In my last post, we talked about how SageMaker Presigned URLs are effectively "Golden Tickets" to your ML environment. We established that giving users direct IAM permission to generate these tickets (sagemaker:CreatePresigned*) is a recipe for disaster—specifically, lateral movement disaster.
Let’s be real: usually, when we talk about cloud security, we’re talking about S3 buckets left open to the world or over-permissive IAM roles attached to EC2 instances. But while everyone is watching the front door, the Data Science team is building a massive side entrance with Amazon SageMaker.
I’ve been deep-diving into SageMaker security assessments lately, specifically looking at how we access these environments. The verdict? SageMaker Presigned URLs are the "Golden Tickets" of the AWS ecosystem.
If you are a pentester or a Cloud Sec engineer, you need to understand how these URLs work because they are effectively bearer tokens that bypass your IDP, your MFA, and potentially your sanity.
A policy-to-threat-model mapping table showing exactly which IAM policy types mitigate which attack classes, why they matter, and what they do not protect against.
This is the reference table cloud security engineers, auditors, and pentesters use when analyzing IAM blast radius and privilege escalation paths.