What can this compromised user actually do?
When an identity is compromised, your SOC's first question should be: what can they actually do? Most teams can't answer this question, and that gap has real consequences.
Effective permissions are the true, net set of actions an identity can perform after evaluating every grant, denial, inheritance path, and policy constraint. They're surprisingly hard to resolve in practice. Across AWS, GCP, Azure, and SaaS platforms, the gap between what a role appears to have access to and what it can actually do is significant, and closing that gap is one of the highest-leverage investments a SOC team can make.
In this session, Exaforce’s Director of Product, Kavita Varadarajan, and engineer, Steven Moy, walk through what makes effective permission resolution so difficult, how Exaforce approaches it across SaaS and IaaS environments, and what it looks like in practice during threat triage and investigation.
Details
- Available on-demand
- Duration: 45 minutes
- Hosts: Kavita Varadarajan and Steven Moy
What you will learn
- What are effective permissions, and why cloud providers like AWS don't fully solve for them for you
- How layered permission models (SCPs, resource policies, role chaining, group inheritance) create blind spots in standard IAM tooling
- How permission visibility translates into operational SOC advantages, such as blast radius estimation, severity scoring, and access-aware triage
- How Exaforce calculates effective permissions across SaaS and IaaS to deliver accurate threat context without manual analysis
- Real examples of how permission data changes the impact and severity of a finding
When an identity is compromised, your SOC's first question should be: what can they actually do? Most teams can't answer this question, and that gap has real consequences.
Effective permissions are the true, net set of actions an identity can perform after evaluating every grant, denial, inheritance path, and policy constraint. They're surprisingly hard to resolve in practice. Across AWS, GCP, Azure, and SaaS platforms, the gap between what a role appears to have access to and what it can actually do is significant, and closing that gap is one of the highest-leverage investments a SOC team can make.
In this session, Exaforce’s Director of Product, Kavita Varadarajan, and engineer, Steven Moy, walk through what makes effective permission resolution so difficult, how Exaforce approaches it across SaaS and IaaS environments, and what it looks like in practice during threat triage and investigation.
Details
- Available on-demand
- Duration: 45 minutes
- Hosts: Kavita Varadarajan and Steven Moy
What you will learn
- What are effective permissions, and why cloud providers like AWS don't fully solve for them for you
- How layered permission models (SCPs, resource policies, role chaining, group inheritance) create blind spots in standard IAM tooling
- How permission visibility translates into operational SOC advantages, such as blast radius estimation, severity scoring, and access-aware triage
- How Exaforce calculates effective permissions across SaaS and IaaS to deliver accurate threat context without manual analysis
- Real examples of how permission data changes the impact and severity of a finding
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