Book Image

Infosec Strategies and Best Practices

By : Joseph MacMillan
Book Image

Infosec Strategies and Best Practices

By: Joseph MacMillan

Overview of this book

Information security and risk management best practices enable professionals to plan, implement, measure, and test their organization's systems and ensure that they're adequately protected against threats. The book starts by helping you to understand the core principles of information security, why risk management is important, and how you can drive information security governance. You'll then explore methods for implementing security controls to achieve the organization's information security goals. As you make progress, you'll get to grips with design principles that can be utilized along with methods to assess and mitigate architectural vulnerabilities. The book will also help you to discover best practices for designing secure network architectures and controlling and managing third-party identity services. Finally, you will learn about designing and managing security testing processes, along with ways in which you can improve software security. By the end of this infosec book, you'll have learned how to make your organization less vulnerable to threats and reduce the likelihood and impact of exploitation. As a result, you will be able to make an impactful change in your organization toward a higher level of information security.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1: Information Security Risk Management and Governance
4
Section 2: Closing the Gap: How to Protect the Organization
8
Section 3: Operationalizing Information Security

Selecting and implementing authentication and authorization mechanisms

Thankfully, we have actually covered some of the aspects of this topic previously. Just as a refresher, I think we should touch on authentication versus authorization before moving on to how we might select and implement the various IAM solutions to ensure we keep unauthorized users from gaining access to resources they shouldn't, and ensuring that the authorized users are able to access what they need to get on with their miserable lives.

Authentication versus authorization

Authentication is focused on the identity of the user, and ensuring they are authentic. Not in the way that they compliment you and actually mean it, but rather that they are who they say they are.

Authorization is focused on what that user is allowed to do (or authorized to do) when they are authenticated.

A user can be authenticated, and due to their role as a data analyst have authorization to access the records they...