authentication, which provides strong service-to-service authentication within the service mesh.

HashiCorp resources:

• Learn Vault with the Vault tutorials and read the Vault documentation
• Secure HCP with multi-factor authentication for account protection
• Enable Vault multi-factor authentication for sensitive operations
• Configure two-factor authentication in HCP Terraform for team security
• Authenticate services with Consul mutual TLS for service-to-service security
• Integrate identity providers with Boundary OIDC authentication

External resources:

• What is MFA explains multi-factor authentication concepts
• Multi-factor authentication guidance covers NIST recommendations
• NIST Digital Identity Guidelines defines authentication requirements

Next steps

Following these documents in order ensures a logical progression through the key concepts and best practices, helping you build a strong foundation to build your identity and access management program.

• Define access requirements
• Grant least privilege
• Create permissions and guardrails
• Centralize identity management
• Implement strong authentication methods (this document)
• Use dynamic credentials
• Manage access lifecycle

In this section of Identity and access management you learned why you should use strong authentication methods in conjunction with centralized identity management and policies that follow the principle of least privilege. Identity and access management is part of the Secure systems pillar.