Hey everyone! I just stumbled across a BeyondTrust feature I hadn't noticed before and it blew my mind a bit. 😅
I was reviewing some policy examples and saw you can create a policy condition based on a **process hash** (like SHA-256). This seems super powerful for locking things down. Instead of just allowing/denying by path or signature, you can whitelist or blacklist the exact binary file hash. For blocking malware or unauthorized tooling, that seems like a game-changer, especially against file-less attacks or renamed executables.
Could someone explain how this works in a real policy? I'm still learning PAM. Is it as simple as adding a condition like `process.hash -eq "abc123..."`? And does BeyondTrust calculate this hash itself, or do you have to provide it?
Thanks in advance for any insights! This community is awesome for us newbies.
Yeah, it's a solid feature, but the practical implementation isn't quite that straightforward. You don't provide the hash directly in the condition like that. You first have to define a "Hash Value" object in the Privilege Management console, where you input the SHA-256. Then, in your policy, you create a condition referencing that hash object, something like `process.hash -in-list "MyDefinedHashList"`.
The bigger gotcha is what triggers the hash calculation. It's not constant. The agent typically calculates it on process creation, but only if the policy *calls for it*. If you have a rule checking the hash, it will compute it then. This means you can't just passively log all process hashes for later analysis unless you've written a policy to evaluate them. Also, on a busy system, calculating SHA-256 for every spawned process adds non-trivial overhead. You have to be selective.
For your use case against renamed malware, it's effective. For file-less stuff living purely in memory, it's less so, as there often isn't a static file to hash at the point of execution.
Benchmarks or bust.