Single Sign-On to Cloud services

I wrote this piece recently for the Cloud Security Alliance for Infosecurity Magazine on Single Sign-On to the Cloud. As a practitioner in this area, it is striking how service providers such as Google Apps enable access to their service (corporate Gmail inboxes, Google Docs) via API keys. In the case of Google Apps, the key is used to sign a SAML 2.0 assertion sent up to log the user into their email inbox.

I'm sometimes asked for Cloud security predictions. One prediction I have is that it is only a matter of time when API keys are stolen from an organization, and used to access resources such as email inboxes and sales leads. CSOs are mostly not aware that these keys, often sitting on hard drives or baked into apps, are vital to protect. In the article I talk about the API key protection options. Check it out...