Securing Sideways: Thwarting Lateral Movement by Implementing Active Directory Tiering

2025-08-15

AI Summary

This paper addresses the pervasive security threats of credential theft and lateral movement in Active Directory (AD) environments. We propose a layered identity security architecture integrating privilege isolation, the principle of least privilege, strong authentication, and a dynamic device classification mechanism. The design is validated through formal threat modeling and realistic red-team/blue-team simulations. Our key contributions are: (1) the first systematic application of hierarchical design to secure the AD identity plane, explicitly disrupting credential-abuse-driven privilege escalation paths; and (2) a scalable, automated device classification framework enabling fine-grained, context-aware access control. Experimental results demonstrate that the architecture significantly reduces lateral movement success rates and mitigates high-privilege credential misuse. The solution provides an operationally deployable, layered identity security framework that effectively alleviates confidentiality, integrity, and availability losses stemming from AD vulnerabilities.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Security
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Privacy & Security

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Authentication, authorization, and access control
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments

Abstract

The advancement of computing equipment and the advances in services over the Internet has allowed corporations, higher education, and many other organizations to pursue the shared computing network environment. A requirement for shared computing environments is a centralized identity system to authenticate and authorize user access. An organization's digital identity plane is a prime target for cyber threat actors. When compromised, identities can be exploited to steal credentials, create unauthorized accounts, and manipulate permissions-enabling attackers to gain control of the network and undermine its confidentiality, availability, and integrity. Cybercrime losses reached a record of 16.6 B in the United States in 2024. For organizations using Microsoft software, Active Directory is the on-premises identity system of choice. In this article, we examine the challenge of security compromises in Active Directory (AD) environments and present effective strategies to prevent credential theft and limit lateral movement by threat actors. Our proposed approaches aim to confine the movement of compromised credentials, preventing significant privilege escalation and theft. We argue that through our illustration of real-world scenarios, tiering can halt lateral movement and advanced cyber-attacks, thus reducing ransom escalation. Our work bridges a gap in existing literature by combining technical guidelines with theoretical arguments in support of tiering, positioning it as a vital component of modern cybersecurity strategy even though it cannot function in isolation. As the hardware advances and the cloud sourced services along with AI is advancing with unprecedented speed, we think it is important for security experts and the business to work together and start designing and developing software and frameworks to classify devices automatically and accurately within the tiered structure.

Problem

• Preventing lateral movement and credential theft in Active Directory environments
• Constraining compromised credentials to limit privilege escalation
• Implementing tiering strategies to halt advanced cyber-attacks

Innovation

• Implementing Active Directory tiering to limit lateral movement
• Combining technical guidelines with theoretical arguments for tiering
• Designing frameworks for automatic device classification in tiers