hunting-iam-privilege-escalation-paths

Hunting IAM privilege-escalation paths: a reachable chain to admin is the bug

Cloud access is a graph. Principals hold policies, policies grant permissions, and some of those permissions let a principal change the graph itself: pass a role, rewrite a policy, assume another identity. Privilege escalation is a path through that graph from where an attacker starts to a principal that can read the data or run the workloads that matter. No single permission looks alarming. The bug is the reachable chain, and you only see it when you follow the edges.

When to use

• You are reviewing cloud IAM: roles, policies, groups, and trust relationships.
• A principal is meant to be low-privileged and you want to prove it cannot reach admin.
• You have the policy documents and want to know what they compose into, not just what each says.

Scope check

Audit identity configuration in accounts you own or are authorized to test, with credentials provisioned for the review. If you can't name the authorization, stop.

The loop

1. Build the identity graph. Inventory every principal, the policies attached to it, the permissions those policies grant, and the resources they touch. Represent it as edges: principal grants permission on resource. The whole method is reachability over this graph, so the graph is the first artifact.

2. Enumerate the escalation primitives. Mark every permission that lets a principal change the graph rather than just use it: passing a more privileged role to a compute or automation service, creating or rewriting a policy version, attaching a policy to yourself, updating a function or task that already runs as a privileged role, or minting credentials for another identity. These edges are how one node reaches another's privilege.

3. Map trust relationships and their conditions. For each assumable identity, read who is allowed to assume it and under what condition. A trust that names a broad set of principals, a wildcard, or a condition that an attacker can satisfy is an edge into that identity. A precise trust condition is not.