Yubico Whitepaper SharedWorkstations
Yubico Whitepaper SharedWorkstations
Yubico Whitepaper SharedWorkstations
Securing shared
workstations
against modern
cyber threats
Phishing-resistant MFA with exceptional UX
Contents
3 Shared workstations are low-hanging cyberattack targets
5 Common shared workstation scenarios and associated vulnerabilities
5 Shared kiosks
5 Mobile-restricted
6 Grab-and-go
6 Point-of-sale (POS)
7 Four critical authentication requirements across shared workstations
9 Drawbacks of legacy MFA
11 Securing shared workstations with phishing-resistant MFA
12 Industry use cases
12 Protect confidential personal and financial information in retail
banking call centers
12 Secure nurse workstations and tap-and-go devices in hospitals
12 Supporting retail POS with convenience and security
13 Summary
14 Sources
$4.65M
41%
rely on sticky notes
for password management7
Shared workstations, kiosks, and devices are critical to the day-to-day operations of
businesses in a wide cross-section of industries. These systems often have a direct link
to critical systems and data, including customer data, payment information, proprietary
information, manufacturing or assembly lines, and even protected health information.
The very nature of shared workstations make them low-hanging targets for cyber
criminals and insider attacks:
Traditionally
Access to critical
prone to insecure
systems or data
security practices
Hardware-backed 2FA and MFA options
MFA access controls
Shared workstations amplify risks associated with devices, user access, authentication,
or insider threats that lead to the theft or loss of credentials, mission critical data, or
intellectual property. If a shared workstation is unavailable due to a cyberattack, this
can lead to business downtime, and further repercussions related to revenue, brand
reputation, and regulatory compliance penalties.
Mobile-restricted
Mobile-restricted A mobile-restricted environment is an environment where mobile devices cannot
industries be used. These could be due to factors related to the environment itself, such as
air-gapped or isolated networks, hard environments, offline or offshore locations,
Call clean rooms or high-security sites. They could also be due to restrictions imposed
centers by regulations, unions, or where mobile devices are simply discouraged by
company policy. There may also be a subset of employees within an organization
Clean that do not wish to use personal mobile devices for work purposes, requiring a
rooms different authentication method.
Shared workstations and devices across mobile-restricted environments calls for
Airgap authentication that is highly secure, compliant to industry regulations, and simple
environments
to use, to drive user adoption.
High-security
sites
Industrial
(no connection, oil rigs, etc)
Point-of-sale (POS)
Point-of-sale These specialized workstations used for customer-facing financial transactions in
industries retail, grocery store, fast-food and restaurant industry, or wholesale environments,
can be used by employees or even by customers (self-service kiosks). In order to
optimize for the customer experience, special attention must be paid to speed and
Retail ease of authentication, avoiding potential account lockouts, and most importantly,
ensuring the security of customer and payment information.
Due to the high risk to financial data at the point-of-sale, these workstations are
Grocery highly regulated under PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard).
Card skimming is the most common risk with POS terminals, capturing data from
payment infrastructure, overlays, malware or compromised software, or wireless /
Wholesale NFC interception. The high rate of employee turnover and the nature of seasonal
work often create added pressure points around onboarding and offboarding
employee access to POS systems.
A growing area of concern in POS is the use of smartphones, tablets, or other
wireless devices in lieu of a standard POS terminal. By 2023, it is estimated that
1 in 4 POS transactions will be via mPOS (mobile point-of-sale), a process which
increases the risk of Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM) attacks and introduces other
mobile vulnerabilities.10
authentication to an
employee’s smartphone. While considering authentication solutions for shared workstation environments, in
This is a common form of addition to how effective the solution is in protecting against external cyberattacks
MFA, but it can be and insider threats, organizations should also consider how the solution affects
circumvented. During the user productivity (account lockouts, log in times), how reliable the solution is across
Twitter Hack, the Hackers varied environments and use cases, external variables which may negatively impact
got past MFA by convincing performance, such as cell signal and batteries, and what the long-term total cost of
the Twitter employees to ownership is.
authenticate the Below are the four critical authentication requirements that organizations should
application-based MFA take into consideration for any shared workstation environment:
during the login. The most
secure form of MFA is a
physical security key, or Security
hardware MFA, involving a
USB key that is plugged How do you make sure the user logging into the device is the
into a computer to legitimate person?
authenticate users. This
type of hardware MFA How do you secure shared devices and internal assets with multiple rotating users,
would have stopped the making sure both the user accounts are secure and that the users are gaining
Hackers, and Twitter is now access to only the applications, services and data they should have access to?
implementing it in place of Admin accounts, or shared workstations with access to privileged
application-based MFA. information, should be protected with an authentication mechanism that is
–N
ew York Department of impersonation-resistant.
Financial Services, Shared workstations should rely heavily on user permissions and access controls
Twitter Investigation (no shared, guest, or anonymous logins), and have restrictions that prevent
Report, October 2020 password saving. Administrator accounts should also be individual, not shared,
to support in-person or remote troubleshooting.
Reliability
How do you ensure consistent authentication that always
works, even in tough environments with varying degrees of
connection?
“
mobile authentication applied and enforced at scale, will require ongoing policy
The average company enforcement, user training and IT support. All forms of mobile-based authentication
loses $5.2 million annually such as SMS, OTP, and push notifications can create a huge support burden if
in productivity due to codes are delayed, users get locked out of their accounts, or users need to register
account lockouts new devices.
–P
onemon Institute, 2019 Any time a user struggles with mobile authentication, they are not being productive.
State of Password and The faster a user can authenticate and do their job securely, or even perform a self-
Authentication Security service password reset if required, the better return on investment.
Behaviors Report
Credentials remain one of the top targets for cyberattackers, and are connected
to 61% of data breaches.13 The average employee has to use and remember
191 passwords, contributing to complexity and user frustration.14 Currently, for
the average company, 60% of IT service desk interactions are related to password
resets.15 Aside from the IT cost, the average company loses $5.2 million annually
in productivity due to account lockouts.16
What is ongoing frustration with authentication most likely to lead to? Unsafe
security workarounds—even by the most educated users. In fact, 49% of IT security
professionals admit to password sharing.17 We know that shared workstations are
associated with higher rates of password sharing, password reuse across accounts,
or passwords being saved to the browser or application—practices which are never
safe, but amplify the risk in a shared workstation scenario.
However, it’s important to note that while any form of two factor (2FA) or MFA
offers more security than passwords alone, each still relies on passwords as the
first factor. Further, with legacy MFA, such as mobile-based MFA, the second factor
is tied to the mobile device. This is a red flag, because of three aspects: there is
no real guarantee that the private key ends up on a secure element on the mobile
device, the OTP code or private key could be intercepted in some way, and it is
impossible to ensure proof of possession; or in National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) terms—impossible to prove it is impersonation resistant.
The YubiKey 5 FIPS Series The YubiKey uses modern authentication protocols such as FIDO U2F and FIDO2
From left to right: YubiKey 5 NFC FIPS, YubiKey 5C NFC open authentication standards to help eliminate phishing-driven credential attacks.
FIPS, YubiKey 5Ci FIPS, YubiKey 5C FIPS, YubiKey 5 YubiKeys also support SmartCard, OTP, and OpenPGP protocols, enabling the
Nano FIPS and YubiKey 5C Nano FIPS
use of a single security key across a variety of modern and legacy systems. The
versatile YubiKey requires no software installation, battery, or cellular connection,
making it ideal for shared workstation and mobile-restricted environments, including
isolated areas. Users can benefit from a frictionless authentication workflow—a
user plugs the YubiKey into a USB port and touches a button to authenticate, or
simply taps the YubiKey using NFC against a device (highly suited for no spark
environments).
YubiKeys also offer a bridge to passwordless authentication with support for
multiple authentication protocols. To further improve the user experience and
YubiKey Bio Series - FIDO Edition speed of authentication, Yubico also offers the YubiKey Bio Series—FIDO Edition
From left to right: YubiKey Bio - FIDO Edition, YubiKey supporting FIDO U2F and FIDO2, which delivers the hallmark security that all
C Bio - FIDO Edition YubiKeys are known for with a new biometric-based passwordless experience.
“
ecure retail POS with convenience
S
Instead of YubiKey being a
highly recommended solution and security
for our clients, we’re moving
Retail Control Systems (RCS) markets and supports business management and
towards making it a required
point-of-sales (POS) systems to retailers and restaurants. Subject to increasingly
solution. We are building it
strict PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance requirements, RCS sought a solution
into our hosting suite, and
that could be used internally by RCS to secure remote admin access to systems,
into our user fees.
but also externally to protect access to sensitive data.
– Retail Control Systems Today, RCS authenticates over 11,000+ user logins with YubiKeys in a typical
48-hour period, helping protect devices as well as specific users and shared-
user profiles.
Username Mobile-based
YubiKey
& password authenticators
. Keeper, 4 Rules for Safe Password Sharing in the Workplace (April 2021), https://www.keepersecurity.com/blog/2021/07/06/4-rules-for-safe-pass-
5
word-sharing-in-the-workplace/
. IBM, 2021 Cost of Data Breach Report, (Accessed September 14, 2021), https://www.ibm.com/security/data-breach
6
.P
7
onemon Institute, 2020 State of Password and Authentication Security Behaviors Report, (February 2020), https://pages.yubico.com/2020-pass-
word-and-authentication-report
.P
8
onemon Institute, 2020 State of Password and Authentication Security Behaviors Report, (February 2020), https://pages.yubico.com/2020-pass-
word-and-authentication-report; Ayal Hassidim, MD et. al., Prevalence of Sharing Access Credentials in Electronic Medical Records, Healthcare
Informatics Research, (July 2017), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5572521/
.S
9
imon Constable, How Hot Desking Will Kill Your Company (June 20, 2019), https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonconstable/2019/06/20/how-hot-
desking-will-kill-your-company/?sh=16f55a8032e9; Jessica Dickler, Post-pandemic, the office will now have a whole new look, (July 12, 2021),
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/12/post-pandemic-offices-have-a-new-look-as-employers-adopt-hoteling.html
10
.Juniper Research, POS & mPOS Terminals: Market Summary & Key Takeaways, (Accessed November 10, 2021), https://www.juniperresearch.com/
infographics/pos-mpos-terminals-market-summary-key-takeawa?ch=mpos; Charlie Osborne, PayPal, Square vulnerabilities impact mobile point-of-
sale machines (August 10, 2018), https://www.zdnet.com/article/paypal-square-vulnerabilities-impact-mobile-point-of-sale-machines/
11
.Ponemon Institute, 2020 State of Password and Authentication Security Behaviors Report, (February 2020), https://pages.yubico.com/2020-pass-
word-and-authentication-report; Ayal Hassidim, MD et. al., Prevalence of Sharing Access Credentials in Electronic Medical Records, Healthcare
Informatics Research, (July 2017), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5572521/
12
.Ponemon Institute, 2020 State of Password and Authentication Security Behaviors Report, (February 2020), https://pages.yubico.com/2020-pass-
word-and-authentication-report; Ayal Hassidim, MD et. al., Prevalence of Sharing Access Credentials in Electronic Medical Records, Healthcare
Informatics Research, (July 2017), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5572521/
13
.Verizon, 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, (Accessed May 18, 2021), https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/2021/mas-
ters-guide/
14
.Amber Steel, LastPass Reveals 8 Truths about Passwords in the New Password Exposé, (November 1, 2017), https://blog.lastpass.com/2017/11/
lastpass-reveals-8-truths-about-passwords-in-the-new-password-expose/
15
.Gartner, 3 Simple Ways IT Service Desks Should Handle Incidents and Requests, (Aug 2019)
16
.Ponemon Institute, 2019 State of Password and Authentication Security Behaviors Report, (Accessed September 14, 2021), https://pages.yubico.
com/2019-password-and-authentication-report
17
.Ponemon Institute, 2020 State of Password and Authentication Security Behaviors Report, (February 2020), https://pages.yubico.com/2020-pass-
word-and-authentication-report; Ayal Hassidim, MD et. al., Prevalence of Sharing Access Credentials in Electronic Medical Records, Healthcare
Informatics Research, (July 2017), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5572521/
18
.451 Research, 2021 Yubico and 451 Research Study, (April 2021), https://pages.yubico.com/work-from-home-policies-driving-mfa-adoption
19
.Kurt Thomas and Angelika Moscicki, New research: how effective is basic account hygiene at preventing hijacking, (May 17, 2019), https://security.
googleblog.com/2019/05/new-research-how-effective-is-basic.html
20
.Aite Group for PinDrop, 61% of Fraud Traced Back to the Contact Center, (Accessed November 15, 2021), https://www.pindrop.com/blog/61-of-
fraud-traced-back-to-the-contact-center/
21
.https://security.googleblog.com/2019/05/new-research-how-effective-is-basic.html
22
.Ibid.
23
.Ibid.
24
.Wander: Uncovering the true costs of enterprise mobility https://www.clevermobile.it/risorse/file/wandera/tcowhitepaper.pdf
25
.https://security.googleblog.com/2019/05/new-research-how-effective-is-basic.html
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