Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism: Temporary Elevated Cloud Access T1548.005

Tactic: Privilege Escalation

Adversaries may abuse permission configurations that allow them to gain temporarily elevated access to cloud resources. Many cloud environments allow administrators to grant user or service accounts permission to request just-in-time access to roles, impersonate other accounts, pass roles onto resources and services, or otherwise gain short-term access to a set of privileges that may be distinct from their own.

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 7 rules above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. The catalog normalizes field names across vendors so Sigma's Image, Elastic's process.name, and Splunk's process_name collapse into one row. Each rule contributes at most once per row.

Fields filtered most (8 distinct)

The fields most rules look at when detecting this technique. The How column shows the operators authors use (eq, wildcard, regex_match, match) and how often each appears. Sample values are concrete examples to start from, not an exhaustive list.

FieldRulesHowSample values
EventType7eq 5, in 2AssociateIamInstanceProfile, AssumeRole, AssumeRoot, AttachRolePolicy, CreatePolicyVersion
Provider_Name7eq 7sts.amazonaws.com, iam.amazonaws.com, ec2.amazonaws.com, kms.amazonaws.com
event.outcome7eq 7success
event.dataset4eq 4aws.cloudtrail
data_stream.dataset3eq 3aws.cloudtrail
aws::requestParameters1contains 1administratoraccess
aws::userIdentity.invokedBy1in 1autoscaling.amazonaws.com, codebuild.amazonaws.com, codepipeline.amazonaws.com
aws::userIdentity.type1eq 1AWSService

Top indicator values (29 distinct)

Specific (field, operator, value) combinations the rules check for, ranked by how many rules under this technique use each one. The Corpus reach column counts how many rules across the entire catalog (any technique) check the same combination. High numbers point to widely-used indicators that are likely noisy on their own; combine them with another condition for useful signal. Blank means the combination is specific to rules under this technique. Click a value to expand the rules under this technique that use it.

FieldKindValueRules (here)Corpus reach
event.outcomeeq
success
7251
event.dataseteq
aws.cloudtrail
417
Provider_Nameeq
sts.amazonaws.com
311
Provider_Nameeq
iam.amazonaws.com
225
Provider_Nameeq
ec2.amazonaws.com
119
Provider_Nameeq
kms.amazonaws.com
12
data_stream.dataseteq
aws.cloudtrail
3141
EventTypeeq
AssumeRole
13
EventTypeeq
AssumeRoot
1
EventTypeeq
AttachRolePolicy
12
EventTypeeq
GetFederationToken
12
EventTypeeq
PutKeyPolicy
1
EventTypein
AssociateIamInstanceProfile
1
EventTypein
CreatePolicyVersion
1
EventTypein
ReplaceIamInstanceProfile
1
EventTypein
SetDefaultPolicyVersion
1
aws::requestParameterscontains
administratoraccess
1
aws::userIdentity.invokedByin
autoscaling.amazonaws.com
1
aws::userIdentity.invokedByin
codebuild.amazonaws.com
1
aws::userIdentity.invokedByin
codepipeline.amazonaws.com
1
aws::userIdentity.invokedByin
ec2.amazonaws.com
1
aws::userIdentity.invokedByin
ecs-tasks.amazonaws.com
1
aws::userIdentity.invokedByin
ecs.amazonaws.com
1
aws::userIdentity.invokedByin
eks-fargate.amazonaws.com
1
aws::userIdentity.invokedByin
eks.amazonaws.com
1
aws::userIdentity.invokedByin
lambda.amazonaws.com
1
aws::userIdentity.invokedByin
rds.amazonaws.com
1
aws::userIdentity.invokedByin
ssm.amazonaws.com
1
aws::userIdentity.typeeq
AWSService
12

Exclusions (10 distinct)

Field/operator/value combinations excluded by rules under this technique (top-level not() clauses), sorted by how many rules exclude each. These are the false-positive paths the community has learned to filter out. A new rule that ignores the high-count entries here will likely fire on the same noisy paths. Click a value to expand the rules under this technique that exclude it.

FieldKindValueRules excluding
aws::userIdentity.typeeq
AWSService
3
aws::sourceIPAddressin
cloudformation.amazonaws.com
1
aws::sourceIPAddressin
servicecatalog.amazonaws.com
1
aws::userIdentity.arnwildcard
arn*/terraform
1
aws::userIdentity.invokedByeq
ssm.amazonaws.com
1
related.entitystarts_with
arn\:aws\:iam\:\:aws\:policy
1
source.as.organization.nameeq
Google LLC
1
source.as.organization.nameeq
MongoDB, Inc.
1
source.as.organization.namestarts_with
AMAZON
1
source.as.organization.namestarts_with
Amazon
1

Rules under this technique

Every rule in the catalog tagged with this technique, grouped by vendor. Click a rule title for its full predicates, exclusions, and indicators.

Platform (all)
Domain (all)

Elastic 7 rules