Process Security, Pillar 02
Who can access your deployer keys, your treasury interface, your infrastructure dashboards, and your CI/CD pipelines? If the answer is not an immediate, precise list, that is your highest-priority process security gap. Identity and access management is the control that limits every other attack.
Identity and access management (IAM) defines who is allowed into your systems. Privileged access management (PAM) governs the highest-risk accounts, the ones that can deploy contracts, move treasury funds, rotate keys, or modify governance parameters. In Web3, both are chronically underdeveloped relative to the blast radius of a failure.
Standard enterprise security solutions for IAM and PAM were designed for centralised organisations with clear employee hierarchies. Web3 protocols operate differently: contributors are pseudonymous, access is often informally granted via shared credentials, and the line between a team member and a contractor is frequently blurred. We design and implement access management frameworks that work within this reality while enforcing the security controls that protect your most critical systems.
Work is delivered through our internal consultancy team and a curated network of specialist partner firms, rigorously vetted for technical depth and professional integrity in the Web3 space.
Why Access Is Everything
“In the Bybit breach, the attacker did not need a zero-day exploit or a smart contract vulnerability. They needed three people with privileged access to approve a transaction they believed was routine. Access management failure, not technical failure, transferred $1.5 billion in minutes.”
Seed Phrases in Password Managers. $35M Gone.
“When LastPass was breached in August 2022, the stolen data included encrypted customer vaults. Many crypto users had stored wallet seed phrases in LastPass, a shared credential store accessible across devices, sometimes shared across team members. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced over $35M in cryptocurrency thefts directly to vault data decrypted from the breach. Each theft was trivially executed once the seed phrase was in the attacker’s hands. Shared credential storage is a single point of failure with a blast radius equal to every secret stored inside it.”
Managed security solutions for access control are not optional at scale. Every additional team member, contractor, and integration partner that enters your ecosystem without a defined access scope increases your attack surface. IAM and PAM are how you keep that surface bounded and auditable.
The Framework
Effective IAM and PAM in Web3 rests on four principles. Most organisations implement one or two partially. We build all four, end to end.
Every system access starts with a confirmed identity. No shared accounts, no anonymous access to sensitive systems. MFA enforced across all privileged roles, with hardware security keys for the highest-risk accounts.
Every person and system has the minimum access needed to do their job, no more. Access is scoped, time-limited where appropriate, and reviewed periodically. Privilege creep is actively prevented rather than periodically cleaned up.
Access logs are collected, retained, and reviewed. Anomalous access patterns, unusual hours, unexpected systems, excessive data access, trigger alerts rather than being discovered in a post-mortem six months later.
Access revocation is immediate, complete, and verified. Departed contributors do not retain access to repositories, wallets, admin panels, or communication channels. Credentials they touched are rotated as standard practice.
