Role definition allows custom role creation

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Metadata

Id: 3fa5900f-9aac-4982-96b2-a6143d9c99fb

Cloud Provider: Azure

Platform: Terraform

Severity: Medium

Category: Access Control

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Description

Allowing the Microsoft.Authorization/roleDefinitions/write action in a custom Azure role definition grants users the ability to create, modify, or delete role definitions within the assigned scope. This level of permission can lead to privilege escalation, where a malicious or compromised user can create overly permissive roles or alter existing ones. To mitigate this risk, custom roles should be limited to Microsoft.Authorization/roleDefinitions/read, as shown below:

permissions {
  actions = ["Microsoft.Authorization/roleDefinitions/read"]
  not_actions = []
}

Restricting write access helps protect against unauthorized changes to role definitions and reduces the attack surface for privilege escalation.

Compliant Code Examples

resource "azurerm_role_definition" "example3" {
  role_definition_id = "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
  name               = "my-custom-role-definition"
  scope              = data.azurerm_subscription.primary.id

  permissions {
    actions     = ["Microsoft.Authorization/roleDefinitions/read"]
    not_actions = []
  }
}

Non-Compliant Code Examples

resource "azurerm_role_definition" "example" {
  name        = "my-custom-role"
  scope       = data.azurerm_subscription.primary.id
  description = "This is a custom role created via Terraform"

  permissions {
    actions     = ["*"]
    not_actions = []
  }
}

resource "azurerm_role_definition" "example2" {
  role_definition_id = "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
  name               = "my-custom-role-definition"
  scope              = data.azurerm_subscription.primary.id

  permissions {
    actions     = ["Microsoft.Authorization/roleDefinitions/write"]
    not_actions = []
  }
}