LoFP LoFP / mlops pipelines and data science teams routinely create sagemaker resources with execution roles, and new pipelines or team members appear as new principals on first use. verify the principal in `aws.cloudtrail.user_identity.arn`, the passed rolearn in `aws.cloudtrail.request_parameters`, and whether the role's privileges and the activity are approved. known automation roles can be excluded after validation.

Techniques

Sample rules

AWS SageMaker Execution Role Passed by Unusual Principal

Description

Identifies the first time an IAM principal passes a given execution role (roleArn) to an Amazon SageMaker resource, via CreateNotebookInstance, CreateTrainingJob, CreateProcessingJob, CreateAutoMLJob, or CreatePipeline. These actions require iam:PassRole and attach an IAM role that the created resource then runs as. An adversary holding both SageMaker create permissions and a broad iam:PassRole grant can pass a more privileged role to a resource they control and execute code as that role, escalating privileges. The rule keys on the combination of the calling principal and the passed roleArn, so it surfaces a principal using an execution role it has not used before in the last 7 days; a role whose account differs from the caller’s, or that is more privileged than the caller, is especially suspicious.

Detection logic

FROM logs-aws.cloudtrail-*
| WHERE data_stream.dataset == "aws.cloudtrail"
    AND event.provider == "sagemaker.amazonaws.com"
    AND event.action IN (
      "CreateNotebookInstance",
      "CreateTrainingJob",
      "CreateProcessingJob",
      "CreateAutoMLJob",
      "CreatePipeline"
    )
    AND event.outcome == "success"
    AND aws.cloudtrail.user_identity.type != "AWSService"
| GROK aws.cloudtrail.request_parameters """.*roleArn=(?<Esql.aws_cloudtrail_request_parameters_role_arn>arn:aws[a-z-]*:iam::[0-9]{12}:role/[^,}]+).*"""
| WHERE Esql.aws_cloudtrail_request_parameters_role_arn IS NOT NULL
| EVAL Esql.principal_arn = COALESCE(
    aws.cloudtrail.user_identity.session_context.session_issuer.arn,
    aws.cloudtrail.user_identity.arn
  )
| STATS
    Esql.timestamp_min = MIN(@timestamp),
    Esql.timestamp_max = MAX(@timestamp),
    Esql.ingested_min = MIN(COALESCE(event.ingested, @timestamp)),
    Esql.event_count = COUNT(*),
    Esql.event_action_values = VALUES(event.action),
    Esql.source_ip_values = VALUES(source.ip),
    Esql.user_agent_original_values = VALUES(user_agent.original),
    Esql.user_identity_arn_values = VALUES(aws.cloudtrail.user_identity.arn),
    Esql.cloud_account_id_values = VALUES(cloud.account.id),
    Esql.cloud_region_values = VALUES(cloud.region)
  BY Esql.principal_arn,
     Esql.aws_cloudtrail_request_parameters_role_arn
| WHERE Esql.ingested_min >= NOW() - 10 minutes
| KEEP Esql.*