CoreQ Academy3.1 Given a scenario, troubleshoot common issues with identity and access management (IAM) components in an enterprise environment.
IAM problems show up as users locked out or, worse, users with access they should not have. Troubleshoot systematically across subjects, secrets, policies and protocols.
Subject access control
- User
- Human identities; check group membership, status and MFA.
- Process
- Software running under an identity; check the account it runs as.
- Device
- Machine identities and certificates; check enrollment and compliance.
- Service
- Service accounts and workload identities; check scopes and secret expiry.
Secrets management
- Tokens
- Expired, revoked or wrongly scoped tokens cause failures.
- Certificates
- Expired or untrusted certificates break authentication.
- Passwords
- Expired or changed passwords on service accounts break integrations.
- Keys
- Missing or mismatched keys break signing and encryption.
- Rotation
- Rotating secrets without updating every consumer causes outages; automate distribution.
- Deletion
- Deleting secrets still in use breaks systems; deleting unused ones reduces risk.
Conditional access
- User-to-device binding
- Tying sessions or tokens to a registered device; failures when users change devices.
- Geographic location
- Location rules blocking travellers or VPN egress points.
- Time-based
- Access windows; check time zones and clock sync.
- Configuration
- Device compliance requirements such as encryption or OS version.
Identity components
- Attestation
- Device or identity attestation failing because of unhealthy state or expired attestation.
- Cloud IAM access and trust policies
- Permission and trust policies that allow or deny cross-account and service access; explicit denies win.
- Logging and monitoring
- Sign-in and audit logs reveal why access failed.
- Privilege identity management
- Just-in-time elevation workflows; failures when activation or approval is missing.
- Biometrics
- False rejection or acceptance issues and enrollment problems.
Authentication and authorization
- Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML)
- Check certificate validity, clock skew, audience and assertion attributes.
- OpenID
- OpenID Connect issues: redirect URI mismatch, wrong client ID, token audience or expiry.
- Multifactor authentication (MFA)
- Lost devices, registration problems or push fatigue.
- SSO
- Session or federation trust problems affecting many apps at once.
- Kerberos
- Clock skew over five minutes, SPN problems or DNS issues break tickets.
- Simultaneous authentication of equals (SAE)
- WPA3 handshake; older clients may not support it (transition mode).
- Privileged access management (PAM)
- Vault checkout, session recording and rotation issues.
- Open Authorization (OAuth)
- Scope, consent, redirect and token lifetime issues.
- Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP)
- EAP method mismatches or certificate trust problems in 802.1X.
- Identity proofing
- Verifying real-world identity before issuing credentials.
- Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.1X
- Port-based access control; check supplicant, RADIUS and certificates.
- Federation
- Trust between identity providers; metadata and certificate rollover issues.
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Original CoreQ Academy material, mapped to objective 3.1 of the publicly available CompTIA SecurityX CAS-005 exam objectives (Exam objectives V5, document version 7.0). Not affiliated with or endorsed by CompTIA. Contains no exam questions.