Single sign-on authentication can be a blessing or a curse to your organization. When implemented with all SSO security requirements addressed, it provides a smooth experience for employee users while saving time for administrators. However, there’s no single standard for what makes an SSO system secure. Attackers constantly shift tactics and techniques, with account takeover attacks (and their resulting data breaches) a growing and particularly lucrative market.
A study of recent data breaches found that over 20% resulted from misuse of stolen employee credentials, while stolen credentials were used in 88% of web application attacks — one of the most common breach pathways. While this represents a decline from previous years in overall credential-related breaches, it highlights a troubling concentration of risk in web-based systems. Compounding the issue, millions of credentials tied to Fortune 1000 corporate emails remain for sale on the Dark Web, waving a bright red flag over SSO security.
Is SSO a problem or a solution? And what can you do to protect the keys to your digital kingdom?
Why SSO Is All the Rage: The Advantages of SSO
Single sign-on authentication is an access control mechanism that enables users to access multiple applications and systems without re-entering their credentials. In enterprises, SSO usually employs a local directory service or centralized identity provider (IdP) service to authenticate corporate identity access to the many applications employees use.
According to the scope and requirements, SSO can be developed internally using one of the standardized protocols such as OpenID Connect (OIDC), OAuth 2.0, or SAML. Alternatively, brands like Okta, Microsoft Azure AD, and Ping Identity offer cloud-based SSO authentication features as part of their product offering to organizations and businesses.
There’s no shortage of reasons for businesses to adopt SSO:
Increased End-user Productivity
Since employees spend less time typing in credentials and get access to business-critical resources much faster, SSO can improve employee productivity to an extensive degree.
Smooth Authentication Experience for End-users
Having to remember just one set of credentials and getting access to everything they need quickly and seamlessly leads to a much better user experience and an increased adoption rate among end-users.
Fewer IT Support Tickets
Improved productivity and a smoother experience aren’t limited to end-users, but also apply to IT teams, whose workload can be significantly reduced with fewer password reset support calls.
Centralized IAM, Onboarding, and Offboarding
Another way SSO improves the lives of administrators is by providing a centralized control point for secure identity and access management (IAM), including onboarding and offboarding users from the many systems and services where they may have accounts.
Hardened Identity Security
SSO bolsters your overall security posture by reducing the identity attack surface. Having fewer passwords means a lower risk of bad password hygiene.
Compliance Readiness
Audit trails, centralized reporting, procedural access revocation, and other controls necessary for regulatory compliance are centralized and easier to manage with SSO.
The Flip Side: The Challenges of Protecting SSO Identities
Not everything is sunny in the land of corporate SSO implementation, so it’s best to familiarize yourself with the potential pitfalls and hurdles of securing SSO:
Single Point of Failure
Having one set of credentials instead of many makes them a single point of failure. It also goes against everything we’ve been instructing users to do—using different passwords for different services. With SSO, if a cybercriminal gains access to a user’s single sign-on credentials, they could potentially access all of the systems connected to the SSO system.
Supply Chain Vulnerabilities
Single sign-on providers are not unhackable. As hard as they try to protect their servers and services, hackers will always try to compromise systems that will give them even broader access to entire user bases—and potentially sensitive application data across multiple businesses and organizations.
Hot Seating, Remote Work, and Credential Sharing
SSO is an ideal solution in theory. In practice, employees share devices and accounts, and frequently use their own devices to access corporate resources. All this contributes to the chaos that may ensue if an account is compromised, but the source of the breach is impossible to track.
Misconfigurations in SSO Implementations
There’s no shortage of proof of concept documentation and video demonstrations of exploits that let malefactors take advantage of vulnerabilities in SSO systems. One of the most common techniques to abuse SSO misconfigurations is token theft.
Session cooking, data capture and modification in transit, and other techniques can trick the system into allowing attackers to jump into an active SSO session without actually obtaining the credentials.
What is SSO security?
SSO security is a mandatory aspect of any SSO implementation. It includes a multifaceted approach to securing federated identities in the organization through their lifecycle while minimizing risk. This entails implementing security measures and policies that can detect, respond to, and prevent potential threats to your users.
Strengthening and maintaining the security posture of your SSO system requires not only technological security measures but also user education and guidance to ensure smooth adoption and a higher level of protection.
6 SSO Security Requirements to Implement Today
1. Multi-factor Authentication (MFA)
Single sign-on and multi-factor authentication usually go hand in hand. With MFA required by regulatory compliance across many industries and sectors, it’s considered essential to protecting employee SSO systems.
Adding another layer of authentication to the traditional username and password significantly reduces the chances of a breach, as hackers would need to bypass multiple steps in the authentication process simultaneously to get access.
That said, MFA alone is not enough to safeguard access to the applications connected to your SSO systems. Not all MFA methods are born equal, and verification factors like text or email one-time password (OTP) have been proven vulnerable to various compromise tactics like SIM swapping and MFA fatigue attacks.
2. Password Hygiene and Complexity Enforcement
Even with MFA, reducing the chances of credential compromise is critical. This entails disallowing weak and incremental passwords (adding a character to a previously used password to make it unique), limiting password age, and implementing the means to obscure credentials in transit and in case of compromise.
Some advanced security strategies include using decoy credentials or honeytokens— intentionally fake login data inserted into systems. If these decoys are entered on a genuine login page, it may signal an attempted phishing attack or credential misuse. By monitoring these markers, security teams can identify and isolate threats before real user data is compromised.
3. Active Session and Token Management
Properly authorized SSO login sessions must have limitations to add protection against various attack tactics that bypass the authentication process altogether. Hardening user session management and preventing token manipulation or theft entails session hijacking prevention through SSO account policies.
For example, you want to limit the number of active sessions per user, the source IP (to enforce VPN encryption on information in transit from remote locations), and the length of session activity periods and ensure you can disconnect sessions and revoke tokens in case of a breach.
You may also use browser-based or end-point identity threat detection and prevention to further harden your SSO security posture.
4. Role-based Access Control (RBAC) and The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)
Another fundamental aspect of SSO security strategy integrates two key principles: Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP). The goal is to ensure that each user has access solely to the applications and resources necessary for their role and nothing beyond that.
Doing so minimizes the risk of internal employees’ or external attackers’ unauthorized access to sensitive resources. Additionally, this approach significantly reduces the burden of managing and enforcing detailed permissions and policies, streamlining administrative tasks.
5. Proof of SSO Login Page Authenticity
Users still enter their credentials into spoofed login pages because there’s no standard for authenticating the service—only standards for users to authenticate themselves. One practical way to reduce the risk of spoofed login pages is to implement a visual authentication aid—a user-specific identifier or watermark that appears on legitimate SSO login forms. This gives users a consistent visual signal that they are interacting with a trusted source, helping them detect and avoid phishing attempts more effectively.
6. Monitoring, Threat detection, and User Activity Analytics
Proactive monitoring for threats and unusual user activity is the last (but not least) requirement for secure SSO implementation. To enable prevention, detection, and swift response to SSO identity threats, it’s crucial to have a real-time and historical view of user activity.
Having the right tools that accelerate ticket resolution while minimizing the potential blast radius of a breach is vital for maintaining your overall SSO security posture and minimizing downtime that may impact productivity.
Robust SSO security requires detailed visibility into user activity and authentication behavior. Real-time monitoring tools can help identify suspicious patterns—such as repeated failed logins, unusual session durations, or access from unfamiliar locations—indicating a potential account takeover attempt. These insights allow security teams to respond swiftly and minimize the impact of an attack.
Stay Ahead of SSO Security Requirements
Cybercriminals are eager to collect and resell corporate SSO account credentials for profit or use them for lateral movement in your systems to spread malware or ransomware. As they evolve their techniques, it’s up to businesses to protect their users from falling for SSO credential theft schemes. This means turning to innovative, creative solutions that take a holistic, end-to-end approach to protecting SSO authentication interfaces.
