Single Sign-On Security Concerns

The Main Concern with Single Sign-On

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What is the main concern with single sign-on?

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Explanations

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A. B. C. D.

A.

A major concern with Single Sign-On (SSO) is that if a user's ID and password are compromised, the intruder would have access to all the systems that the user was authorized for.

The following answers are incorrect: The security administrator's workload would increase.

Is incorrect because the security administrator's workload would decrease and not increase.

The admin would not be responsible for maintaining multiple user accounts just the one.

The users' password would be too hard to remember.

Is incorrect because the users would have less passwords to remember.

User access rights would be increased.

Is incorrect because the user access rights would not be any different than if they had to log into systems manually.

Single sign-on (SSO) is a mechanism that allows users to authenticate themselves once and gain access to multiple applications or systems without having to authenticate again. The primary concern with SSO is the risk of a single point of failure. If an attacker gains access to a user's SSO credentials, they can potentially access all the applications and systems that the user has access to, leading to a more significant security breach.

Therefore, the main concern with SSO is that if a user's SSO credentials are compromised, it can lead to unauthorized access to multiple applications, increasing the risk of data breaches and other security incidents. The extent of the damage that can be caused by a single compromised SSO credential depends on the number of applications or systems that the user has access to through SSO.

To mitigate the risks associated with SSO, it's crucial to implement strong authentication mechanisms and enforce policies that require users to choose complex and unique passwords, use multifactor authentication, and regularly change their passwords. It's also crucial to monitor user activity and detect anomalies that could indicate a compromise of SSO credentials. Additionally, access control and authorization policies should be enforced to limit the extent of damage that could be caused by a compromised SSO credential.