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IBM Verify (formerly IBM Security Verify) is IBM’s cloud identity provider. Connect an IBM Verify tenant to Oleria to see who can sign in through it, which applications they can reach, who administers the tenant, and which API clients and applications act as non-human identities. Oleria reads this data from the IBM Verify APIs with an API client that you create in the IBM Verify admin console. You can then review over-provisioned access and take action directly from Oleria. One Oleria integration covers one IBM Verify tenant. To connect another tenant, add another integration.

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What Oleria discovers

Once connected, Oleria continuously discovers and maps the following from your IBM Verify tenant:
  • Users - every user, with username, display name, email address, title, department, employee number, and whether the user is active. Oleria also shows when each user was created, last modified, and set to expire, the user’s realm, and, when IBM Verify records them, their manager, delegate, and when their password was locked. Last activity is the later of the user’s last sign-in and last MFA use.
    • Users in IBM Verify’s Cloud Directory sign in with an IBM Verify password. Oleria shows when they last changed it.
    • Users from an identity source, such as an enterprise SAML or OIDC provider, sign in through that source, so SSO shows as required for them. Users from a social identity source, such as Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn, appear as external users.
    • Users who hold any IBM Verify admin role, directly or through a group, are marked as administrators. Each administrator’s account role is admin:tenantadmin when they hold the tenant administrator role, and otherwise one of their admin roles. Other users show the account role user.
  • Sign-in methods and MFA - each user’s password or identity source, plus the MFA methods they’ve enrolled and used: email, SMS, and voice one-time codes, authenticator app (TOTP), FIDO2 and passkeys, security questions, IBM Verify app push, and QR code sign-in. MFA status comes from the first of these that applies: If the API client can’t read access policies, MFA shows as unavailable for users who don’t have two-factor authentication turned on.
  • MFA factors and enrollments - each MFA factor type the tenant offers, and each user’s enrollments, shown as active, pending until validated, or suspended when disabled.
  • Groups - three kinds, with their members:
    • Standard groups, shown as custom groups, including groups nested in other groups. Each group shows its description, creation and modification dates, member count, and its owners.
    • Reserved groups, the groups IBM Verify creates, such as the admin and developer groups, shown as built-in groups.
    • Dynamic groups, whose members IBM Verify computes from a rule, shown as dynamic groups with their creator and status.
    Oleria also shows a built-in group named All IBM Verify users, with every user as a member. It stands for the applications that every user can access. See Applications.
  • Roles - IBM Verify’s admin roles and admin permissions, such as tenant administrator and user administrator. Roles that IBM provides are standard roles. Roles you create are custom roles. Each role shows which roles and permissions it contains, so its holders get all of their access. Roles are granted to users and to groups, including dynamic groups. A grant with an end date shows its expiration. Disabled grants, grants past their end date, and grants of a disabled admin role aren’t shown.
  • Applications - every application in the tenant, with its type, template, whether it’s enabled, its provisioning mode, and its OAuth client ID or SAML entity ID. Each application shows who can access it: users, groups, and dynamic groups granted access, with the application roles each holds. When an application gives every user access, Oleria shows access from the All IBM Verify users group.
  • Application roles - the roles and permissions defined for each application, linked to their application.
  • Non-human identities (NHIs): Each NHI also appears with its credential: a client secret, a key pair for private_key_jwt clients, or a certificate for mutual TLS clients. Oleria records that a credential exists, never its value. Last used is the newest token that IBM Verify issued to the client in the last 90 days.
  • Identity threats - detections from IBM Verify identity threat protection in the last 90 days, shown as risks on the tenant: multiple failed logins, compromised credentials, login deviations, credential stuffing, abnormal user activity, and other threats. Warning detections are moderate risks and critical detections are high risks. Each shows the rule, its summary, start and end times, the number of impacted users, and the IDs of the compromised users.
  • Activity - events from the IBM Verify event log:
    • sign-ins, failed sign-ins, and sign-outs, including SSO sign-ins to applications, with the IP address, location, realm, device type, and the sign-in or MFA method used
    • tokens issued to and revoked for API clients and applications that authenticate as themselves
    • management events: users created, changed, deleted, enabled, or disabled, password resets, group changes and membership changes, admin and application access granted and revoked, application changes, API clients created, changed, and deleted, MFA factors added and removed, and access and password policy changes
    • access policy decisions: sign-ins that adaptive access or an access policy allowed or denied, with the risk level and the rule that matched
    • identity governance events: access requests submitted, approved, and rejected, certification campaign decisions to keep or revoke access, and accounts provisioned or deprovisioned in applications
    • users who self-register, and privacy consents users grant or withdraw
    • service, notice, and digital badge events, kept as custom events
    Each event is credited to the user, API client, or application that IBM Verify names as performing it. Events that IBM Verify performs on its own, such as automatic deprovisioning, have no performer. Failed events show IBM Verify’s reason. Events Oleria doesn’t recognize are kept as custom events.
Oleria refreshes users, groups, roles, and applications on its regular sync schedule. Activity syncs separately.
This integration covers identities, access to applications, roles, and activity. IBM Verify has no resource inventory, so Oleria doesn’t populate resource-level Access Graph or Access Inventory data for IBM Verify.

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Prerequisites

  • An IBM Verify tenant on verify.ibm.com, such as acme.verify.ibm.com.
  • An IBM Verify administrator who can create API clients under Security -> API access, such as a tenant administrator.
  • Admin access on the Oleria platform to add a new integration.

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Permissions

Oleria uses one API client for both discovery and remediation actions. The client’s entitlements decide what Oleria can read and change. IBM Verify accepts any one of the entitlements listed for an operation. Read entitlements: Don’t use readUsers or readGroups in place of readUserGroups: they don’t return group memberships. If the API client is missing an entitlement other than readUserGroups and readEntitlements, Oleria skips that data and syncs the rest of the tenant. The exception is activity: without readReports, the activity sync fails rather than showing no activity. Remediation entitlements, required for actions: Grant only the remediation entitlements of the actions you plan to use. Before an action runs, Oleria checks that the API client holds the action’s entitlement, and refuses the action if it doesn’t.
manageAppAccessAdmin can change applications and who can access them, not only read them. IBM Verify has no read-only alternative, so Oleria needs it to show applications, application access, and applications that act as non-human identities. Without it, Oleria syncs the rest of the tenant without them. Store and rotate this API client’s secret as you would an administrator credential.
Use a dedicated API client for this integration. Oleria never disables the API client it connects with.

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Create an API client in IBM Verify

1

Open API access

Sign in to the IBM Verify admin console and go to Security -> API access. Click Add API client and name it Oleria.
2

Select the read entitlements

Under Entitlements, select readUserGroups and readEntitlements, which Oleria needs to connect, plus manageAppAccessAdmin, readAPIClients, readDynamicGroups, readEnrollMFAMethodAnyUser, readAccessPolicies, and readReports. Read the warning about manageAppAccessAdmin first.
3

Select the remediation entitlements (optional)

To let Oleria take remediation actions, also select the entitlements of the actions you’ll use: updateAnyUser to disable and enable users, updateAnyGroupMember for group membership, manageEntitlements for admin roles, manageUsers to create and delete users, manageGroups to create groups, revokeAllSessions to revoke sessions, and manageAPIClients to disable API clients. Application access actions use manageAppAccessAdmin, which you selected in the previous step.
4

Copy the credentials

Save the API client, then copy its Client ID and Client secret from Security -> API access.
If you restrict the API client to specific IP addresses, allow Oleria’s IP addresses. Contact support@oleria.com for the current list.
The IBM Verify admin console changes over time. If these steps don’t match what you see, refer to IBM’s API access documentation.

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Connect IBM Verify to Oleria

1

Open the integration

Sign in to your Oleria workspace, navigate to Integrations, and select IBM Verify.
2

Complete the connection form

Fill in the connection form:
3

Authenticate

Select Authenticate. Before it saves anything, Oleria gets a token for the API client and checks that it can read users, groups, and admin roles. If IBM Verify rejects the client ID or secret, check both values and that the API client is enabled. If readUserGroups or readEntitlements is missing, Oleria names the missing entitlement. Other missing read entitlements don’t block the connection.Find the newly connected tenant, named IBM Verify (<tenant host>), on the Connected tab of your Oleria Integrations page.

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Edit the connection

You can change the Client ID and Client secret of an existing integration. Leave Client secret blank to keep the stored secret. If you change the Client ID, also enter that API client’s secret. You can’t change the Tenant host. To connect a different tenant, add a new integration.

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Verify the integration

Confirm the IBM Verify tenant appears on the Connected tab of your Oleria Integrations page with a status of Healthy. After the first sync completes, review the discovered users, groups, roles, applications, non-human identities, and activity in your Oleria workspace. In the integration’s Capabilities and operation readiness section, Read users, Read groups, and Read roles show Available. If one shows Needs permission, add the missing entitlement to the API client: When the API client has readAPIClients, the section also lists the entitlements the API client holds.

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Remediation actions

Oleria runs actions with the integration’s API client. Each action needs the entitlement listed in Permissions, plus readAPIClients. Oleria refuses these actions and sends no change to IBM Verify:
  • Changing the membership of reserved groups, dynamic groups, or the All IBM Verify users group. IBM Verify computes dynamic group membership from the group’s rule.
  • Removing the tenant’s last user who holds the tenant administrator role directly.
  • Removing a role that the user holds only through a group. Remove the user from the group instead.
  • Removing application access that the user has only through a group, a dynamic group, or because the application gives every user access. Change the group’s access or the application’s settings in IBM Verify instead.
  • Assigning or removing application access for the All IBM Verify users group. Whether every user can access an application is a setting of the application in IBM Verify.
  • Disabling the API client the integration connects with.
  • Disabling an API client that IBM Verify returns without its secret. IBM Verify would generate a new secret for it, which would break whatever uses the API client.
Keep these points in mind:
  • Oleria reads the target before it changes anything. If the target is already in the requested state, the action succeeds without making a change, and there’s nothing to revert.
  • After each change, Oleria reads the target again. If IBM Verify didn’t apply the change, the action fails.
  • When you remove a direct grant of a role or application access that the user also has through a group or for every user, Oleria removes the direct grant, and the result notes that the user keeps the access.
  • Before an action runs, Oleria checks that the API client holds the action’s entitlement. This needs readAPIClients; without it, Oleria doesn’t run actions and reports that readAPIClients is missing.
  • Reverting checks the target first. If it changed after the action ran, or no longer exists, Oleria leaves it as is.

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Known limitations

  • Only verify.ibm.com tenants. Tenants on the older ice.ibmcloud.com domain and custom domains can’t be connected.
  • Applications need manageAppAccessAdmin. IBM Verify has no read-only entitlement for applications. Without it, Oleria shows no applications, no application access, and no applications that act as non-human identities.
  • Activity history is limited to 90 days. IBM Verify keeps events for 90 days. The first sync imports activity from that window only, identity threats cover the last 90 days, and an API client or application with no token in that window has no last-used date. If a five-minute period holds more events than the IBM Verify events API returns for one query, some of those events may be missing.
  • Some event types aren’t imported. Account sync, registration drop-off, and gateway agent health events aren’t synced. They report reconciliation jobs, sign-up analytics, and on-premises gateway health rather than changes to users or access.
  • Large groups may show no members. On tenants without IBM Verify’s large group support, IBM Verify doesn’t list the members of a group with more than 10,000 members. Oleria shows the group without its members and marks it as truncated.
  • Applications can’t be disabled as NHIs. See Remediation actions.
  • API clients have no owner or creation date. IBM Verify doesn’t record who owns or created an API client, or when. Secret creation and rotation dates aren’t available either, because Oleria never reads secrets.
  • Password change dates are for Cloud Directory users only. Users from an identity source have no IBM Verify password.
  • No impersonation. A user’s delegate in IBM Verify receives the user’s approval and recertification tasks, not the ability to sign in as the user, so Oleria shows the delegate on the user without an impersonation link.
  • Identity threats are shown on the tenant. Each threat lists the IDs of the compromised users in its details instead of being linked to their accounts.
  • Application roles can only be viewed. Role actions apply to IBM Verify admin roles and admin permissions. Manage application roles in IBM Verify.
  • Not synced. Accounts that IBM Verify provisions in downstream applications, identity source configurations, access requests and certification campaigns, consent records, workflow models, and the IBM Verify app registrations of each user aren’t synced.

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Contact us

For questions about this integration, contact us at support@oleria.com.