This blog post was originally written for a company internal blog. I have removed references and screenshots from internal applications. I have also refactored parts of the blog to be more generic.
We still deploy many of our applications on Windows VM. Part of this blog is Windows server specific.
What is it?
The principle of least privilege states that only the minimum necessary rights should be assigned to a subject that requests access to a resource and should be in effect for the shortest duration necessary. It prevents users from obtaining or changing information in unwanted ways. This is important because it helps organisations reduce risk by reducing the potential damage that excessive privilege can cause accidentally or maliciously.
As developers, we need to be aware that this principle not only applies to us not running everything as root or local admins on our development machines. It also applies to service users our applications run as, database users our applications access data with and API users our application access third party APIs with. It even applies to our application design, where we should have appropriate roles for users identified in use cases.
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