Glossary

Least privilege has several common application phrases. Whether it’s the ‘principle of least privilege’ or ‘least privileged access,’ they all refer to the same design philosophy. Least privilege is a preventative security measure designed to mitigate the damage a data breach can inflict, but it is not meant to prevent data breaches in the first place. Here’s how it works:

If the credentials to a developer account are leaked or stolen, any malicious agent will have access to anything these credentials grant. If this hypothetical developer has access to a security monitoring system, sensitive customer information, platform backend code, management systems that allow for escalation of privileges, or any other aspects of the platform, that single compromised account can cause an immense amount of damage.

Implementing least privilege here would mean removing unnecessary visibility or credentials from this developer account, limiting the damage this account can inflict with every bit of access that is removed. Does a frontend developer need to access backend code? Or security monitoring systems?

Implementing least privilege looks different for different scenarios. In a small team, employees may have multiple roles and require access to many more parts of the platform, making least privilege more difficult. There are still plenty of solutions. Perhaps least privilege would mean generating multiple accounts to be used by one person, so even though that person is accessing different parts of the platform, no single account is doing so.

A more efficient method for implementing least privilege, and a method that scales well with larger organizations, is role-based access control (RBAC). RBAC assigns the ability to access various parts of the platform to a role instead of to an account. With the fine-grained control from a professional secrets management solution, these roles can be added and removed from accounts to update access on the fly. This process speeds up the on and off-boarding of employees, allows developers to swap between roles quickly, and implements the least privilege without wasting time.