Cloud Attack Paths Hidden in Resource Relationships, Not Individual Misconfigs

Most cloud security tools scan individual resources for known vulnerabilities, but the most dangerous attack paths emerge from relationships between resources rather than any single misconfiguration. A chain of individually valid permissions — such as updating an IAM role, passing it to a Lambda function, and deleting S3 objects — can create an unintended privilege escalation path that no single-resource scanner would flag. Structural analysis techniques like Datalog-based graph traversal can detect these transitive permission chains without requiring any user-defined metadata or intent declarations. Similarly, SMT solvers such as Z3 can evaluate complex policy conditions mathematically to determine whether they effectively grant wildcard access, even when no explicit wildcard was written. Circular role trust and self-modifying permission paths are also structurally detectable risks that the security industry has largely overlooked in favor of property-based resource checks.