Least privilege
Granting only the permissions needed for the intended task, for the required duration and scope. Apply it to humans, services, build jobs, and agents.
- Also called
- principle of least privilege
- Defined in
- NIST glossary: least privilege
Covered in
Review cloud permissions and role trust together
Distinguish who can obtain a cloud identity from what that identity can do, then test the effective access path.
Run Kubernetes workloads with only the privileges they need
Review pod settings, service accounts and effective permissions together before treating a namespace as an isolation boundary.
Secure design patterns: a catalogue for insecure-design (A06)
A catalogue of reusable secure-design patterns, grouped by concern, each with when to use it, a short example and the failure it prevents: choke-point authorization, capability tokens, parse-don't-validate, safe-by-default APIs, tenant scoping, fail-closed, idempotency, and more.
Meet the OpenSSF OSPS Baseline as a maintainer: the levels, every Level 1 control on GitHub, and the evidence
Walk through the eight control families and three maturity levels of OSPS Baseline v2026.08.28, meet each Level 1 requirement on a GitHub repository, and keep evidence a consumer can check.
Case study: Microsoft AI researchers' over-permissive SAS token (2023)
How an over-permissive Azure Storage SAS token in a public repository for AI models exposed internal Microsoft data in 2023, and how to scope, scan for and revoke signed URLs.
Practice: Privileged container lab: Reject a privileged workload before deployment · NetworkPolicy lab: Lock down a shop namespace · IAM trust policy lab: Evaluate a role trust policy against the confused deputy · Local project: Verify Kubernetes admission and network boundaries