services / Google Cloud / Service Accounts

Service accounts are Google accounts intended for use by applications or workloads for authentication. They can be either managed by Google or user-managed.

Many of these permissions are extremely sensitive, because service accounts are frequently overprovisioned. A user with access to a service account effectively has access to all permissions the service account has, so broad access to service accounts can allow users to gain unintended access.

iam.​serviceAccounts.​implicitDelegation

Implicit delegation allows you to chain service account access token requests. This permission on a service account gives the user access to creating access tokens on any service accounts that service account has access to.

Risks

1. Lateral movement (BOOST)

Scope: CRITICAL

This privilege may grant access to sensitive data from a significant fraction of organizational functions, allow interruption of critical organizational services, or its exploit could lead to significant privilege escalation.

Links