Adaptive Identity and Access Management Architecture with Continuous Risk Assessment and Telemetry-Based Credential Abuse Detection

1. Introduction

Identity and Access Management (IAM) constitutes one of the fundamental pillars of information security in modern organizations. In corporate environments characterized by hybrid infrastructures, cloud services, and distributed collaboration, precise control of digital identities has become essential to preserve the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical resources.

Despite the widespread adoption of multifactor authentication, identity federation, and role-based access control, several recent incidents demonstrate that legitimate credentials continue to be exploited by adversaries. The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2023 indicates that approximately 74% of the analyzed breaches involved the human element, often associated with the misuse of compromised credentials (VERIZON, 2023). Techniques such as credential dumping, pass-the-hash, and Kerberoasting are extensively documented in intrusion campaigns and are frequently associated with lateral movement within corporate networks.

The main problem lies in the fact that traditional IAM systems validate identity only at the time of initial authentication. Once the session has been established, continuous reassessment of the risk associated with user activity rarely occurs. Consequently, an adversary who obtains valid credentials may operate for long periods without detection, exploiting legitimate permissions.

Zero Trust-based security architectures propose a paradigm shift, in which each access request must be continuously verified based on context and behavior (ROSE et al., 2020). However, many practical implementations still lack formal models for dynamic risk assessment and direct integration with operational telemetry.

In this work, we investigate three main research questions:

RQ1: How can a continuous risk assessment model applicable to IAM systems be formalized mathematically?
RQ2: How can telemetry from identity, network, and endpoint sources be integrated to detect credential abuse?
RQ3: What is the impact of this approach on operational metrics such as Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR)?

The contributions of this study are:

• Proposal of a formal mathematical model of dynamic risk $R(u,s,t)$ applied to identity sessions.
• Development of an adaptive architecture integrating policy decision mechanisms and telemetry analysis.
• Experimental evaluation based on simulation of realistic attacks documented in the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

The remainder of the article is organized as follows: Section 2 presents theoretical foundations and related work; Section 3 describes the threat model and problem formalization; Section 4 presents the proposed methodology; Section 5 describes the implementation; Section 6 presents the experimental evaluation; Section 7 discusses a case study; Section 8 analyzes implications; and Section 9 presents the conclusions.

2. Background and Related Work

2.1 Access Control Models

The Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) model is one of the most widely used access control paradigms in corporate systems. Formally, RBAC defines relationships between users, roles, and permissions (SANDHU et al., 1996). Let:

• $U$ be the set of users
• $R$ be the set of roles
• $P$ be the set of permissions
• $UA \subseteq U \times R$ the user–role relation
• $PA \subseteq R \times P$ the role–permission relation

Despite its conceptual simplicity, complex environments often face problems of combinatorial explosion of roles and excessive privileges.

As an alternative, the Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) model introduces policies based on subject, resource, and environment attributes (HU; KUHN; FERNADEZ, 2015). In this paradigm, access decisions are expressed as boolean predicates evaluated dynamically.

Zero Trust architectures extend this concept by incorporating continuous verification of identity and context throughout the session (ROSE et al., 2020). This paradigm emphasizes constant monitoring and dynamic reassessment of trust.

2.2 Security Telemetry and Threat Detection

Modern threat detection systems use large volumes of operational telemetry from multiple sources, including endpoints, networks, and applications. SIEM and XDR platforms consolidate this data for centralized analysis and event correlation (BEHL; BEHL, 2017).

Tools such as Sysmon enable detailed collection of system events in Windows environments, while network-based intrusion detection systems such as Suricata provide visibility into potentially malicious traffic (OISF, 2023).

Sigma rules were proposed as an open standard for describing platform-independent detection signatures (ROTH; BÜSCH, 2020). This approach facilitates the sharing of threat intelligence among organizations.

2.3 Credential Abuse

Several studies show that compromised credentials are frequently used for lateral movement and privilege escalation (HUTCHINS; CLOPPERT; AMIN, 2011). Techniques documented in the MITRE ATT&CK framework include:

• Credential Dumping (T1003)
• Pass-the-Hash (T1550.002)
• Kerberoasting (T1558.003)

These techniques allow adversaries to reuse valid credentials without necessarily exploiting additional vulnerabilities.

3. Threat Model and Problem Formalization

We assume an adversary capable of compromising credentials through phishing, malware, or temporary privileged access to an endpoint. After obtaining valid credentials, the adversary may execute widely documented tools for credential extraction and reuse.

The threat model considers the following capabilities:

• Execution of in-memory credential dumping tools
• Authentication to internal services using valid credentials
• Lateral movement using protocols such as SMB, WinRM, and RDP

We assume, however, that the central identity provider remains intact and uncompromised.

We define the dynamic risk associated with a session as:

$$ R(u,s,t) = \alpha B(u,t) + \beta A(u,s,t) + \gamma C(u,t) $$

where:

• $B(u,t)$ represents user behavioral deviation
• $A(u,s,t)$ represents access anomalies associated with the session
• $C(u,t)$ represents environmental context (device, location, time)
• $\alpha, \beta, \gamma$ are normalized coefficients such that $\alpha+\beta+\gamma=1$

A fundamental security property can be expressed as:

$$ R(u,s,t) > \theta \Rightarrow \text{Session revalidation or termination} $$

where $\theta$ represents a configurable risk threshold.

4. Proposed Methodology

The proposed architecture integrates multiple layers of observability and access control. The goal is to correlate operational telemetry with authorization decisions in near real time.

The main components of the architecture are:

Component	Function
Identity Provider	Authentication and identity management
Policy Decision Point	Access policy evaluation
SIEM	Event correlation and analysis
Security sensors	Telemetry collection

Risk calculation occurs continuously as new events are received.

Algorithm 1 ComputeRisk(u, s, t)

Input: user u, session s, time t
Output: risk value R

B ← BehavioralDeviation(u,t)
A ← AccessAnomaly(u,s,t)
C ← ContextScore(u,t)

R ← αB + βA + γC

if R > θ then
    TriggerAdaptiveResponse(u,s)
end if

return R

The computational complexity of the algorithm is $O(n)$ per event, where $n$ represents the number of attributes analyzed.

Events are correlated with MITRE ATT&CK techniques to enrich adversarial behavior analysis.

5. Implementation

The experimental implementation used a technology stack composed of tools widely adopted in corporate environments.

Component	Version
Keycloak	21
Open Policy Agent	0.55
Elastic Stack	8.x
Suricata	7
Sysmon	14

Example of a Rego policy used for adaptive access control:

package iam.risk

default allow = false

allow {
  input.risk < 0.6
}

Relevant collected events include, for example, Sysmon Event ID 10, which records access to sensitive processes such as LSASS, frequently associated with credential extraction techniques.

The analysis infrastructure used an Elastic cluster composed of three nodes with 32 GB of memory each, enabling the ingestion of hundreds of millions of events.

6. Experimental Evaluation

The experimental evaluation was conducted in a simulated corporate environment with characteristics close to those of medium-sized enterprise networks.

Metric	Traditional RBAC	Proposed architecture
Average MTTD	18 h	10.3 h
Average MTTR	26 h	16.1 h
False positives	6.2%	4.7%

The experimental environment included:

• 20 Windows servers
• 15 Linux servers
• approximately 1,200 active users
• about 480 million events collected over three months

Privilege graph analysis using BloodHound revealed a 58% reduction in privilege escalation paths after access policy adjustments.

7. Case Study

A multi-stage attack simulation was conducted, representing a realistic identity compromise chain:

1. Targeted phishing resulting in valid credentials.
2. Execution of in-memory credential dumping.
3. Extraction of Kerberos tickets for Kerberoasting.
4. Lateral movement via SMB.

During the experiment, the system identified multiple correlated indicators:

• Sysmon event ID 10 indicating suspicious access to LSASS
• authentication from an unusual geographic location
• privilege escalation associated with anomalous behavior

The calculated risk exceeded the threshold $\theta$ after approximately seven minutes, leading to automatic session revocation.

8. Discussion

The results indicate that integration between IAM and operational telemetry enables credential abuse to be detected at a significantly earlier stage than traditional models based solely on initial authentication.

However, some limitations must be considered. The effectiveness of the model depends heavily on the quality and coverage of the collected telemetry. Environments with limited log visibility may present reduced analytical accuracy.

In addition, proper calibration of the coefficients $\alpha$, $\beta$, and $\gamma$ is essential to balance sensitivity and the false positive rate. Strategies based on behavioral analysis and statistical models can assist in this tuning.

9. Conclusion

This work presented an adaptive Identity and Access Management architecture based on continuous risk assessment and integration of operational telemetry. We formalized a mathematical model for calculating dynamic risk associated with user sessions and demonstrated its practical application in an experimental environment.

Experimental results indicate relevant improvements in operational metrics for detection and incident response when compared to traditional access control approaches.

The convergence of identity control, telemetry analysis, and adaptive policies represents a promising path toward strengthening security in complex corporate environments.

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