CVE-2026-82860 in hulumi
Summary
by MITRE • 08/31/2026
@hulumi/policies versions before 1.3.2 fail to fully inspect inline and attached IAM policy evidence for the administrator-policy guardrail. Attackers can craft admin-equivalent policy paths that bypass policy evaluation controls.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 08/31/2026
The vulnerability in @hulumi/policies prior to version 1.3.2 represents a critical failure in identity and access management governance, specifically within the mechanism designed to enforce an administrator-policy guardrail. This security control is intended to prevent users or services from acquiring administrative privileges that exceed their authorized scope by inspecting both inline policies directly attached to entities and managed policies attached at various levels of the AWS Identity and Access Management hierarchy. The core technical flaw lies in the incomplete inspection logic, which fails to fully parse or evaluate all potential policy paths when determining if a configuration violates the administrator restriction. This deficiency allows for sophisticated bypass techniques where attackers can craft IAM policy statements that are functionally equivalent to administrative access but structured in a way that evades the specific detection patterns implemented by the tool.
From an operational perspective, this vulnerability undermines the principle of least privilege, which is foundational to secure cloud architecture. By allowing admin-equivalent policies to slip through undetected, organizations risk granting excessive permissions to compromised identities or misconfigured services. An attacker exploiting this flaw could escalate privileges from a low-privilege role to full account administrator status without triggering alerts or blocking the configuration change. This effectively neutralizes the protective barrier intended by the guardrail, leading to potential data exfiltration, lateral movement within the cloud environment, and complete compromise of AWS resources under that account. The impact is severe because it affects the integrity of automated compliance checks and security posture assessments that rely on accurate policy evaluation.
This issue aligns with CWE-284 Improper Access Control, as the system fails to restrict actions based on insufficiently enforced permissions. Furthermore, in the context of the MITRE ATT&CK framework for cloud environments, this vulnerability facilitates techniques associated with Privilege Escalation and Defense Evasion. Attackers can use these crafted policies to maintain persistence or expand their foothold while avoiding detection by security monitoring tools that depend on accurate policy analysis. The inability to detect admin-equivalent paths means that standard guardrails designed to catch broad wildcard actions like Action: * may be bypassed through more nuanced, albeit functionally identical, permission grants.
To mitigate this risk, immediate remediation requires upgrading @hulumi/policies to version 1.3.2 or later, where the inspection logic has been corrected to fully evaluate all inline and attached policy evidence against administrator constraints. Organizations should also conduct a retrospective audit of existing IAM policies using updated tools to identify any configurations that may have exploited this flaw during the window of vulnerability. Implementing additional layers of defense, such as AWS Service Control Policies at the organization level or rigorous manual review processes for high-privilege role assumptions, can provide compensating controls while ensuring long-term compliance with security best practices and regulatory standards regarding access management.