Blog
Long-form IAM and cloud-permission engineering playbooks for builders and leaders.
Cloud IAM Top Risks ▾
- Overly Permissive Policies A practical way to remove wildcard permissions from Terraform IAM policies while keeping release velocity.
- Privilege Escalation via IAM How escalation paths emerge in policy + trust combinations and how to block them early in code review.
- Long-lived Access Keys & Credential Sprawl How engineering teams reduce machine credential risk using lifecycle controls and Terraform guardrails.
- Cross-account Trust Misconfigurations How to harden assume-role trust policies for multi-account platforms.
- Unused / Dormant Roles & Identities A practical identity cleanup program for cloud teams managing rapid growth and frequent ownership changes.
- Service Account Key Mismanagement Cross-cloud guardrails for machine identity credentials and key lifecycle operations.
- Public S3 / Storage via IAM How IAM policies and resource policies combine to create unintended public access.
- Confused Deputy & Resource Policy Risks Mitigating indirect access abuse through tighter resource policy conditions.
Least Privilege in Practice ▾
- Achieving Least Privilege Without Breaking Devs A rollout model for tightening IAM safely while preserving engineering velocity.
- Detecting Privilege Drift in Production How to build a practical drift loop between runtime IAM usage and IaC policy definitions.
- From Audit Logs to Tightened Policies Use access telemetry to reduce policy scope with confidence and fewer rollout regressions.
- Using SCPs / Org Policies / Conditional Access How to combine org-level preventive controls with repo-level policy linting.
Best Practices for Engineering Teams ▾
- Secure-by-default IAM for Startups An opinionated startup IAM baseline that scales without heavyweight security bureaucracy.
- IAM Threat Modeling 101 A repeatable threat modeling lens focused on identity abuse paths in cloud systems.
- IAM Incident Response Checklist A pragmatic checklist for leaked credentials, suspicious role assumptions, and policy abuse events.
- IAM Review Cadence for Fast-moving Teams A lightweight review rhythm that keeps permissions healthy without slowing release cycles.
IaC & Frameworks ▾
- Scanning Terraform for IAM Risks How to integrate IAM scanning into Terraform workflows from local development to merge gates.
- CloudFormation IAM Pitfalls Common IAM mistakes in CloudFormation stacks and mitigation patterns for mixed Terraform/CFN estates.
- Pulumi & CDK: IAM Patterns That Bite Identity risks introduced by abstraction layers and generated IAM statements in higher-level IaC tools.
- Kubernetes RBAC ↔ Cloud IAM Boundaries How platform teams align Kubernetes RBAC with cloud IAM to reduce escalation paths.