Role with privilege escalation by actions 'iam:AttachRolePolicy'

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Metadata

Id: f465fff1-0a0f-457d-aa4d-1bddb6f204ff

Cloud Provider: AWS

Platform: Terraform

Severity: Medium

Category: Access Control

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Description

Granting an IAM role permission to perform iam:AttachRolePolicy with Resource = "*" allows the role to attach any policy to any role in the AWS environment, including itself. This enables privilege escalation, as a user or process with this permission can grant themselves full administrative privileges or access beyond what was originally intended. If left unaddressed, such a configuration could lead to unauthorized access, data breaches, or full compromise of the AWS account.

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_role" "cosmic" {
  name = "cosmic"
}

resource "aws_iam_role_policy" "test_inline_policy" {
  name = "test_inline_policy"
  role = aws_iam_role.cosmic.name

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