Platform for Cross-Domain Cloud Security Policy Verification

Traditional cloud security tools primarily detect known problems after they occur. Policy-as-Code (PaC) tools offer a step forward by gating deployments pre-change, but they suffer from domain-scoping and implementation coupling, meaning policies for one cloud provider or tool don't compose or integrate with others. This leads to a fragmented security posture and an inability to declare safety properties once and verify them universally across the entire configuration lifecycle.

The Challenge: Cloud Configuration as First-Order Logic

A core problem is that cloud configurations, especially AWS IAM policies, are expressed in first-order logic, a formal system many engineers are not trained in. When multiple policies (identity, resource, SCP, permission boundary, session) compose, determining the effective permission involves complex logical evaluation with specific order and deny-override semantics. Engineers often think procedurally, leading to a language mismatch that causes prevalent misconfigurations. Current scanners fail to capture these compositional risks, checking policies in isolation rather than their combined effect.

A Specification-First Architecture for Safety Invariants

The proposed solution introduces a specification-first approach with a three-layer architecture to manage security intent and verification:

• Collector (Observation Layer): This component is responsible for querying cloud APIs (e.g., using Steampipe or AWS Config), resolving multi-layer policy logic (ACLs, bucket policies, IAM, etc.), and producing a unified, effective state (e.g., `public_access: true`). This is where the complexity of parsing raw cloud configuration and computing its effective state is localized. Transparency is key, with open-source collectors and inspectable JSON snapshots.
• Specification Language (CEL): Engineers define desired safety properties or boundary conditions (e.g., `asset.tags.Sensitivity == "High" && asset.public_access == true`) using a simpler, boolean evaluation language like Common Expression Language (CEL). This expresses the *conclusion* about system safety rather than the *derivation* of permissions.
• Evaluation Engine: This is a provider-agnostic component that evaluates CEL predicates against the typed JSON produced by the collector. It checks the pre-calculated effective state against the defined safety invariants. New provider features only require schema extensions in the collector, not engine rewrites.

This architectural pattern effectively separates concerns: the collector handles the intricate details of cloud API interactions and policy resolution, the security team declares high-level safety intent, and the evaluation engine mechanically enforces those invariants against the resolved state. This moves from reactive detection to proactive, declarative verification, significantly improving cloud security posture by aligning engineering intent with effective system state.