Catching Data Perimeter Drift Before It Reaches Production

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Cloud providers provide tools for customers to prevent data exfiltration attempts by creating a data perimeter — a set of permission guardrails that ensure that only trusted identities from expected networks can access trusted resources [1]. For example, a company can set up controls so that users within its organization can access only their company-specific S3 buckets from their corporate networks. Any other access patterns will be denied. These are important for organizations that are generally sensitive to data exfiltration, such as finance, healthcare, and government. Setting up a data perimeter in AWS involves creating an organization-wide policy and network policy. Service control policies (SCP) [10] and resource control policies (RCP) [11] define the maximum allowable permissions for a given identity or a resource, while VPC endpoint policies [12] define the maximum allowable permissions for a given service through a private network. Together, these controls establish a boundary around the organization’s network and resources to enforce a data perimeter.