Challenges and Solutions to Applying Technology in Secure Remote Access
Remote access services refer to technologies build to offer authorized workforce and partners the capacity to manage and secure remote access to company data and networks. According to Thomas and Stoddard (2012), remote access technologies are today one of the exploited IT resources and many enterprises, small, and big, have invested in them. Therefore, it has increasingly become the preferred connectivity way for many corporate roles using different types of corporate- and staff-owned devices. However, recent findings point that these technologies are associated with varied challenges, especially security challenges, but with a few easy solutions (Thomas & Stoddard, 2012). As such, this essay seeks to look into a major security challenge posed by remote access services and offer some possible solutions to the security challenge.
One of the key security challenges of remote access services is the use of weak or blank passwords for the administrative accounts. Moreover, this underlying security challenge is not just with the remote access; rather it is caused by poor identity validation as well as weak authentication (Thomas & Stoddard, 2012). Typical computer users have passwords for several purposes, such as logging into the accounts, retrieving e-mails, accessing databases, networks, applications, and web sites. Additionally, most of the remote access technologies simply depend on traditional user identification and password. Regrettably, when common passwords and identifications are shared it may result into mass vulnerabilities. At the same time, many users believe that their passwords should include a minimum of eight characters long, alphanumeric, and have special characters for security purposes (Thomas & Stoddard, 2012). However, this compels many users into creating passwords which are both hard to remember and easy for an attacker to crack. This is because computers are able to crack shorter passwords effectively irrespective of how complex they might be. Passwords which are hard to remember might also reduce the system’s security because the users may be required to write or store the password electronically; the users may need repeated password resets; and it is also more likely for the users to re-use same password.
One of the key solutions for weak or blank passwords is creating more user awareness. In particular, teaching the users the importance of passwords and how to choose secure passwords that are easy to remember (Thomas & Stoddard, 2012). It is also important to ensure that remote access is monitored and should be disabled whenever it is no longer required. This will prevent former employees from retaining access particularly because time and again disgruntled former staff may raise disorder on a company’s networks if the administrators and management delay revoking their access to the company’s resources (Thomas & Stoddard, 2012). Supplementing the passwords with other indispensable factors can also help in handling the problem. Supplementing the passwords, commonly referred to as biometrics or multifactor authentication, is based on three fundamental factors: something you know (username), something you have (PIN that is on a token), and something you are (a fingerprint, facial recognition or iris scan). In most cases, biometrics implementation is done in hardware and generally seen in the laptops. Furthermore, Thomas and Stoddard (2012) cite that biometrics is excellent in providing protection to mobile devices, particularly laptops, from the attacks against login process. However, such technological options may fail to protect an organization’s network if the users reuse same insecure passwords on the other systems which only use a single-factor, password based authentication (Thomas & Stoddard, 2012). For instance, removing hard-drive from a laptop that is biometric-protected will render protection ineffective, thereby allowing someone else to read the disk contents, together with any password mix ups present.
In summary, the highlighted some of the challenges and solutions to applying technology in secure remote access, For instance, one major challenge affecting secure remote technology is weak or blank passwords which enable attackers to easily crack the password. However, this may be prevented by choosing secure passwords which are easy to remember. Supplementing the passwords is also important and it is based on three fundamental factors; something you know, something you have, and something you are. Therefore, there is need for a careful choice of secure passwords which are easy to remember is likely to reduce the incidences of attacks on secure remote technologies.
Reference
Thomas, T. M., & Stoddard, D. (2012). Network security first-step. Indianapolis, IN: Cisco Press.
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