Local Logon Access to Production Servers

Posted by Alan on September 13, 2007, 12:04 pm

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Hello,

I am the odd man out on my team when it comes to the discussion of, "whether
or not Application owners should have Local Admin abilities on production
servers." I am very strong in my opinion that this is not a good idea, but
have been unsuccesful in convincing my team. What I am looking for is some
form of best practices documentation, or personal experiences. I would like
to leverage this information as not only the reasoning behind restricting
this access (common sense to me), but also provide a real-world solution
besides giving them full access. I appreciate any assistance.

Thanks.

Alan

Posted by jwgoerlich on September 14, 2007, 12:43 pm

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Separation of duties and principle of least privilege are two of the
basic Infosec rules. These rules may be enforced by regulation,
depending upon your country and industry.

The former is easy to answer. Generally speaking, infrastructure
personnel should not have elevated access to the application, and
application owners should not have elevated access to the system. The
latter is requires a different tact.

Rather than asking if Application owners require Local Admin access, I
would ask what specific access Application owners require to perform
their duties. This list is much smaller and in most cases can be
granted to users who are not members of the Administrators group.

The companies that I work with generally grant Application owners the
ability to RDP into the server, stop and start application-specific
services, manage specific NTFS folders, and manage scheduled tasks.
This is a real-world solution. All of these can be granted. Your list
may differ, of course, but this line of questioning may yield a more
secure system.

Regards,

J Wolfgang Goerlich

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Posted by Roger Abell [MVP] on September 14, 2007, 5:50 pm

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You may not find a doc that reasons it out in detail for you,
mostly because it is such a basic principal. You could ask,
as admins what kinds of things can they do, that they do not
need to do, that they should not do, and, can we trust then
not to do them ? For most applications, services, etc. the
list is long. (shut down the machine, format the drive, change
the ips, implant software, look at anything, ... )

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