Crafting effective policies for identity and access management roles

Abstract

Disclosed herein are system, method, and computer program product embodiments for preemptively evaluating whether roles are over-privileged within an (IAM) identity and access management system. Roles may be over-privileged when they are granted permissions to perform certain actions outside the scope granted to those roles. The evaluation occurs without submitting the certain actions to the IAM system and allows roles to be evaluated on a preemptive basis so that corrective actions may be taken to prevent unauthorized access to resources. Roles may be associated with policies which may each define different permissions for accessing resources. The evaluation may involve generating an effective policy from the policies associated with a role to provide a comprehensive view of all permissions associated with the role. The specified solution operates to generate an effective permission for accessing a resource and evaluating whether that effective permission is outside of a permissible scope of access for the role.