English
Español
Français
Deutsch
日本語
한국어
العربيةMint credentials through a Roles Anywhere profile
Can bind a privileged role to a Roles Anywhere profile and mint creds from an external cert.
Grants escalation only in combination. All of these are needed together:
rolesanywhere:CreateProfileiam:PassRoleiam:PassRole can bind a privileged role to a Roles Anywhere profile and mint creds from an external cert, but only when it is held together with rolesanywhere:CreateProfile. Held together they reach administrator access.
Why it is dangerous
A principal can call rolesanywhere:CreateProfile to bind the privileged role to an IAM Roles Anywhere profile, then present a certificate chained to a registered trust anchor to mint that role's credentials from outside AWS. a survives IAM credential rotation and is durable persistence.
In MITRE ATT&CK terms this maps to T1098.001, Account Manipulation: Additional Cloud Credentials, under the privilege escalation tactic. AWS records it in CloudTrail as CreateProfile, CreateTrustAnchor. The call is quiet against normal activity, so it is easy to miss without a rule for it. It also gives an attacker a way to keep access after the first foothold is closed, so it is worth watching even when it looks like routine administration.
Detection
CreateProfileCreateTrustAnchorPrerequisites
A registered trust anchor (or rolesanywhere:CreateTrustAnchor), a role trusting rolesanywhere.amazonaws.com, and iam:PassRole for it.
Tactic
Privilege Escalation
A control that would remove it: Restrict rolesanywhere:CreateProfile and iam:PassRole for roles trusting rolesanywhere.amazonaws.com to a break-glass role.
Whether to apply it depends on how the permission is used in your environment, so it is a business decision rather than an automatic fix. The same permission can be load-bearing in one account and pure risk in another.
Pathbreak confirms whether this path resolves in your account, ranks it against the others by how much it opens up, and uses your threat model and business context to show which paths are worth cutting.
Questions
What does iam:PassRole allow?
Can bind a privileged role to a Roles Anywhere profile and mint creds from an external cert.
What else is needed for iam:PassRole to be dangerous?
It becomes an escalation only when held together with rolesanywhere:CreateProfile. On its own it is not enough, which is what makes the combination easy to miss.
How is mint credentials through a Roles Anywhere profile detected?
Watch for CreateProfile, CreateTrustAnchor in CloudTrail. The call is quiet against normal activity, so it is easy to miss without a rule for it.
How do you break this path?
A control that would remove it is: Restrict rolesanywhere:CreateProfile and iam:PassRole for roles trusting rolesanywhere.amazonaws.com to a break-glass role. Whether to apply it depends on how the permission is used in your account, so it is a business decision rather than an automatic fix.
Which MITRE ATT&CK technique is this?
T1098.001, Account Manipulation: Additional Cloud Credentials, under the privilege escalation tactic.
Related paths
References
Find this in your own account
We run a read-only scan of one AWS account and show you which of these paths exist, ranked by blast radius, with the change that breaks each one. First validated paths within the hour.