Quantifying Azure RBAC Wildcard Overreach

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Parisel, Christophe
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866913920795541504
author Parisel, Christophe
author_facet Parisel, Christophe
contents Azure RBAC leverages wildcard permissions to simplify policy authoring, but this abstraction often obscures the actual set of allowed operations and undermines least-privilege guarantees. We introduce Belshazaar, a two-stage framework that targets both the effective permission set problem and the evaluation of wildcards permissions spread. First, we formalize Azure action syntax via a context free grammar and implement a compiler that expands any wildcard into its explicit action set. Second, we define an ultrametric diameter metric to quantify semantic overreach in wildcard scenarios. Applied to Microsoft s official catalog of 15481 actions, Belshazaar reveals that about 50 percent of actions admit a cross Resource Provider reach when associated with non obvious wildcards, and that effective permissions sets are effectively computable. These findings demonstrate that wildcard patterns can introduce substantial privilege bloat, and that our approach offers a scalable, semantics driven path toward tighter, least-privilege RBAC policies in Azure environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_10755
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantifying Azure RBAC Wildcard Overreach
Parisel, Christophe
Cryptography and Security
Azure RBAC leverages wildcard permissions to simplify policy authoring, but this abstraction often obscures the actual set of allowed operations and undermines least-privilege guarantees. We introduce Belshazaar, a two-stage framework that targets both the effective permission set problem and the evaluation of wildcards permissions spread. First, we formalize Azure action syntax via a context free grammar and implement a compiler that expands any wildcard into its explicit action set. Second, we define an ultrametric diameter metric to quantify semantic overreach in wildcard scenarios. Applied to Microsoft s official catalog of 15481 actions, Belshazaar reveals that about 50 percent of actions admit a cross Resource Provider reach when associated with non obvious wildcards, and that effective permissions sets are effectively computable. These findings demonstrate that wildcard patterns can introduce substantial privilege bloat, and that our approach offers a scalable, semantics driven path toward tighter, least-privilege RBAC policies in Azure environments.
title Quantifying Azure RBAC Wildcard Overreach
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10755