Project, 2026.01–now, in progress

AWS IAM Privilege Escalation Research: ABAC (Tag-Condition) Based Privilege Escalation

This research looks at privilege escalation in AWS IAM. Path finding for RBAC-style escalation is largely worked out in the literature, but under ABAC, where tag conditions decide access, changing a tag effectively changes a permission, and existing detectors miss the paths this opens. After privilege escalation detection was set as a goal in the CloudRMF 3.0 plan, the work measured how often policies that allow risky actions carry conditions in public policy data, and tested whether PMapper, CloudSplaining, and Pacu react to tag changes. Joonho Seo carries out the research and gave the 'AWS IAM Privilege Escalation' talks alone. The work is ongoing; the current step is writing the threat model and problem definition section of a paper that formalizes tag-driven escalation as a transition system.

Where

S3Lab, Pusan National University

My role

Research and sole presenter

Status

ongoing