One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions 6.9.3 - Administration Guide

Preface

Welcome to the One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions 6.9.3 Administrator Guide.

This document describes how to configure and manage the One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions (SPS). Background information for the technology and concepts used by the product is also discussed.

Introduction

This section introduces One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions (SPS) in a non-technical manner, discussing how and why is it useful, and what additional security it offers to an existing IT infrastructure.

Topics:

The major benefits of One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions (SPS)

One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions (SPS) is part of the One Identity Safeguard solution, which in turn is part of One Identity's Privileged Access Management portfolio. Addressing large enterprise needs, SPS is a privileged session management solution which provides industry-leading access control, session recording and auditing to prevent privileged account misuse and accelerate forensics investigations.

SPS is a quickly deployable enterprise device, completely independent from clients and servers - integrating seamlessly into existing networks. It captures the activity data necessary for user profiling and enables full user session drill down for forensic investigations.

SPS has full control over the SSH, RDP, Telnet, TN3270, TN5250, Citrix ICA, and VNC connections, giving a framework (with solid boundaries) for the work of the administrators. The most notable features of SPS are the following:

Central policy enforcement

SPS acts as a centralized authentication and access-control point in your IT environment which protects against privileged identity theft and malicious insiders. The granular access management helps you to control who can access what and when on your critical IT assets.

Prevention of malicious activities

SPS monitors privileged user sessions in real-time and detects policy violations as they occur. In case of detecting a suspicious user activity (for example entering a destructive command, such as the "rm"), SPS can send you an alert or immediately terminate the connection.

Greater accountability (deterrance)

SPS audits "who did what", for example on your database- or SAP servers. Aware of this, your employees will do their work with a greater sense of responsibility leading to a reduction in human errors. By having an easily interpreted, tamper-proof record in encrypted, timestamped, and digitally signed audit trails, finger-pointing issues can be eliminated.

Faster, cost-effective compliance audits

SPS makes all user activity traceable by recording them in high quality, tamper-proof and easily searchable audit trails. All data is stored in encrypted, timestamped and signed files, preventing any modification or manipulation. The movie-like audit trails ensure that all the necessary information is accessible for ad-hoc analyses or audit reports.

Lower troubleshooting and forensics costs

When something wrong happens, everybody wants to know the real story. Analyzing thousands of text-based logs can be a nightmare and may require the participation of external experts. The ability to easily reconstruct user sessions allows you to shorten investigation time and avoid unexpected cost.

Application areas

Fastest return to value and extremely low TCO

One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Sessions (SPS) is a turnkey network appliance - its implementation and configuration is fast and simple. Compared to competitors, there is no need to purchase and install any additional software (for example, Windows or MS SQL servers) or hardware to have SPS fully functioning. Full implementation typically takes only 3-5 days! No need for long and costly professional services for implementation and customization. After deployment, SPS operates in the background like a black box of an airplane - there is no need for any extra workload to operate it.

Independent, agentless device

Compared to agent-based solutions, there is no need for installing and updating agents on clients or servers, eliminating unnecessary maintenance and potential security issues. As a host independent gateway, SPS can control and monitor access to any type of systems incl. all Windows/UNIX/Linux servers, mainframes, network devices, security devices, web-based applications or thin client environments, such as VMware Horizon View (formerly known as VMware View), Citrix Virtual Apps (formerly known as Citrix XenApp) or Citrix Virtual Desktops (formerly known as Citrix XenDesktop).

Transparent, “router-like” operation

As a proxy gateway, SPS can operate as a router in the network – invisible to the user and to the server. As a transparent solution, SPS requires minimal changes to the existing network. Also, since it operates on the network level, users can keep using the client applications they are familiar with, and do not have to change their work processes, unlike jump host solutions.

Granular access control

Since SPS has full access to the inspected traffic, security managers can granularly control who can access what and when on the servers. For example, they can selectively permit or deny access to protocol channels: enable terminal sessions in SSH, but disable port-forwarding and file transfers, or enable desktop access for RDP, but disable file sharing. In addition, SPS supports real-time shadowing allowing an authorizer to follow the administrator's session in real-time and terminate his/her connection in case of detecting a policy violation.

Real-time prevention of malicious activities

SPS can monitor transferred content in real time and can send alerts or even block connections if a certain pattern is detected in the traffic. Predefined patterns can be a risky command in a text-oriented protocol or a suspicious application in a graphical connection. This command and application level policy can prevent malicious user activities as they happen instead of just recording or reporting them.

Industry-leading session recording and auditing

SPS is the leading session auditing solution on the market offering Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities to log ALL data about privileged actions in graphical user interfaces as well as text-based protocols. SPS can support and audit file transfers, as well. All data is recorded into searchable movie-like audit trails, making it easy to find relevant information in forensics or troubleshooting situations. In case of any problems (server misconfiguration, database manipulation, unexpected shutdown), the circumstances of the event are readily available in the audit trails, thus the cause of the incident can be easily identified. Auditors can do free-text searches in the content of text-based and graphical sessions. They can search for EVERY events (for example, mouse clicks, pressing Enter) and texts seen by the user.

To protect the sensitive information included in the communication, the two directions of the traffic (client-server and server-client) can be separated and encrypted with different keys, thus sensitive information like passwords are displayed only when necessary.