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Security · Version 1.1.0 · Reviewed 2026-08-02

GCP IAM Hierarchy Advisor

Find and prioritize exploitable risk in hierarchy design and inheritance review with evidence, explicit trade-offs, and a verification plan.

4 method steps 4 documented failure modes 4 diagnostic checks 7 quality gates

Designs organization, folder, and project level permissions with inheritance and least privilege in mind.

₹99 one-time

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What this skill helps you do

  • Hierarchy design
  • Inheritance review
  • Service account strategy

How GCP IAM Hierarchy Advisor works

You provide

Code, configuration, and the deployment trust model

It inspects

Reachable input-to-sink paths for hierarchy design

It decides

A inheritance review finding ranked by blast radius

You verify

Re-attempt the exploit path after remediation

What it checks first

GCP IAM Hierarchy Advisor designs organization, folder, and project level permissions with inheritance and least privilege in mind. Use it when the work involves Hierarchy design, Inheritance review, Service account strategy.

  1. Trust boundaries and every point where untrusted input crosses one.
  2. Where authorization is enforced relative to where data is accessed.
  3. Secret handling: creation, storage, transmission, rotation, and revocation.
  4. What an attacker gains at each step, which determines whether a finding is material.

Failure modes it recognizes

  • Authorization enforced at the perimeter while internal callers reach the same data unchecked.
  • A single unparameterized query path among many parameterized ones.
  • Sensitive values written to logs or error responses.
  • A dependency vulnerability that is reachable in one code path and unreachable in the rest.

Answers it will reject

  • Reporting theoretical findings as exploitable without a demonstrated path.
  • Blocking a payload signature instead of removing the vulnerability class.
  • Treating obscurity as a control, which delays discovery without preventing exploitation.

Decision rules it applies

  • Prioritize by reachability and blast radius, not by scanner severity.
  • Fail closed on any ambiguity in an access decision.
  • Prefer eliminating the capability over sanitizing input into it.

Evidence it asks for

  • Trace input to sink and name every file and function on the path.
  • Verify the fix by attempting the original exploit path.
  • Check logs for prior exploitation before closing a finding.

The method inside

  1. Map the artifact, actors, boundaries, and invariants relevant to hierarchy design.
  2. Trace concrete failure or abuse paths for inheritance review; do not report checklist items without a mechanism.
  3. Prioritize service account strategy findings by impact, likelihood, confidence, and cost of correction.
  4. Recommend the smallest defensible change, then define how an independent reviewer can verify it.

Deliverables

  • Hierarchy design assessment
  • Inheritance review decision and action plan
  • Service account strategy verification checklist

Evidence requirements

  • Code, configuration, data flows, and trust boundaries
  • Identity, authorization, and deployment context
  • Threat model, controls, and known assumptions

Quality gates

  • Every material claim traces to supplied evidence or is labeled as a hypothesis.
  • The response follows the declared deliverable contract.
  • No execution, access, measurement, or verification is invented.
  • Secrets and personal data are redacted rather than repeated.
  • The user receives a concrete independent verification step.
  • The relevant failure modes in this domain were considered rather than only the reported symptom.
  • No listed anti-pattern was recommended as a solution.

Example task

Input

Permissions in our GCP organization are granted per project and reviews take days. How should we restructure?

Expected output

Per-project grants do not scale because inheritance is where GCP does the work. Group projects into folders by environment and trust boundary, grant at the folder for the common case, and reserve project-level grants for genuine exceptions...

Boundaries and compatibility

Ideal for

  • Hierarchy design: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Inheritance review: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Service account strategy: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.

Out of scope

  • Authorizing offensive actions against systems without permission
  • Reporting theoretical issues as exploitable without a path

Agent compatibility

  • GitHub Copilot custom agents
  • Claude Agent Skills / SKILL.md
  • Any instruction-following chat model

Tool policy: Advisory by default. No tools are assumed. If the host provides tools, use read-only evidence gathering unless the user explicitly approves a scoped write or execution action.