SecurityCipher
Home Blog About Us

Learn Paths, courses, and reference docs

  • ๐Ÿš€ Start Here Beginner path through the site
  • ๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ Penetration Testing Roadmap Structured path to become a pentester
  • ๐ŸŽ“ Free Security Courses Current free Udemy coupon listings
  • ๐Ÿ“„ Secure Code Explain Vulnerable vs secure code side by side
  • ๐ŸŽฏ Penetration Testing Tricks Field notes for real engagements
  • ๐Ÿ“– Vulnerability Explain How common vulns actually work

Checklists Interactive reviews and LLM risks

  • โœ… Security Checklists Hub All interactive security checklists
  • ๐Ÿ“‹ Writeup Checklists Steps derived from real writeups
  • ๐Ÿง  LLM AI Security Checklist Controls for LLM apps
  • ๐Ÿค– OWASP LLM Top 10 LLM Top 10 risks mapped out
  • ๐Ÿงฐ Burp Suite Guide Step-by-step Burp tutorials
  • ๐Ÿ“˜ Payload Field Manual Safe-first probes and signals

Practice Browser labs, games, and explorers

  • ๐Ÿ”ฌ Interactive Labs SQL injection, AI, architecture review
  • ๐ŸŽฎ Security Games Phishing, JWT, WAF, and more
  • ๐Ÿš— On-Call Drive Neon-city arcade security missions
  • โ€ข Shift Zero SOC desk: phish, OTP, malware, tickets
  • โ“ Application Security Quiz Web, secure coding, and cloud quizzes
  • ๐Ÿ—บ๏ธ OWASP Top 10 Explorer Clickable risk map with signals
  • ๐Ÿ”€ Interactive Attack Paths Recon-to-impact chains

Tools & Career Databases, jobs, and community

  • ๐Ÿ› ๏ธ Security Tools Curated recon, SAST, and bounty tools
  • ๐Ÿ”Ž CVE Lookup Multi-source CVE intelligence
  • ๐Ÿ’ฐ Bug Bounty Programs Live public scopes to search
  • ๐Ÿ’ผ Cybersecurity Jobs Roles from company career pages
  • ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ’ป Security Researchers Community profiles and submissions
  • ๐ŸŽค Security Conferences Upcoming and past events
Browse all Security resources hub Freelance Security โ†’
My Resume
Freelance SecurityFreelance
New Security Researchers Join the directory - submit your profile for review Submit profile โ†’
← Security Tools View on GitHub

enumerate-iam

Brute-forces an AWS key's permissions to enumerate what actions it can perform.

Enumerate IAM permissions

Found a set of AWS credentials and have no idea which permissions it might have?

$ ./enumerate-iam.py --access-key AKIA... --secret-key StF0q...
2019-05-10 15:57:58,447 - 21345 - [INFO] Starting permission enumeration for access-key-id "AKIA..."
2019-05-10 15:58:01,532 - 21345 - [INFO] Run for the hills, get_account_authorization_details worked!
2019-05-10 15:58:01,537 - 21345 - [INFO] -- {
    "RoleDetailList": [
        {
            "Tags": [], 
            "AssumeRolePolicyDocument": {
                "Version": "2008-10-17", 
                "Statement": [
                    {
...
2019-05-10 15:58:26,709 - 21345 - [INFO] -- gamelift.list_builds() worked!
2019-05-10 15:58:26,850 - 21345 - [INFO] -- cloudformation.list_stack_sets() worked!
2019-05-10 15:58:26,982 - 21345 - [INFO] -- directconnect.describe_locations() worked!
2019-05-10 15:58:27,021 - 21345 - [INFO] -- gamelift.describe_matchmaking_rule_sets() worked!
2019-05-10 15:58:27,311 - 21345 - [INFO] -- sqs.list_queues() worked!

Now you do!

enumerate-iam.py tries to brute force all API calls allowed by the IAM policy. The calls performed by this tool are all non-destructive (only get* and list* calls are performed).

Installation

git clone git@github.com:andresriancho/enumerate-iam.git
cd enumerate-iam/
pip install -r requirements.txt

Library

This software was written to be easy to integrate with other tools, just import the main function and provide the required arguments:

from enumerate_iam.main import enumerate_iam

enumerate_iam(access_key,
              secret_key,
              session_token,
              region)

The output will contain all the enumerated permission information in a python dictionary.

Other tools

Before writing enumerate-iam.py I tried a few that performed the same task. Decided to write my own because the others:

  • Did not check for all API calls
  • Where painfully slow when adding more API calls to the list
  • Did not return the permissions in a programmatic way

Updating the API calls

The API calls to be performed during permission enumeration are stored in enumerate_iam/bruteforce_tests.py, a Python dict() which is generated by enumerate_iam/generate_bruteforce_tests.py using the API documentation available in the aws-sdk-js library.

AWS releases new services every quarter, to make sure that this tool is finding all the existing permissions run:

cd enumerate_iam/
git clone https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-js.git
python generate_bruteforce_tests.py
rm -rf aws-sdk-js

Related tools

This tool was released as part of the Internet-Scale Analysis of AWS Cognito Security research. During this research the cc-lambda tool was also used to extract information from the Common Crawl data.

Initial code

The initial code was released in this gist and improved in multiple ways:

  • Complete refactoring
  • Results returned in a programmatic way
  • Threads
  • Improved logging
  • Increased API call coverage
  • Export as a library
Press Escape to close the search panel.

Donate

Buy me a Coffee

Penetration Testing Services

penetration Testing Services

Web Application Security Quiz

Web Application Security Quiz

Daily Bug Bounty Writeups - Twitter

Daily Bug Bounty Writeups

Download our Latest Android Application

Guide for Penetration Testing

Daily Bug Bounty Writeups - Telegram

Daily Bug Bounty Writeups

Author

Piyush
Senior Product Security Engineer

Ethical Hacker || Penetration Tester || Gamer || Blogger || Product Security Engineer || AI Security

READ ARTICLE

Donate

Buy me a Coffee

Recent Posts

  • AI-Generated Code Security Bugs: A Vibe Coding Case Study
    AI-Generated Code Security Bugs: A Vibe Coding Case Study
    October 7, 2026/
    0 Comments
  • Cloud Misconfig Bounty Hunting in 2026: Open Buckets, Firebase, and Secrets
    Cloud Misconfig Bounty Hunting in 2026: Open Buckets, Firebase, and Secrets
    September 8, 2026/
    0 Comments
  • DevSecOps From Laptop to Production: A Practical Security Pipeline Guide
    DevSecOps From Laptop to Production: A Practical Security Pipeline Guide
    August 27, 2026/
    0 Comments

Follow Us

SecurityCipher

Practical security guides, vulnerability deep-dives, and hands-on resources for bug bounty hunters and penetration testers.

Useful Links

  • Security Checklists
  • Cybersecurity Jobs
  • Blogs
  • About
  • Contact
ยฉ 2026 Security Cipher. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy ยท Terms & Conditions