Certified: The GIAC GPCS Audio Course

In this episode, we learn how to audit I A M policies and spot dangerous permission patterns before they become incidents, because most cloud compromises are accelerated by permissions that are broader than anyone intended. Policy auditing is not about perfection or about shaming teams for moving fast; it is about developing an eye for patterns that reliably predict risk. When you can scan a policy and quickly identify overreach, wildcard abuse, or accidental administrative capability, you gain the ability to reduce blast radius without slowing delivery. The most valuable audits are repeatable, meaning different reviewers reach the same conclusions because the criteria are clear and the intent is documented. We are going to build that kind of repeatable approach, starting with definitions and moving into practical red flags and remediation conversations that keep systems safe while still letting teams ship.

Before we continue, a quick note: this audio course is a companion to our course companion books. The first book is about the exam and provides detailed information on how to pass it best. The second book is a Kindle-only eBook that contains 1,000 flashcards that can be used on your mobile device or Kindle. Check them both out at Cyber Author dot me, in the Bare Metal Study Guides Series.

Overreach can be defined as permissions that exceed real tasks and exceed your risk tolerance, even if nobody is currently abusing them. A policy can be overreaching in two ways: it can allow actions that the identity should not perform, and it can allow actions on resources beyond the identity’s legitimate scope. Overreach is not always obvious because policies are often written in broad service categories rather than in narrow operational tasks. A role might appear reasonable because it references a familiar service, but it could still grant capabilities that allow destructive changes, data exfiltration, or privilege escalation. Overreach also shows up when access is granted for a temporary project and never removed, turning an exception into a permanent baseline. When you audit for overreach, you are comparing what the identity can do to what it should do, and that comparison must be grounded in real job tasks, not in generic convenience.

Wildcard actions and wildcard resources are a special category of overreach because they expand access in ways that are hard to reason about and easy to abuse. Wildcard actions allow an identity to perform all actions within a service or even across many services, which often includes high-impact administrative capabilities that were never intended. Wildcard resources allow the identity to apply those actions to all resources, including resources that exist today and resources created in the future. The risk is not only that wildcards are broad, it is that they hide complexity, because services often contain both safe read actions and dangerous write actions under the same umbrella. Wildcards also undermine the principle of least privilege because they remove the specificity that ties permissions to a business need. In the context of incident response, wildcard permissions make scoping harder because the answer to what could this identity do becomes too large and uncertain. That uncertainty increases panic and increases downtime during a crisis.

The reason wildcards are risky is that cloud services change and expand, and wildcard grants can silently gain new power over time. A role that was safe last year can become dangerous this year because a new action was added to the service and the wildcard automatically includes it. The policy did not change, but the effective capability did, which is the worst kind of drift because it is invisible to change control. Wildcards also make it easy to create escalation chains because they often include permission to modify identity, modify policies, or access sensitive data stores. Even when a wildcard is limited to one service, that service might include the ability to attach policies, create keys, or change trust relationships, which are actions that should be treated as administrative. In audits, a wildcard is not automatically wrong, but it is always a signal to ask whether the identity truly needs that breadth and whether conditions are present to constrain it. If the answer is unclear, you should treat the wildcard as a risk until proven otherwise.

Accidental admin is the condition where an identity gains administrative power unintentionally, usually through a policy that seems operational but includes high-impact rights. There are common signals that indicate accidental admin, and you can learn to spot them quickly. Broad write permissions across core services are a signal, because broad write often includes the ability to change configurations that govern security posture. Any permission that allows I A M changes is a strong signal, because I A M changes can create new identities, new keys, new trust relationships, and broader policy attachments. Policy edit permissions are also a signal because the ability to change policies can expand permissions without external approval, which defeats governance. Access to create, attach, or modify roles and policy bindings is especially risky because it can lead directly to privilege escalation. In practice, accidental admin often appears when a role was designed to allow deployment or troubleshooting and someone added a powerful permission to fix a specific problem quickly. The addition solves the immediate issue, but it introduces a persistent capability that turns a compromised workload into an administrative compromise.

A scenario illustrates the problem in a way that maps cleanly to real incidents. A service account is used by an automation tool to deploy workloads and manage configuration, and it is granted permissions that seem necessary for its job. Over time, someone grants it the ability to create access keys or credentials for convenience, perhaps to integrate with another system. That capability allows the service account to mint new credentials, which can then be used outside the intended environment and outside normal monitoring. If the service account is compromised, the attacker can create new keys, store them, and return later even after the original access path is closed. They can also use that new credential creation path to bypass controls that were meant to restrict who can access certain services. What looked like a small addition turned into a persistence mechanism and a privilege escalator. This scenario is common because teams often treat credential creation as a normal automation task, but it is actually one of the highest risk actions in cloud environments.

Policy pitfalls make these problems more likely, and the patterns are predictable. Copied policies are a major pitfall because teams copy from prior projects without understanding why permissions were broad in the original context. Outdated exceptions are another, where a policy includes a grant for a service or resource that is no longer needed, but nobody wants to remove it because they fear breaking something. Rushed fixes are the most common, where an engineer adds broad rights during an incident or deployment failure and then never revisits the change. These pitfalls accumulate because they are easy to create and hard to unwind, especially when the system lacks documentation of intent. The result is a policy environment that is over-permissioned not because people are careless, but because the organization has no reliable mechanism to tighten after the emergency passes. Auditing must therefore be designed to detect these patterns and to drive a remediation loop that is safe and repeatable.

Quick wins in policy auditing start with searching for wildcards and then reducing them by service scope, because wildcards are high-signal and often low-effort to improve. You do not need a perfect understanding of every policy to make progress; you can focus first on the obvious red flags that correlate with large blast radius. A practical approach is to find policies that include wildcard actions, wildcard resources, or both, and then ask which specific actions and which specific resources are truly required. You reduce by narrowing the service actions to a subset tied to real tasks, and you reduce by scoping resources to the relevant projects, accounts, or identifiers. Even if you cannot eliminate a wildcard immediately, you can often replace a broad wildcard with a smaller set of actions that covers most use cases. You can also use conditions to narrow when the wildcard applies, which is often an acceptable intermediate step. The point is to move from broad to deliberate, one policy at a time.

Reading a policy effectively requires a simple method that avoids getting lost in syntax. Practice reading it by verbs, resources, and conditions, because those are the elements that define real capability. Verbs are the actions being allowed or denied, and they tell you what the identity can do. Resources tell you where those actions apply, and they define scope and blast radius. Conditions tell you the guardrails, meaning under what circumstances those actions are permitted, such as only from certain networks, only with certain tags, or only when certain attributes match. When you read this way, you can understand the policy’s intent and risk posture without needing to memorize every vendor-specific keyword. You also become faster at spotting mismatches, such as powerful verbs applied to broad resources with no conditions. That mismatch is the signature of overreach. Over time, this reading method becomes instinctive, and that is what allows auditing at scale.

Condition keys deserve focused attention because they are one of the best tools for making access safer when you cannot reduce actions or resources as much as you would like. Conditions can enforce that an action only applies to resources with specific tags, only in specific environments, or only when requests meet certain attributes. Conditions can also restrict actions based on identity properties, such as requiring multi-factor authentication context for sensitive operations or requiring the request to come from a specific trusted path. The value of conditions is that they add intent enforcement, which reduces accidental misuse and makes attacker abuse harder. Conditions are not a replacement for least privilege, but they are a powerful layer of defense that can turn a broad permission into a constrained permission. In audits, a policy that includes conditions often signals that someone has thought about guardrails, which is encouraging. A policy with broad rights and no conditions signals the opposite.

Documentation of intent is what keeps audits consistent over time, because without intent you cannot tell whether a permission is necessary or accidental. Intent documentation does not need to be long, but it must be specific enough to answer why a permission exists and what would break if it were removed. It should capture the job task, the resource scope, and the expected behavior that demonstrates the permission is used legitimately. It should also capture who approved the permission and when it should be reevaluated, because reevaluation is the mechanism that prevents exceptions from becoming permanent. When intent is documented, auditors can make consistent decisions because they can compare the policy to the declared purpose. When intent is missing, audits become debates based on fear, and fear tends to keep permissions broad. Documentation is therefore a control, not just a record, because it enables safe tightening.

A memory anchor helps you keep the highest risk patterns top of mind as you audit, especially when you are scanning many policies. The anchor for this episode is wildcards, privilege escalation, and lateral movement, and each term points to a different danger. Wildcards signal broad capability and future drift. Privilege escalation signals the ability to gain more authority, such as modifying I A M or minting new credentials. Lateral movement signals the ability to pivot across resources and environments, such as broad access across projects or the ability to change network exposure. When you see a policy element that aligns with one of these categories, you slow down and ask whether the capability is truly required and whether guardrails exist. This anchor also helps you communicate findings, because it frames issues in terms of attacker outcomes rather than in terms of policy syntax. Stakeholders care about outcomes, and this anchor keeps the conversation grounded.

Now mini-review the audit steps and top red flags so you can apply them consistently. You begin by identifying the identity and its job purpose, because permissions can only be judged against purpose. You scan for wildcards and broad resources because they are high-signal indicators of overreach. You scan for accidental admin signals, especially I A M changes, policy edits, credential creation, and broad write rights that affect security posture. You read the policy by verbs, resources, and conditions to understand the true shape of access. You check for conditions and scope boundaries, and you treat absence of guardrails as a reason to tighten. You look for copied or outdated exceptions by comparing the policy to current operational needs and current resource inventories. You document what you found, propose a narrower replacement, and plan the change in a way that reduces fear of breakage. These steps are effective because they focus on the permission patterns that correlate with real compromise paths.

Remediation conversations are where audits either turn into safer systems or turn into stalled documents, so rehearse how to frame them around safety and delivery. A good remediation conversation begins by acknowledging the operational goal the policy was meant to support, because teams granted permissions for a reason. Then you explain the risk in terms of blast radius and compromise outcomes, not in terms of abstract compliance. You propose a narrower policy that still supports the goal, and you plan a safe rollout that includes testing, monitoring, and rollback. You also offer intermediate steps, such as adding conditions or narrowing resources first, if eliminating a wildcard immediately would be too disruptive. The tone should be collaborative, because the goal is to help teams ship safely, not to force them into work they cannot sustain. When remediation is presented as an enabler of reliable delivery and reduced incident risk, it is easier for teams to accept and prioritize.

To conclude, choose one risky pattern you see often and plan its replacement in a way that you could execute in a real environment. A strong choice is wildcard actions on broad resources with no conditions, because that pattern is common and dangerous. The replacement plan is to identify the real job tasks, map them to a narrow set of actions, and scope those actions to the specific resources that task touches. If the task truly requires broad capability, you add conditions and separate duties so that the broad action is constrained and audited. You document intent so future auditors understand why the permission exists and when it should be reevaluated. Finally, you plan a safe migration, such as deploying the narrowed policy alongside the old one, testing behavior, then removing the broad grant once confidence is high. When you can plan a replacement this way, you are not just spotting risks; you are building a permission system that stays deliberate as the cloud changes around it.