Access Control Auditing

Overview

Audit access control implementations across codebases, cloud configurations, and application layers for security vulnerabilities and policy violations. This skill targets IAM policies, ACLs, RBAC configurations, file permissions, and API authorization logic to identify privilege escalation paths, overly permissive grants, and violations of the principle of least privilege.

Prerequisites

• Access to the target codebase and configuration files in ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/
• Familiarity with the authorization model in use (RBAC, ABAC, ACL, or IAM)
• grep, find, and standard shell utilities available via Bash
• For cloud audits: CLI tools such as aws iam, gcloud, or az role installed and authenticated
• Reference: ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/references/README.md for IAM best practices, ACL vulnerability patterns, and NIST/GDPR access control standards

Instructions

1. Enumerate all access control definitions by scanning for IAM policy files, RBAC configuration, ACL definitions, middleware authorization checks, and .htaccess or equivalent files using Glob and Grep.
2. Map each role or principal to its granted permissions, building a permission matrix that identifies which subjects access which resources at which privilege level.
3. Evaluate each permission grant against the principle of least privilege -- flag any wildcard permissions (*), overly broad resource scopes, or administrative access granted to non-admin roles.
4. Check for separation of duties violations where a single role combines mutually exclusive privileges (e.g., both "create user" and "approve user").
5. Identify privilege escalation paths by tracing role inheritance chains, looking for roles that can modify their own permissions or assume higher-privileged roles.
6. Inspect API route handlers and middleware for missing or inconsistent authorization checks -- compare route definitions against their corresponding auth guards.