Tag: identity management

Identity Management Improvements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3: Part 1

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Dmitri Pal

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.3 has been out for a bit, but have you looked at what we’ve added in the Identity Management area for this release? I’m excited to say, we’ve added quite a bit!

In the past I have been talking about individual features in Identity Management (IdM) and System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) but this is really not how we prioritize our efforts nowadays. We look at customer requests, community efforts, and market trends and then define themes for the release. So what were these themes for RHEL 7.3?

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PCI Series: Requirement 10 – Track and Monitor All Access to Network Resources and Cardholder Data

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Dmitri Pal

This is my last post dedicated to the use of Identity Management (IdM) and related technologies to address the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This specific post is related to requirement ten (i.e. the requirement to track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data). The outline and mapping of individual articles to the requirements can be found in the overarching post that started the series.

Requirement ten focuses on audit and monitoring. Many components of an IdM-based solution, including client components like

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PCI Series: Requirement 8 – Identify and Authenticate Access to System Components

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Dmitri Pal

This post continues my series dedicated to the use of Identity Management (IdM) and related technologies to address the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).  This specific post is related to requirement eight (i.e. the requirement to identify and authenticate access to system components). The outline and mapping of individual articles to requirements can be found in the overarching post that started the series.

Requirement eight is directly related to IdM. IdM can be used to address most of the requirements in this section. IdM stores user accounts, provides user account life-cycle management

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PCI Series: Requirement 7 – Restrict Access to Cardholder Data by Business Need to Know

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Dmitri Pal

This is my sixth post dedicated to the use of Identity Management (IdM) and related technologies to address the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).  This specific post is related to requirement seven (i.e. the requirement to restrict access to cardholder data by business need to know).  The outline and mapping of individual articles to the requirements can be found in the overarching post that started the series.

Section 7 of the PCI DSS standard talks about access control and limiting the privileges of administrative accounts.  IdM can play a big role in addressing these requirements.  IdM provides several key features that are related to access control and privileged account management.  The first one is

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PCI Series: Requirement 6 – Develop and Maintain Secure Systems and Applications

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Dmitri Pal

This post is the fifth installment in my PCI DSS series – a series dedicated to the use of Identity Management (IdM) and related technologies to address the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This specific post is related to requirement six (i.e. the requirement to develop and maintain secure systems and applications). The outline and mapping of individual articles to requirements can be found in the overarching post that started the series.

Section six of the PCI DSS standard covers guidelines related to secure application development and testing. IdM and its ecosystem can help in multiple ways to address requirements in this part of the PCI-DSS standard. First of all, IdM includes a set of Apache modules for

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PCI Series: Requirement 3 – Protect Stored Cardholder Data

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Dmitri Pal

Welcome to another post dedicated to the use of Identity Management (IdM) and related technologies in addressing the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This specific post is related to requirement three (i.e. the requirement to protect stored cardholder data). In case you’re new to the series – the outline and mapping of individual articles to the requirements can be found in the overarching post that started the series.

Section three of the PCI DSS standard talks about storing cardholder data in a secure way. One of the technologies that can be used for secure storage of cardholder data is

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PCI Series: Requirement 2 – Do Not Use Vendor-Supplied Defaults for System Passwords and Other Security Parameters

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Dmitri Pal

This article is third in a series dedicated to the use of Identity Management (IdM) and related technologies to address the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This specific post covers the PCI DSS requirement related to not using vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters. The outline and mapping of individual articles to the requirements can be found in the overarching post that started the series.

The second section of the PCI-DSS standard applies to defaults – especially passwords and other security parameters. The standard calls for the reset of passwords (etc.) for any new system before placing it on the network. IdM can help here. Leveraging IdM for centralized accounts and policy information allows for a simple automated provisioning of new systems with

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PCI Series: Requirement 1 – Install and Maintain a Firewall Configuration to Protect Cardholder Data

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Dmitri Pal

This article is one of the blog posts dedicated to use of Identity Management (IdM) and related technologies to address the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This specific post is related to requirement one – install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data. The outline and mapping of individual articles to the requirements can be found in the overarching post that started the series.

The first requirement of the PCI standard talks about the firewalls and networking. While Red Hat’s Identity Management solution is not directly related to setting up networks and firewall rules, there are several aspects of IdM that

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Identity Management and Related Technologies and their Applicability to PCI DSS

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Dmitri Pal

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is not new. It has existed for several years and provides security guidelines and best practices for the storage and processing of personal cardholder data. This article takes a look at PCI DSS 3.2 (published in April of 2016) and shows how Identity Management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (IdM) and related technologies can help customers to address PCI DSS requirements to achieve and stay compliant with the standard. If you need a copy of the PCI DSS document it can be acquired from the document library at the following site: www.pcisecuritystandards.org

In October of 2015 Red Hat published a paper that gives an overview of the PCI DSS standard and shows how Red Hat Satellite and other parts of the Red Hat portfolio can help customers to address their PCI compliance challenges. In this post I would like to expand on this paper and drill down into more detail about

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Thinking Through an Identity Management Deployment

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Dmitri Pal

As the number of production deployments of Identity Management (IdM) grows and as many more pilots and proof of concepts come into being, it becomes (more and more) important to talk about best practices. Every production deployment needs to deal with things like failover, scalability, and performance.  In turn, there are a few practical questions that need to be answered, namely:

  • How many replicas do I need?
  • How should these replicas be distributed between my datacenters?
  • How should these replicas be connected to each other?

The answer to these questions depends on

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