Rotate Credentials

Contributed by: Vishakha Sadhwani

Difficulty level: Intermediate

To ensure that a compromised user profile or unauthorized access to your cloud services doesn’t lead to a widespread security breach, it’s crucial to regularly rotate credentials, especially for privileged accounts with elevated access to sensitive data or systems. This applies not only to users but also to services that communicate with other services within your cloud environment. In the vast landscape of cloud security, rotating credentials is a fundamental pillar that can significantly enhance your defenses against unauthorized access.

Let’s delve into the world of credential rotation and discover how it complements user access management to create a robust security framework for your cloud environment.

The Core Idea

Rotating credentials means regularly changing the passwords, access keys, tokens, and other authentication factors that users and applications use to access your cloud resources. It’s like changing the locks on your house periodically, just in case someone has made a copy of the old key. This helps to minimize the risk of unauthorized access. By periodically invalidating credentials, you render compromised ones useless to attackers, limiting their window of opportunity to exploit them. Moreover, credential rotation can aid in detecting suspicious activity by monitoring failed login attempts with old credentials.

How It Works

You can break how to rotate credentials into five ...