Tutorial 4: Privileged Access and Service Identities
Unit 3 ยท Identity and access management
Objectives
Reduce standing administrative privilege.
Scope machine identities and rotate credentials.
Use approval, recording, and monitoring for high-risk actions.
Privileged access can change controls, read broad data, or create identities. Separate daily and administrative accounts, require strong authentication, use just-in-time elevation, and record sensitive actions. Service identities should be narrowly scoped, non-human, and independent of personal accounts.
request elevation -> approve -> short-lived role
perform action -> audit actor, target, reason, result -> expire
Never solve automation by granting a service account database administrator rights. Define exact operations, resource scope, network conditions, and rotation. Break-glass paths need dual control, alerts, and retrospective review.
Exercises
Design just-in-time access for a production database.
Scope a service account for report generation.
Define audit fields for an administrative action.
Self-check
What is standing privilege?
Why use short-lived elevation?
What should an audit event contain?
Self-Check Quiz
1. Why avoid shared administrator accounts?
AnswerThey weaken accountability, make revocation difficult, and hide which person performed an action.
2. What should service identity permissions be based on?
AnswerThe minimum concrete operations and resources required by the service's function.
Homework
Review privileged access in a three-tier enterprise system.
Propose just-in-time and break-glass controls.
Write a service-account permission policy.
Sample answerHuman administrators use separate accounts, phishing-resistant MFA, approval, time-limited roles, command logging, and alerts. A report service receives read-only access to specific views, uses a managed identity, cannot alter schemas, and rotates automatically.