Permissions on the Loose: Measuring Overprivilege in Real-World Serverless Applications

arXiv:2607.02875 · cs.CR · Submitted 2026-07-03 · Read on arXiv

cs.CR

Submitted: 2026-07-03

Updated: 2026-09-08

Comments: Added functionality tests and revised topic

Code: https://github.com/boto/boto

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Privilege Escalation — 11× in this paper
• Amazon Web Services — 7× in this paper
• Core — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Credential Access — 7× in this paper
• Adam — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Analyzer — 6× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Trace — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Data Destruction — 5× in this paper
• Data Exfiltration — 5× in this paper
• Identity and Access Management — 5× in this paper
• Resource Hijacking — 5× in this paper
• Generalization — 4× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Data Tampering — 3× in this paper
• Denial of Service — 3× in this paper
• Verification — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Abstraction — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Symposium on Security and Privacy — 1× in this paper

Sources

• Guarding Serverless Applications with SecLambda
• Quantifying Azure RBAC Wildcard Overreach
• ALPS: Automated Least-Privilege Enforcement for Securing Serverless Functions

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