Group with privilege escalation by actions 'iam:CreateLoginProfile'

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Metadata

Id: 04c686f1-e0cd-4812-88e1-4e038410074c

Cloud Provider: AWS

Platform: Terraform

Severity: Medium

Category: Access Control

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Description

Granting a group the iam:CreateLoginProfile action with a Resource set to "*" in an IAM policy allows any user in that group to create or reset the console password for any IAM user in the account. This enables privilege escalation, as attackers or unauthorized users can create login profiles for privileged IAM users, effectively gaining their access. Leaving this misconfiguration unaddressed can lead to account compromise and full administrative access over AWS resources.

Compliant Code Examples

resource "aws_iam_user" "cosmic2" {
  name = "cosmic2"
}

resource "aws_iam_user_policy" "inline_policy_run_instances2" {
  name = "inline_policy_run_instances"
  user = aws_iam_user.cosmic2.name

  policy = jsonencode({
    Version = "2012-10-17"
    Statement = [
      {
        Action = [
          "ec2:Describe*",
        ]
        Effect   = "Allow"
        Resource = "*"
      },
    ]
  })
}

Non-Compliant Code Examples

resource "aws_iam_group" "cosmic" {
  name = "cosmic"
}

resource "aws_iam_group_policy" "test_inline_policy" {
  name = "test_inline_policy"
  group = aws_iam_group.cosmic.name

  policy = jsonencode({
    Version = "2012-10-17"
    Statement = [
      {
        Action = [
          "iam:CreateLoginProfile",
        ]
        Effect   = "Allow"
        Resource = "*"
      },
    ]
  })
}