Lesson 3 of 13 · 7 min read
Cloud IAM and Privilege Escalation Paths
Cloud identity and access management decides what every user, service and workload can do, so it is the real perimeter of a cloud environment. Privilege escalation happens when a principal can use its permissions to gain more: attaching policies to itself, passing a powerful role to a resource it creates, changing code that runs under another role, or minting credentials. ML platforms are full of such paths because training and notebook roles are often broad. Least privilege, permission boundaries, organisation-level guardrails and path analysis keep them closed.
free sign-in, no card required
Practise it as an interviewer asks it
Containers, gVisor, microVMs and VMs: where is each isolation boundary?Why are cloud metadata endpoints an SSRF target, and how do modern defences work?What does the shared responsibility model mean for a managed AI service?What is privilege escalation? Explain vertical and horizontal escalation with an example of each.Threat-model an LLM inference API that receives untrusted input at scale.A Linux service running as a non-root user is compromised. What decides whether the attacker can become root, and what do you check?