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Cloud IAM Policy Design
Writing least-privilege access policies for cloud resources, and avoiding the common over-permissioning failure modes.
What it is
Cloud IAM policy design defines exactly which identities (users, services, roles) can perform which actions on which resources — the single most consequential access-control surface in a cloud environment.
Key points
- Least privilege in practice: start from zero permissions and add only what's needed, rather than starting from broad access and trying to narrow it later — the latter almost never actually happens once something works.
- Service accounts / workload identities are a common over-permissioning risk — a service given broad admin access "to be safe" becomes a high-value target if compromised, since it can act with all of those permissions.
- Policy evaluation logic (explicit deny overriding allow, resource-based vs. identity-based policies) needs to be understood precisely — cloud IAM systems have real, exploitable subtleties in how overlapping policies combine.
- Regular access reviews catch permission creep — access granted for a past project that was never revoked is one of the most common real-world cloud security findings.