AWS IAM Inline Policy Added to a Group

Description

Identifies an inline policy added to an IAM group via PutGroupPolicy. An inline policy attached to a group grants its permissions to every current and future member of that group. Adversaries can abuse this to escalate privileges (grant elevated permissions to a group they belong to, or will add themselves to) and to establish persistence through a durable, membership-based grant that is easy to overlook. Group inline policies are uncommon compared to managed-policy attachments, so their creation by an unexpected principal warrants review.

Detection logic

Its licence does not clear it for publishing here

Sunturai publishes a detection's own text where the licence it arrived under has been reviewed and permits it, and Elastic License 2.0 has not. The query as its source wrote it, its canonical form and the hash that pins this revision are in the workspace record.

Detection requirements

Platform: Containers ESXi IaaS Identity Provider Linux macOS Network Devices Office Suite SaaS Windows
The rule states no platform. This is derived from the ATT&CK technique it maps to.
Log source category: event_index

Known benign triggers

Identity and platform teams and infrastructure-as-code pipelines occasionally manage group inline policies as part of normal access governance. Verify the principal in `aws.cloudtrail.user_identity.arn`, the targeted group, and the policy document against approved change records. Known administration roles and deployment automation can be excluded after validation.

References

Links the source published beside this detection. Reference is the link the source wrote, unmodified. Class is decided by this catalogue from the host and path, not stated by the source. Cited by counts published detections citing the same resource, including this one, and the sources beneath it count the repositories this catalogue ingests, which is not the same as independent research.
Reference	Class	Cited by
docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/APIReference/API_PutGroupPolicy.html	Product documentation	Only this detection cites it
docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_policies_managed-vs-inline.html	Product documentation	Only this detection cites it

Detection rules

AWS IAM Inline Policy Added to a Group

Description

Detection logic

Detection requirements

Known benign triggers

MITRE ATT&CK mappings

References

From the source

Licence

Authorship

Detection rules