Insecure IAM Policies

Insecure Identity and Access Management (IAM) Policies represent one of the most critical cloud security vulnerabilities, enabling attackers who gain any foothold in a cloud environment to escalate privileges, move laterally across services, and ultimately achieve full account compromise. IAM is the foundational security control in every cloud platform—when IAM policies are overly permissive, every other security control built on top of them is effectively bypassed.

Cloud IAM systems (AWS IAM, GCP IAM, Azure Active Directory/RBAC) provide fine-grained access control through policies that define which principals (users, groups, roles, service accounts) can perform which actions on which resources under which conditions. The complexity of these systems—AWS alone has thousands of individual IAM permissions across hundreds of services—makes it extremely difficult to implement least-privilege access correctly. Organizations frequently resort to wildcard permissions ("Action": "*", "Resource": "*") or overly broad managed policies to avoid operational friction, creating massive privilege escalation opportunities.

The impact of insecure IAM is amplified by the interconnected nature of cloud services. A single overly permissive role can provide access to compute instances, storage buckets, databases, secrets managers, and deployment pipelines. Attackers who compromise a service account with broad permissions can pivot across the entire cloud environment without triggering traditional network-based detection mechanisms, as all access occurs through legitimate API calls using valid credentials.

IAM privilege escalation in cloud environments follows several well-documented attack patterns. In AWS, an attacker who compromises credentials with iam:CreatePolicy and iam:AttachUserPolicy permissions can create a new policy granting AdministratorAccess and attach it to their compromised identity. Similarly, permissions like iam:PassRole combined with lambda:CreateFunction allow creating a Lambda function that executes with a high-privilege role. Over 20 distinct IAM privilege escalation paths have been documented in AWS alone, with similar patterns in GCP and Azure.

Common insecure IAM patterns include: using the root account or organization admin for daily operations, granting *:* (all actions on all resources) to development teams, creating service accounts with permissions far exceeding their actual requirements, failing to rotate access keys and credentials, not implementing conditional access policies (IP restrictions, MFA requirements, time-based access), and maintaining long-lived static credentials instead of using temporary role-based access. Cross-account trust relationships without adequate external ID validation enable confused deputy attacks.

Attackers enumerate IAM permissions using tools like Pacu (AWS), ScoutSuite, or Prowler to map the exact permissions available to compromised credentials. They then use privilege escalation tools like pmapper (for AWS policy analysis) or GCP IAM Privilege Escalation scripts to identify exploitation paths from their current permission set to administrative access. The entire privilege escalation chain may involve multiple steps—each individually appearing benign—but collectively achieving full account compromise.

• Complete cloud account takeover enabling attackers to control all resources, data, and configurations across the entire cloud environment
• Lateral movement across cloud services using compromised IAM credentials to access databases, storage, compute, networking, and security services
• Data exfiltration at scale by leveraging broad IAM permissions to access storage services, databases, and backup systems containing sensitive data
• Persistent backdoor creation through the ability to create new IAM users, roles, or access keys that survive remediation of the initial compromise
• Cryptojacking and resource abuse when compromised IAM credentials provide access to compute provisioning APIs, enabling attackers to launch instances for cryptocurrency mining
• Supply chain attacks when IAM compromise provides access to CI/CD pipelines, container registries, or artifact repositories

1. Implement the principle of least privilege for all IAM policies. Start with zero permissions and grant only the specific actions required for each principal's documented use case. Use AWS IAM Access Analyzer, GCP IAM Recommender, or Azure AD Access Reviews to identify and reduce unused permissions. Never use wildcard actions or resources in production IAM policies.
2. Eliminate long-lived static credentials (access keys, service account keys) wherever possible. Use temporary credentials through IAM roles (AWS STS AssumeRole), workload identity federation (GCP), or managed identities (Azure). For human users, enforce SSO through an identity provider with MFA requirements.
3. Implement IAM permission boundaries (AWS) or organization policy constraints (GCP) that set maximum permission limits regardless of individual policy grants. This prevents privilege escalation even if an attacker gains the ability to modify IAM policies.
4. Deploy continuous IAM monitoring and anomaly detection. Use AWS CloudTrail with GuardDuty, GCP Cloud Audit Logs with Security Command Center, or Azure Activity Logs with Sentinel to detect suspicious IAM activity such as new policy attachments, role creation, access key generation, or cross-account access from unusual sources.
5. Conduct regular IAM access reviews and implement just-in-time (JIT) access for elevated privileges. Remove unused IAM entities (users, roles, policies) and credentials that have not been used within a defined period (90 days maximum). Use cloud-native tools or third-party solutions to automate access reviews.
6. Implement strong conditional access policies: require MFA for all IAM actions, restrict access to specific IP ranges or VPC endpoints, implement time-based access constraints for sensitive operations, and use session tags and external IDs for cross-account access.
7. Use infrastructure-as-code to manage all IAM configurations and enforce IAM policy linting in CI/CD pipelines. Tools like Parliament (AWS), cfn-nag, and Checkov can detect overly permissive policies before deployment.

Begin by auditing all IAM entities across your cloud accounts. For AWS, use aws iam get-account-authorization-details to export the complete IAM configuration, then analyze it with tools like pmapper or iamlive to visualize effective permissions and identify privilege escalation paths. For GCP, use gcloud projects get-iam-policy to enumerate all role bindings. For Azure, use az role assignment list to enumerate RBAC assignments.

Test for privilege escalation by systematically checking each compromisable identity against known escalation techniques. Use tools like Pacu (AWS exploitation framework) to automate privilege escalation testing: identify current permissions, enumerate escalation paths, and attempt escalation in a controlled manner. Test whether permission boundaries effectively prevent escalation. Verify that service accounts used by applications have only the minimum permissions required by comparing actual usage (from CloudTrail/audit logs) against granted permissions.

Conduct IAM hygiene assessments using CIS Benchmarks for your cloud platform. Verify: no root/admin credentials are used for daily operations, all human users authenticate through SSO with MFA, no access keys older than 90 days exist, no unused IAM roles or service accounts persist, all cross-account access requires external IDs, and conditional access policies (MFA, IP restrictions) are enforced on sensitive operations. Use tools like Prowler (AWS), ScoutSuite (multi-cloud), or Steampipe to automate these compliance checks across all accounts and regions.