Session
Role Alchemy: Forging Least-Privilege Roles from Cloud Logs with PowerShell
Stop guessing at custom cloud roles and start deriving them from data. In dynamic environments like Azure, permission sprawl is a significant risk, where users and services accumulate excessive privileges in overly broad roles, such as "Contributor." This creates a massive, unnecessary attack surface that manual audits can't keep pace with. This session introduces a practical, PowerShell-driven pipeline that transforms this guesswork into a repeatable, data-driven security practice.
We will demonstrate how to turn raw cloud activity logs into precise, least-privilege RBAC roles, all using code that works on both PowerShell 7 and Windows PowerShell 5.1. We will walk through the entire workflow: ingesting and shaping data into a user-action matrix, applying K-Means clustering to discover natural usage patterns, and using our custom "auto-k" algorithm to determine the optimal number of roles intelligently. This technique prevents both unmanageable "role explosion" and overly permissive mega-roles, producing a ready-to-deploy JSON role definition that reflects how your users *actually* work.
To accelerate the final steps, we also showcase a strictly optional AI assistant that suggests business-friendly role names and descriptions—all while keeping a human firmly in the loop. You will leave with a blueprint to shrink your organization's attack surface and all the code needed to adapt this methodology for Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.
Frank Lesniak
Microsoft 365 Consulting Team Lead with Focus on Corporate M&A | PowerShell | Windows | Azure | Sr. Cybersecurity & Enterprise Technology Architect at West Monroe
River Forest, Illinois, United States
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