Role with privilege escalation by actions 'iam:CreateLoginProfile'

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Metadata

Id: 9a205ba3-0dd1-42eb-8d54-2ffec836b51a

Cloud Provider: AWS

Platform: Terraform

Severity: Medium

Category: Access Control

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Description

This check identifies if an AWS IAM role policy grants the iam:CreateLoginProfile action with a Resource set to "*", as shown below:

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

Allowing this action enables a user or role to create login profiles (that is, set console passwords) for any IAM user account, potentially facilitating privilege escalation. If left unaddressed, attackers could exploit this permission to gain unauthorized console access and take full control of IAM users, posing a severe security risk to the environment.

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:CreateLoginProfile",
        ]
        Effect   = "Allow"
        Resource = "*"
      },
    ]
  })
}