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3 stories in the last 24h

CISA and NIST Issue Guidance to Protect Cloud Identity Tokens

CISA and NIST published Interagency Report 8587 with voluntary guidance to harden cloud identity tokens against theft, forgery, and lateral movement.

CISA and NIST released NIST Interagency Report 8587 on September 15 with final voluntary guidance for federal agencies, cloud providers, and their customers on protecting SSO, federation, and API tokens. Requirements include one-hour maximum token lifetimes, 90-day signing key rotation for high-impact systems, hardware-backed key storage, explicit audience fields, and keeping tokens out of logs. The guidance was motivated by the 2020 ADFS compromise where forged SAML assertions bypassed MFA, and an incident where a leaked consumer signing key enabled token forgery and theft of 60,000+ emails from one agency. Nearly 250 public comments shaped the text, with input from Google, Microsoft, Okta, AWS, Oracle, IBM, HashiCorp, Wiz, and the OpenID Foundation via the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative.

Infosecurity Magazine · 17h agoAdvisory

CISA promotes a fresh way to deter cyberattackers: Lie to them

CISA issued first-time guidance advising critical infrastructure operators to deploy honeypots, honeytokens, and decoys to detect and distract intruders.

CISA published 'Using Cyber Decoys to Strengthen Detection and Response,' a 22-page guide marking the agency's first guidance on decoys such as honeypots and honeytokens. Acting executive director Chris Butera described decoys as a low-cost, high-fidelity way to detect adversaries already inside networks, complementing zero-trust and assume-compromise approaches. The guidance covers decoy principles, definitions, deployment scenarios, and is aimed especially at resource-constrained critical infrastructure sectors.

CyberScoop · 11h agoAdvisory

AI agent authorization risks remain a gap in new NIST-CISA token security guidance

NIST and CISA release IR 8587 guidance on securing signed tokens, but AI agent authorization and delegation risks remain out of scope.

NIST, with CISA support, published 'Protecting Tokens and Assertions from Forgery, Theft, and Misuse' (NIST IR 8587), recommending continuous monitoring and tighter token lifecycle controls for SSO and API access. The guidance does not yet fully address AI agent identity, delegation chains, or prompt injection steering agents with valid tokens, and NIST says new or expanded standards are needed. Experts recommend treating AI agents as low-trust non-human identities, maintaining agent inventories, expiring credentials after task completion, and requiring human approval for high-risk actions. The report references shared-signal mechanisms like CAEP and RISC, and follows a May incident where a CISA contractor GitHub repository exposed AWS and GitHub tokens.

CSO Online · 16h agoAdvisory