CHAIN-060 — Managed identity with excessive subscription-scope role

Summary

Severity: High · Likelihood: High · Logic: ALL

Why this chain matters

A resource's managed identity is assigned Contributor or higher at subscription scope. Any code execution on that resource (IMDS token) yields subscription-wide privilege. This is the bread-and-butter Azure privilege-escalation chain.

Component rules

This chain fires when its trigger conditions are met by the following rules. Click any rule to see its detection logic and compliance mappings.

Rule ID	Role
zt_id_008	Trigger
zt_id_003	Trigger

Attack walkthrough

Step 1 — curl the IMDS endpoint for a token scoped to management.azure.com.

Actor: Attacker on resource
MITRE ATT&CK: T1552.005
Enabled by: zt_id_008

Attacker gain: ARM token for the managed identity.

Step 2 — Enumerate role assignments; identity holds Contributor on /subscriptions/.

Actor: Attacker
MITRE ATT&CK: T1087.004
Enabled by: zt_id_003

Attacker gain: Confirmed subscription-scope privilege.

Step 3 — Create new role assignment, new storage with anon access, exfiltrate VM disks.

Actor: Attacker
MITRE ATT&CK: T1098
Enabled by: zt_id_003

Attacker gain: Subscription takeover.

Blast radius

Initial access	Any RCE on the resource.
Max privilege	Subscription Contributor / Owner.
Data at risk	Every resource in the subscription
Services at risk	Azure RBAC subscription-wide

How the logic works

The chain fires only when every rule above has at least one finding in the current scan. Missing any one rule breaks the chain — so remediating any single step disrupts the attack path.