AWSCloudFormationFullAccess

Last Modified

Mar 12, 2026

March 12, 2026 at 09:25 PM UTC

Version

Total Versions

Created

Jul 26, 2019

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Risk

High

An unrestricted escalation path, identity administration, secret reads or the power to switch off security monitoring. Read from this policy document alone: trust policies, boundaries and SCPs in your account still decide what actually succeeds. How this is assessed

High
Can launch resources that run as a more privileged role
Grants every action of 1 documented escalation path on any resource with no condition.
- cloudformation-005cloudformation:CreateChangeSet + cloudformation:ExecuteChangeSetunrestricted
Use with caution: Make sure no highly privileged role trusts the service involved, and restrict iam:PassRole in your own policies or boundary to named roles with iam:PassedToService.
High
Can take over existing resources that run as another role
Grants every action of 1 documented escalation path on any resource with no condition.
- cloudformation-002cloudformation:UpdateStackunrestricted
Use with caution: List the roles attached to the functions, instances, pipelines or notebooks it can modify: the holder effectively has them too.
Medium
Can rewrite resource policies and sharing
Grants 1 permissions management action across 1 service (cloudformation) on any resource, enough to share resources outside the account.
cloudformation:setstackpolicy
Use with caution: Turn on IAM Access Analyzer external access findings, and keep account-level guards like S3 Block Public Access enabled.
Medium
Full cloudformation access on every resource
Uses cloudformation:* with Resource "*" and no condition, so every action AWS adds to that service later is granted too.
cloudformation:*
Use with caution: The grant grows every time the service does. For long-lived access, prefer a policy that lists the actions you actually need.

Policy Document

View on GitHub

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19{
  "PolicyVersion": {
    "Document": {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
        {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": [
            "cloudformation:*"
          ],
          "Resource": "*"
        }
      ]
    },
    "VersionId": "v1",
    "IsDefaultVersion": true,
    "CreateDate": "2019-07-26T21:50:35+00:00"
  }
}