IAM

Every summer I tell myself AWS will slow down a bit. It never does. Four months, 248 new policy versions, 93 new policies and 1,022 IAM actions that never showed up in a managed policy before. That is roughly twice last summer. And September is not even over (AWS will probably ship a few more before Wednesday). Here is what changed in AWS managed IAM policies in Summer 2026 (June to September), straight from the IAMTrail archive. Every policy below links to its full version history and diffs. ...

The 46-Minute Problem The IAMTrail detection engine (originally MAMIP) fetches ~1,500 AWS managed IAM policies every run. The original approach was pure bash: 1 2 3 4 aws iam list-policies --output json | jq -cr '...' | xargs -P 16 -n3 sh -c \ 'aws iam get-policy-version --policy-arn $1 --version-id $2 | jq --indent 4 . > "policies/$3"' sh Looks fine, right? Except each iteration spawns a full AWS CLI process. That means a fresh Python runtime, boto3 import, credential resolution, one single HTTP call, then exit. Times 1,500. ...

📜 The Origins Back in 2019, Scott Piper started a GitHub repository to track changes to AWS Managed Policies. It was a simple setup, manually triggered but it worked well and was incredibly useful. Using git diff or the Github.com UI, Scott and the community could easily see how policies evolved over time. At that time, AWS didn’t publicly share the changes made to managed policies by the various “two-pizza” product teams inside AWS. ...

Update from: 2021-12-23 Official Security bulletin from AWS AWSSupportServiceRolePolicy Informational Update https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2021-007/ You will find below details about the security incident that led to this unattended access for millions of AWS customers. On 22nd December 2021, AWS deployed a new version (v20) of AWSSupportServiceRolePolicy, used by a mandatory role AWSServiceRoleForSupport for AWS Support access to all AWS Accounts. In this policy, they added the action s3:getObject, which gives AWS Support teams access to all customer Amazon S3 data. ...

TL;DR: AWS Managed Policies are safe. Currently. :arrows_counterclockwise: Previously in Policy Validation Before the AWS Access Analyzer (AA) Policy Validation release, a few open source initiatives were available to lint AWS IAM Policies, like Parliament from Duolabs and CloudSplaining (Salesforce). The tricky part of these tools is that they are community-driven, from volunteer contributors, and most of the master data comes from AWS IAM docs web scraping. It is difficult to maintain over time, especially if the documentation format is changing, or if the documentation is not in sync with the IAM reality. It will be easier for everyone if the one who is providing the rules is the one who creates the validation tool to run against these rules. Isn’t it? ...