misconfig.cloud Workspace
Lesson 2 · 8 minutes · 40 points

Why an IAM role is safer than sharing access keys

A role gives a trusted system temporary credentials for a defined purpose. The customer keeps control of the trust policy and can remove that access.

Start with the trust decision

An IAM role answers two different questions: who may assume me? in its trust policy, and what may I do? in its permissions policies. Both must be correct.

Misconfig service identityAssumeRole + external ID →Customer read roleTemporary credentials →AWS read APIs

Practice

A vendor asks for an access key so it can inspect CloudWatch and ECS. Which change gives the customer the clearest control?

Lesson completion is disabled in the public demo; points are only awarded from verified server-side events.