AI Cyber Defense / Cloud, Kubernetes and software supply chain
AI Cyber Defense: Constrain cloud role assumption across accounts
Scope trusted principals and supported conditions to the actual workload. Review both permission to assume the role and permissions available after assumption.
Environment and inputs: Cloud control planes, workload identity, Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines and immutable deployment artifacts; provider support varies.
Scenario and goal
A compromised workload may assume a role in another account through an overly broad trust relationship.
Why it matters
For this scenario, an attacker can automate permitted API operations after gaining a workload or pipeline identity. Review who can change trust, who can assume the resulting identity and what resources it can reach. Keep source review, build provenance, deployment authorization and runtime permissions as distinct checks. A configuration object or successful deployment does not prove the intended runtime boundary is enforced.
Evidence to collect
Collect effective trust policy, caller identity, session context and resource actions, including cross-account audit visibility.
Validate with an authorized exercise
Use disposable test roles to verify an approved caller succeeds and an unrelated account is denied; confirm both decisions can be investigated from retained audit records.
Rollout and checks
Evaluate effective permissions and runtime behavior in a disposable account or namespace before production rollout. Retain the approved source revision, resulting artifact and independent audit trail. Plan recovery if identity, policy or admission dependencies fail. Reconcile running assets after the change because resources created outside the normal pipeline can otherwise remain outside its checks.
Scope and limits
This guide proposes a defensive test; it is not a tested production design. Check platform support and local requirements. References explain the mechanisms but do not certify the design. Behavior alone does not prove AI involvement.