This lesson explains IAM fundamentals for cloud and container environments, practical controls to reduce attack blast radius, tooling and automation for IAM hygiene, and human/process elements for maintaining secure identity lifecycles. It ties IAM controls to attack mitigation—showing how short-lived credentials, least privilege, conditional access, vaulting, and RBAC reduce the impact of leaked keys or compromised identities.
Identity and Access Management Controls — Cloud Infrastructure and Container Security Hook: You survived the DDoS, now stop handing out the torches Remember how we just dug into DoS and botnet orchestration — devices turning into screaming, packet-spitting toddlers because credentials or misconf...
Compromise a key identity and you gain a kingdom. Harden identities and you shrink the blast radius of almost every attack. What we mean by IAM here (quick refresher) Identity : who or what is acting — human users, service accounts, machine identities. Authentication : how the identity prove...
Core primitives across environments Concept AWS / Azure / GCP Kubernetes / Containers Identity types Users, Roles, Service Principals ServiceAccounts, Pods, Controllers Authn method Passwords, Keys, OAuth/OIDC, Managed Identities Kubeconfig, ServiceAccount tokens, OIDC, mTLS ...
Practical controls that actually stop bad things Least privilege first, always Create narrow roles. Deny by default, allow only needed actions. Avoid broad permissions like star resources or wildcards on sensitive actions. Use short-lived, federated, or managed identities Replace long-liv...
Short attack playbook and how IAM breaks each step Scenario: an attacker finds a leaked API key, uses it to spin up compute, and launches a botnet or stress test against a target. Attack steps and mitigations: Credential theft Mitigate: rotate keys, short-lived tokens, vaults, avoid embeddi...
Concrete examples (pseudocode for clarity) AWS style policy snippet (pseudocode, keep it narrow): { 'Version': '2012-10-17', 'Statement': [ { 'Effect': 'Allow', 'Action': ['ec2:DescribeInstances'], 'Resource': '*' },...
Tools and automation that scale IAM hygiene Cloud-native: AWS IAM Access Analyzer, Azure AD Conditional Access, GCP IAM Recommender K8s: OPA/Gatekeeper or Kyverno to enforce policies, kube-audit, Falco for runtime alerts Secret vaults: HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault C...
Closing: quick takeaways and next moves IAM is your blast-radius reducer. Good identity design makes incidents smaller, easier to detect, and faster to remediate. Short-lived, scoped credentials + vaulting = fewer nightmares. Don't babysit long-lived keys. Kubernetes and cloud have differ...
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