Signal Sciences > Case Studies > Duo Enhances Security Visibility and Performance with Signal Sciences

Duo Enhances Security Visibility and Performance with Signal Sciences

Technology Category

Cybersecurity & Privacy - Application Security
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Buildings
National Security & Defense

Use Cases

Supply Chain Visibility
Tamper Detection

About The Customer

Duo is a leading provider of unified access security and multi-factor authentication delivered through the cloud. Duo's mission is to protect organizations against cyber security threats by making security easy and effective. Duo customers trust its platform to support the scale and frequency of billions of authentication requests across the globe every week. The company is committed to ensuring a seamless user experience without compromising on security, and it was in search of a solution that could provide application security visibility for its platform and websites without introducing additional security or operational risks.

The Challenge

Duo, a leading authentication platform, was in search of a solution that could provide application security visibility for its platform and websites without introducing additional security or operational risks. The company's platform supports billions of authentication requests globally every week, and it was crucial for Duo's security team to monitor and secure this traffic without negatively impacting the user experience or introducing additional security risks. Their previous experiences with hardware and cloud Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) had resulted in single points of failure and difficulties in managing traffic, prompting the need for an alternative approach.

The Solution

Duo selected Signal Sciences for its ability to provide immediate security visibility and blocking with an architecture that could scale without impacting performance. Signal Sciences' pragmatic approach, based on their previous experience running engineering and security at one of the Alexa top-100 ranked sites, appealed to all stakeholders at Duo. The secure architecture of Signal Sciences easily integrated into Duo’s environment without requiring a lot of resources for deployment or becoming an attack surface. Duo confirmed that Signal Sciences’ software wasn’t susceptible to additional attacks. Their patented module and agent architecture is guaranteed to fail-open, providing a fail-safe mechanism. The security team found that real security, not just a product deployed in logging mode, was possible with Signal Sciences, without negatively impacting the performance of its customers.

Operational Impact

The implementation of Signal Sciences' solution resulted in enhanced security visibility and blocking for Duo's authentication platform and websites. The solution was easily integrated into Duo's environment without requiring a lot of resources for deployment or becoming an attack surface. The security team found that real security was possible with Signal Sciences, without negatively impacting the performance of its customers. There were no rules to tweak or tune, and Duo’s team experienced zero false positives while installed in production. This meant that legitimate customers could continue to authenticate, while the malicious actors were stopped short. The solution's fail-open architecture also provided a fail-safe mechanism, ensuring that even in the event of a failure, the system would fail gracefully without impacting operations.

Quantitative Benefit