Single Sign On (SSO) has become a way of life in today's hybrid and remote working environments. With SSO, employees can use a single login to access all cloud and on-premises resources, without having to authenticate themselves for each app. From an organization's standpoint, too, SSO is convenient because it provides central control over resource usage. IT admins can know who has accessed what resource and when. Due to these benefits, SSO has become the de facto authorization and authentication mechanism today.
Many tools offer SSO, and Okta is one of the popular choices. In this article, we'll talk about what Okta is and will review its security aspect.
What is Okta?
Okta is a tool that facilitates streamlined authentication and authorization to view or edit resources in your organization. This customizable solution integrates with third-party and custom apps to give your users a streamlined authentication mechanism for any stack or app. In other words, Okta is a scalable authentication mechanism that can be built into any application for easy and seamless access to employees.
At the same time, organizations also benefit from Okta, as it reduces the development and maintenance costs of your code. Plus, you can configure rules and have complete control over who accesses what resource within your organization. It even generates the reports you need for auditing and compliance.
Now comes a big question. How secure is Okta? Do you need additional security mechanisms to protect your resources from unauthorized access? Read on to know.
How Secure is Okta?
In this section, let's look at the different security components of Okta to better understand its security mechanisms. Accordingly, you can evaluate if Okta offers the security your organization needs.
Role of an Administrator
As with any authentication tool, the administrator plays an important role in Okta too. An administrator is a superuser responsible for ensuring smooth access to resources for employees while maintaining security. In this sense, they perform a wide range of tasks such as application provisioning, user management, customization, continuous monitoring, audit, and more.
All this control makes the admins the gatekeepers of authorization and access within the organization. Unfortunately, there's always a chance for misusing this privilege, thereby opening the possibility for an insider attack. Note that an insider attack by admins is possible in any organization, tool, and situation, so no specific tool can offer 100% protection against the misuse of privileged accounts.
That said, Okta does offer a few features to reduce the chances of privileged account misuse. One such feature is the custom admin role, where you can provide custom permissions and granular control within the admin role. Broadly speaking, there are two roles, namely, standard and custom roles.
Some standard roles are super admin, help desk admin, group admin, read-only admin, and app admin, and they come with predefined permissions and configurations. Besides these roles, you can create admin roles with custom privileges. By restricting super admin roles to just a handful of employees, you reduce the chances of data loss and insider threat.
API Tokens
Okta's API tokens are similar to HTTP cookies, and they authenticate a user to access a particular service. In this sense, API tokens are treated like passwords and are valid only for active users. They expire after 30 days and renew when they receive another API request. Moreover, these tokens can't be renewed after being inactive for 30 days.
The advantage of these tokens is that admins can easily control and manage them through the admin page. It also provides the control and visibility that admins need to prevent unauthorized users from accessing a resource.
Email Notifications
Okta provides the option to configure your email settings to add another layer of security to your organization.
Some of the custom notifications that you can leverage to boost security are:
- Sign-on notification You can configure Okta to email end-users if they sign in from a new or unrecognized device. This setting can avoid malicious users from using an individual;'s credentials to sign in to your network.
- MFA notification End-users get an email if they are enrolled in a new Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) method. Similarly, they are sent an email if an MFA was reset or changed by the admin.
- Password change notification When users change their password, a notification email is sent to inform them of the same. Again, this prevents unauthorized people from taking over an account.
- Suspicious reporting Any suspicious access, log-in from unknown locations, etc., trigger automatic emails to end-users.
Note that all these notifications are reactive and not proactive. This means they are mere notifications and not measures that prevent or authenticate access. For example, when an employee's login credentials are used from a new device, all that they get is a notification email that informs them of the same. The onus is on them to reach out to your admins, so the damage can be controlled.
Security Settings
Depending on the admin role, one or more of your admins will have the authority to change your organization's security settings. Here's a look at these settings and what they can do for your organization.
- “Remember Me” checkbox Admins can decide if users should see a “remember me” checkbox below their login credentials. The idea here is that if your employees tick the checkbox, their login details are stored until someone deletes the cookies in your browser.
- Link expiry You can set time limits for the expiry of the activation link sent to your users.
- Recent activity As soon as your users log into the account, they can view their recent activity, provided your admin configures these settings for you. Again, this is a reactive approach where users point out any abnormal activity related to your account.
The above-mentioned security settings are proactive, especially the limited period for link activation.
Insights and Reports
Okta has a feature called ThreatInsight that aggregates data across the entire organization to identify malicious IP addresses that can end malware or ransomware. This way, your organization can take measures to block these IP addresses and prevent them from entering your network.
Besides this, Okta can also generate the reports you need for internal auditing and compliance. In particular, it helps to meet some security standards like SOC2.
Creating Network Zones
Network zones are a security boundary or perimeter that limits access based on IP addresses and geolocations. What this essentially means is that users who are located within the approved zones alone can access the network. Any user or device that's located outside the network zone can't access the network.
Your admins are responsible for creating and maintaining these network zones, based on your organization's operations. These network zones are highly flexible and can be created based on proxy types and Autonomous System Numbers (ASN) as well, besides just IP addresses. An exception can be made and a specific IP address that's outside the network zone can be allowed by the admins. However, this is a manual process and is granted only on a case-by-case basis.
These network zones add another layer of security to your organization, as it prevents users and devices outside the security perimeter to log into your network.
Risk Scoring
Risk scoring is the process of using machine learning intelligence to identify if any sign-in event can be a malicious activity. Okta takes a data-driven approach and assigns a risk value to every activity, such as the:
- Source IP address
- The behavior of the user who requested the sign-in
- The number of successful and failed sign-ins
- Routing information related to every request
A value is assigned to each of these activities and accordingly, a risk score is computed for each requested sign-in. This risk scoring is then matched with Okta's security policies to understand the level of risk associated with each sign-in. A threshold is also established and if a sign-ins risk score exceeds the risk score, no access is granted.
To give you an idea, a sign-in from a location outside the network zone will have a high-risk score, unless such a sign-in was overridden earlier. Naturally, this sign-in will not be allowed and will be escalated for further approval. Such measures reduce the chances of unauthorized access from unknown locations and help to protect your organization's assets.
Sign-on Policies
Sign-on policies are a set of rules or configurations for access. With this feature, you have complete control and flexibility on how users can sign in to their accounts, the associated password policy, and more. You can even have app-based sign-on policies if you need additional flexibility to allow access to specific applications.
Similarly, you can configure the password policy within your organization. For example, you can decide how long or strong the passwords must be, how often they should be changed, etc.
All these policies together reduce the possibility for strangers to access your network.
User Behavior
Okta captures user behavior over time and analyses it for patterns. Accordingly, you can identify “suspect” users who could do insider attacks. More importantly, you can understand the general behavior and preferences of your users and create policies accordingly.
Note that you can't deny access to users based on any specific behavior. Rather, you can use it to track how user behavior changes due to your policies and, accordingly, can make changes to your security policies.
In all, Okta comes with many security features to make the authentication and authorization process seamless and smooth for everyone. More importantly, it has some important features like custom admin roles and risk scoring to safeguard your assets from loss.
However, Okta is not perfect and comes with its share of downsides. If you're looking for specific features in your SSO and don't find them in Okta, here are some good alternatives to consider.
The Best Okta Alternatives
Some of the best Okta alternatives are:
- Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) Provides strong authentication methods by combining seamlessly with Windows 10. It can even create a passwordless authentication mechanism to avoid the security gaps that come with passwords. At the same time, you can leverage many of Microsoft's services like O365 to reduce the complexity of setup and maintenance.
- Ping Identity Ping Identity is an SSO service that streamlines access to resources and provides ease and convenience to end-users. It also integrates well with third-party and custom applications to give authorized users access to the entire tech stack. Improved performance and security are the other highlights of this tool.
- SecureAuth SecureAuth is another SSO service that ensures that only authorized users can access a resource. It also offers protection to usernames and passwords when required, and can be deployed both on-premises and on the cloud. All its features make it easy to implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and, at the same time, prevent the loss of sensitive data.
- Akamai Identity Cloud Akamai Identity Cloud integrates well with many ERP tools to provide smooth and secure access to resources. This tool is a good option for anyone looking to migrate to the cloud or have a big presence in the cloud. Akamai also comes with other salient features such as storage, reporting, security configurations, and more.
In all, these are some well-known alternatives to Okta, though not all of them are better than Okta on the security front. Still, it's worth knowing these tools and exploring them to understand their fit within your organization.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, Okta is a well-known SSO that provides secure and convenient access to your organization's resources. It also provides the control and visibility that admins need to keep your networks and resources secure. In this article, we reviewed Okta's security on multiple fronts to help you evaluate if its security controls match your organization's needs. Finally, we also looked at some alternatives to Okta, though not all of them are necessarily better than Okta when it comes to security. We hope this article helps you to make an informed decision about subscribing to a secure SSO service.
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