Detecting AWS Iam Privilege Escalation

Detecting AWS IAM Privilege Escalation

Overview

This skill uses boto3 and Cloudsplaining-style analysis to identify IAM privilege escalation paths in AWS accounts. It downloads the account authorization details, analyzes each policy for dangerous permission combinations (iam:PassRole + lambda:CreateFunction, iam:CreatePolicyVersion, sts:AssumeRole), and flags policies that violate least-privilege principles.

When to Use

• When investigating security incidents that require detecting aws iam privilege escalation
• When building detection rules or threat hunting queries for this domain
• When SOC analysts need structured procedures for this analysis type
• When validating security monitoring coverage for related attack techniques

Detection Gaps & Validation

• GetAccountAuthorizationDetails doesn't show the whole picture: it returns attached/inline/group policies but not permission boundaries, SCPs, session policies, or resource-based policies. A flagged path may actually be blocked by a boundary/SCP (false positive), or a real escalation may be enabled by a resource policy (e.g., a role's trust policy or an S3/KMS policy) you never parsed (false negative). Reconcile against the boundary and trust policy before reporting.
• Non-default policy versions and inheritance: check the policy's default version (attackers stage admin in a non-default version via iam:CreatePolicyVersion/SetDefaultPolicyVersion), and expand group-inherited permissions. NotAction/Deny statements and Condition keys (aws:PrincipalTag, MFA) are ignored by naive substring matching.
• Privesc combos beyond the well-known ones: iam:PutUserPolicy, iam:AttachGroupPolicy, iam:UpdateAssumeRolePolicy, and iam:PassRole paired with glue/cloudformation/datapipeline/sagemaker/codebuild create functions, plus ssm:SendCommand on instances bearing admin instance profiles.
• Validate the path is real: confirm with aws iam simulate-principal-policy --policy-source-arn … --action-names iam:AttachUserPolicy … (it honors boundaries/SCPs), or actually exercise the chain in an isolated test account — don't report an escalation that a boundary silently denies.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8+ with boto3 library
• AWS credentials with IAM read-only access (iam:GetAccountAuthorizationDetails)
• Optional: cloudsplaining Python package for HTML report generation

Steps

1. Download IAM Authorization Details — Call iam:GetAccountAuthorizationDetails to retrieve all users, groups, roles, and policies
2. Analyze Policies for Privilege Escalation — Check each policy for known escalation permission combinations
3. Identify Wildcard Resource Policies — Flag policies using Resource: "*" with dangerous actions
4. Map Principal-to-Policy Relationships — Build a graph of which principals can access which escalation paths
5. Score and Prioritize Findings — Rank findings by severity based on escalation vector type
6. Generate Report — Produce structured JSON report with remediation guidance

Expected Output

• JSON report of privilege escalation findings with severity scores
• List of dangerous permission combinations per principal
• Wildcard resource policy audit results
• Remediation recommendations for each finding