Description

The application, a user or a role have more privileges than they require. This can be leveraged by an attacker to execute normally restricted actions on a system.

Impact

Execute actions that should be restricted to other groups or roles.

Recommendation

Explicitly assign permissions to the appropriate groups and roles following the principle of least privilege.

Threat

Authenticated attacker from the Internet with access to a misconfigured role.

Expected Remediation Time

⏱️ 30 minutes.

Details

To configure many AWS services, you must pass an IAM role to the service. This allows the service to later assume the role and perform actions on your behalf.

By giving a role or user the iam:PassRole permission, you are saying: > this principal is allowed to assign AWS roles to resources and services in this account.

You can limit which roles a user or service can pass to others by specifying the role ARN(s) in the Resource field of the policy that grants them iam:PassRole:

{
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Action": "iam:PassRole",
  "Resource": [
    "arn:aws:::123456789012:role/SomeRole"
    "arn:aws:::123456789012:role/OtherRole"
  ]
}
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As a rule of thumb, you should include only the roles required by your application. Wildcards and over-permissive resource grants highly increase the probability of (or completely allow) a privilege escalation.

Requirements

Fixes