Triage AWS AccessDenied

Triage AWS AccessDenied is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills. It costs 21 tokens per session (497 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A troubleshooting procedure for AWS permission errors such as AccessDenied and UnauthorizedOperation. AWS permissions are controlled by policies attached to identities, resources, organizations, sessions, and permission boundaries.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to identify the failed action, resource, region, and role or user; inspect CloudTrail; simulate policies; and verify that the same request succeeds without granting excessive access.
Why use it?
It helps locate the exact policy layer blocking an API request so the smallest necessary permission change can be made.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to identify the failed action, resource, region, and role or user; inspect CloudTrail; simulate policies; and verify that the same request succeeds without granting excessive access.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/triage-access-denied
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills --skill triage-access-denied
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for Triage AWS AccessDenied

README.md
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Your own site
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Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for Triage AWS AccessDenied

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/triage-access-denied"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills/triage-access-denied.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 21 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 497 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00021 $0.00497
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00249
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00099
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00050

Measured 12d ago against content hash 3b62b4460d2f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Triage AWS AccessDenied scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/aws/triage-access-denied/SKILL.md · 71 lines

What it actually says

When to use

Use when you receive AccessDenied, UnauthorizedOperation, or not authorized to perform errors.

Preconditions

  • You can access the AWS account with permission to inspect IAM and CloudTrail.
  • You can identify the failing action and, ideally, the principal and resource.

Procedure

  1. Capture the failing API action, resource, region, and principal (role/user).
  2. Look up the corresponding CloudTrail event (or application logs) for context.
  3. Identify which policy types apply: identity policy, resource policy, permission boundary, SCP, session policy.
  4. Use policy simulation to confirm the explicit deny/implicit deny.
  5. Propose the narrowest change that grants access.

Decision points

  • Explicit Deny in any layer: must remove/override deny (cannot be allowed elsewhere).
  • SCP denies: change must happen at org/OU level.
  • Resource policy missing principal: update resource policy rather than identity.
  • Permission boundary blocks: adjust boundary or use a different role.

Verification

  • Re-run the exact API call and confirm success.
  • Confirm no broader permissions were granted than necessary.

Rollback / undo

  • Revert the policy change to the prior version.
  • Detach any temporary policies used for debugging.

Escalation

  • Security/IAM owners for SCP/boundary changes.
  • Service owners for resource policy changes on shared resources.

Examples

Action: s3:GetObject
Resource: arn:aws:s3:::<bucket>/<key>
Principal: arn:aws:sts::<account>:assumed-role/<role>/<session>
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 71 lines · 21 tokens per session scan A 3b62b4460d2f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Triage AWS AccessDenied is a skill published in the GitHub repository bregman-arie/devops-sre-skills (22 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 21 tokens to every session and 497 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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