Cloud security assessments can produce long lists of IAM findings:
- Excessive permissions
- Unused roles
- Broad trust policies
- Service accounts with extensive access
A penetration test asks a more useful question: Can an attacker actually chain those permissions into meaningful access?
Cloud privilege escalation rarely depends on one obviously dangerous permission. Attackers can chain identities, roles, trust relationships, exposed credentials, workloads, and management APIs to reach resources that their initial access cannot reach directly.
Consider a compromised developer identity with permission to assume another role. That role may have access to a compute workload, while the workload's identity may have access to storage, secrets, or administrative APIs. Individually, each permission may appear explainable. Together, they can create a path to sensitive resources.
Cloud penetration testing should therefore model identity relationships as an attack graph.
Testers can examine how a compromised user, workload identity, service account, or federated identity can move through the environment. Testing may include role assumption, privilege boundaries, credential exposure, metadata access, trust policies, and permissions granted to workloads.
The test should also distinguish theoretical privilege from usable privilege.
A role may technically permit an administrative action but lack the conditions required to execute it. Conversely, a seemingly moderate permission can become highly privileged when combined with access to a sensitive workload or secret.
Also Read: Service Account Security Testing: The Credentials Attackers Want You to Ignore
This has become increasingly important as identity becomes the effective security perimeter. Google's 2026 Cloud Threat Horizons research found identity issues involved in 83% of incidents affecting major cloud and SaaS environments examined by Mandiant.
The result of an effective cloud IAM penetration test should not simply be a spreadsheet containing hundreds of permissions.
It should show where an attacker starting from a realistic foothold can go.
That means identifying the initial identity, each privilege transition, the resources reached, and the eventual business impact.
The most dangerous IAM finding may not involve the role with the most permissions. It may involve an ordinary identity that gives an attacker the shortest path to sensitive data, privileged systems, or critical workloads.