What it means
Cloud IAM policy analysis evaluates effective permissions, conditions, inheritance, wildcard use, trust relationships, resource scope, and paths to privilege escalation.
Why it matters
Individual policy documents can look reasonable while their combined effect grants far more access than intended.
Practical focus
- Calculate effective access rather than reading policies in isolation
- Identify wildcard actions and resources
- Review trust and delegation paths
- Test high-risk permissions and unused access
Common mistakes
- Reviewing only directly attached policies
- Ignoring deny, boundary, and inheritance behavior
- Assuming role names reflect actual privilege
- Removing access without testing workload dependencies
Certification relevance
This subject appears in or supports the following certification bodies of knowledge: