Single sign-on's false sense of security: how to strengthen SSO with Oleria

With the accelerating shift to the cloud, the rise of remote and hybrid work, and the embrace of decentralized deployment of cloud-based tools and SaaS solutions, identities have become the new security perimeter. Security and IT teams are tasked with securing this new perimeter while facing pressure from the C-suite and business units to provide fast, easy access across a fragmented environment.

Single Sign-On (SSO) emerged as an increasingly popular solution to address both sides of this balance. By allowing users to access multiple applications through a single set of login credentials, SSO streamlines the user experience and improves productivity. SSO also promises to simplify identity and access management, in theory creating a single point of control to enforce password hygiene, implement multifactor authentication (MFA), and manage permissions across applications. Today, more than 4 in 5 enterprise organizations around the world have SSO in place.

But the strengths and simplicity of SSO can give organizations a false sense of security — putting them at risk of two common mistakes:

1. Overlooking misconfigurations within SSO accounts: SSO presents a single point of failure. A single compromised SSO credential can give a threat actor open access to everything a user has access to. This makes strong MFA absolutely paramount for every SSO account. Yet, many organizations do not regularly audit (and may not be able to easily see) whether MFA is enabled — or includes weak MFA factors (i.e., SMS OTP) instead of strong MFA factors (i.e., FIDO keys or passkeys) — for all centrally managed accounts.

2. Overlooking locally managed accounts: Even as organizations prioritize the expansion of SSO to all apps and accounts, locally managed accounts will always linger on the edges. These may be SaaS apps or tools that don’t integrate with an SSO provider, apps or local accounts where SSO just hasn’t been enabled, or “shadow IT” accounts on apps that employees have implemented without approval or oversight. Locally managed accounts present a common blind spot in IAM programs: It’s difficult to see if strong MFA is enabled for these accounts, and hard to monitor for suspicious activity and risk across these accounts, creating potential vulnerabilities as a result.

Patching blind spots to reinforce SSO security

The two mistakes above are not flaws of SSO. Rather, they stem from common security blind spots — critical gaps in visibility and control that could leave your organization exposed:

1. Lack of continuous monitoring and insights
   Many organizations do not have centralized oversight into all user activities through their SSO solution. More specifically, SSO generally provides visibility into login activity at the application level — but the visibility stops there. Security teams can’t see the activities of logged-in users within applications. This can lead to missed detection of unusual access behaviors, difficulties in tracking privileged accounts, and challenges in identifying compromised credentials.

2. Absence of consistent MFA enforcement
   A compromised SSO login essentially opens the door to all a user’s access permissions. That makes MFA even more critical for securing SSO, especially for high-risk or privileged accounts. SSO solutions don’t always provide adequate monitoring of MFA coverage — in particular, visibility to ensure strong MFA factors. 

3. Limited control over SSO token usage
   SSO tokens allow users to access applications without having to authenticate every time, enhancing productivity and the user experience. But these tokens can introduce significant risks if organizations don’t track token lifetimes, usage, and expiration. Stale or compromised tokens may continue to provide access, creating an exploitable vulnerability. When tokens go unmanaged, attackers can potentially use compromised credentials for extended access that will fly under the security radar.

4. Compliance and audit gaps
   Maintaining regulatory compliance becomes challenging without centralized auditing capabilities in SSO environments. Regulations like GDPR and HIPAA require strict control over access and detailed logging for audits. SSO systems without centralized logging make it harder to enforce the principle of least privilege and ensure data protection compliance, exposing organizations to potential regulatory penalties.

Gaining visibility to local (non-SSO) accounts

Local application accounts or systems without SSO integration complicate unified security efforts, as these accounts are often left out of the centralized monitoring loop. 

1. Most organizations have no continuous, centralized visibility of locally managed accounts to see where MFA is enabled and where it’s not (to say nothing of whether that MFA includes strong factors). This makes it very difficult to close those MFA gaps and protect locally managed accounts from phishing or brute-force attacks.

2. Organizations typically conduct a periodic manual audit of their local accounts. But that periodic audit can allow risks within these locally managed accounts to fester for weeks or months. Moreover, the manual audit process is notoriously inaccurate, failing to turn up all locally managed accounts. This means locally managed accounts too often fly under the radar, going completely unmonitored.

Downstream impacts of limited visibility & control

The above blind spots create cascading impacts on an organization’s security posture:

• Unauthorized access: Without detailed monitoring, organizations lack full visibility into user access across applications, increasing the risk of undetected unauthorized activity.
• Credential compromise: With SSO centralizing access, a single compromised credential can expose multiple applications. Limited insight into SSO-related activities may result in incidents going unnoticed until significant damage occurs.
• Delayed incident response: Limited visibility slows down the response to suspicious activity, increasing the chances of widespread security breaches, longer recovery periods, and financial and reputational damage.
• Compliance challenges: SSO systems without centralized logging complicate regulatory compliance. Meeting standards for least privilege access and data protection becomes challenging without the ability to track and control access effectively.
• User management complexities: Managing both SSO and non-SSO accounts creates operational inefficiencies. Security teams often face difficulties enforcing consistent MFA policies, especially for privileged accounts, and struggle to streamline transitions from local to SSO-managed accounts.

How Oleria strengthens SSO and locally managed (non-SSO account) security

Oleria’s platform provides full clarity and control organizations need to manage identity security effectively within SSO environments. Through detailed insights into user behaviors and access patterns, Oleria empowers organizations to address these critical security gaps:

1. Detect SSO accounts

Oleria enables organizations to identify and track SSO users across various configurations, including SAML 2.0, federated login, and Identity Provider (IdP) roles. By supporting both direct and group-based SSO access, Oleria enhances visibility and simplifies the management of SSO accounts. This centralized tracking ensures consistent security controls, streamlines access management, and safeguards critical accounts.

2. Detect local (non-SSO) accounts

Oleria identifies local (non-SSO) users across applications, streamlining oversight of these decentrally managed accounts and enabling security teams to ensure consistent security measures across all users.

3. Detect SSO & non-SSO accounts without MFA‍

Oleria identifies SSO accounts where MFA is not enabled (and SSO accounts with weak MFA factors), allowing security teams to enforce MFA policies and strengthen the security of SSO-enabled environments. 

Secure SSO 

As identity becomes the new security perimeter, SSO offers tremendous benefits to security and IT teams, as well as end users across the business. Along with strong MFA, SSO has become table stakes. But the power of SSO can give organizations a dangerous false sense of security. Moreover, SSO’s benefits come with significant complexities around managing and monitoring SSO activities — most significantly, centralizing authentication and access into a single point of failure. And overlooking remaining locally managed (non-SSO) accounts can leave dangerous risks completely unmonitored.

Security and IT teams need to be able to see all SSO activities — and readily identify and remediate risks — in order to protect each user’s figurative “keys to the castle” from mistakes and malicious manipulations. And they need to have the same level of continuous visibility across all locally managed accounts. 

Oleria is purpose-built to deliver exactly the kind of comprehensive, fine-grained visibility and robust control of identity and access across SSO environments, enabling security and IT teams to enable the full productivity-enhancing value of SSO while confidently managing security, compliance, and operational risks.

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