Description

@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.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "9.8",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-31T09:17:06.353Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-31T09:17:06.353Z",
  "executiveSummary": "The @hulumi/policies package contains a critical security vulnerability in versions prior to 1.3.2 involving the bypass of the administrator-policy guardrail.\nThe vulnerability type is an Improper Input Validation or Security Control Bypass, where the inspection mechanism fails to adequately analyze inline and attached IAM policy evidence.\nThis flaw allows attackers to craft administrative-equivalent IAM policy paths that successfully evade existing policy evaluation controls.\nThe affected system is the @hulumi/policies library, which is used to enforce organizational or security guardrails within infrastructure-as-code or cloud environment management workflows.\nRisk implications are high, as the bypass effectively grants an attacker the ability to escalate privileges to administrative levels by masking policies in a manner that the verification engine does not recognize or correctly parse.\nExploitation does not necessarily require direct authentication to the evaluation engine itself, but rather relies on the ability to submit or influence the IAM policy definitions that the tool is tasked with inspecting.\nThe primary impact is the unauthorized acquisition of administrative rights, undermining the integrity of the security guardrail implementation.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability resides in the core inspection logic of the @hulumi/policies package, which is responsible for verifying that provided IAM policies comply with the defined administrator-policy guardrail.\nThe root cause is a failure in the policy inspection engine to perform deep-recursive or canonicalized analysis of both inline and attached IAM policies. Specifically, the engine exhibits insufficient validation logic when encountering complex policy structures or specific naming conventions for policy paths.\nThe attack flow begins when an attacker identifies the target environment's use of @hulumi/policies to restrict administrative access. Instead of submitting a standard administrative policy that would be flagged, the attacker leverages the parsing deficiency by crafting a malformed or non-canonical policy path that represents an equivalent administrative permission set.\nBecause the engine does not fully normalize these paths or exhaustively traverse all attached policy objects, it fails to equate the 'crafted' path with the restricted administrator-policy guardrail, resulting in a false-negative security evaluation.\nThe exploitation method involves the submission of an IAM configuration that includes an obfuscated or nested administrative policy definition. When @hulumi/policies triggers the verification routine, the vulnerable function performs a shallow inspection, failing to resolve the true permissions granted by the attached evidence.\nThe component responsible for the vulnerability is the policy traversal and evaluation module within the package. Versions prior to 1.3.2 are susceptible, as they lack the necessary logic to enforce strict adherence to guardrail criteria across all policy attachment methods.\nPost-exploitation, an attacker successfully deploys policies that grant administrative-equivalent privileges. This allows for lateral movement, resource modification, or data exfiltration within the cloud environment, effectively bypassing the security boundary that the tool was intended to maintain. The vulnerability is triggered during the evaluation phase of the policy lifecycle, often during a CI/CD pipeline step or an automated policy-as-code enforcement run."
}