IaC Ownership Made Simple: A Tag-Based Approach to Governance

Read full article here: https://www.token.security/blog/iac-ownership---tag-based-approach/?utm_source=nhimg

In modern cloud environments, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become the backbone of scalable and automated deployments. With a single commit or pipeline run, hundreds of resources can be created—including servers, policies, and most importantly, non-human identities (NHIs) such as roles, service accounts, and API keys. But this raises a critical question: Who owns these IaC-generated identities?

Unlike identities created directly by humans, IaC resources are generated by pipelines, Terraform modules, or automated processes. This makes traditional log-based tracking insufficient. Ownership is vital for security, incident response, and compliance, yet tracing it back to the responsible developer or DevOps engineer is notoriously difficult.

The Ownership Challenge in IaC

• Direct role creation: Was the owner the DevOps engineer who ran Terraform, or the developer who requested it?
• CI/CD-triggered deployments: Does ownership belong to the engineer who built the pipeline or the developer who committed the code?
• Modules and templates: If an overprivileged role is created by a reusable module, who’s accountable—the author of the module or the user who consumed it?

The reality is that IaC ownership is multi-layered, and without clear accountability, organizations risk unmanaged, orphaned, or overprivileged NHIs.

The Tag-Based Approach

One proposed solution is a tagging mechanism built directly into IaC workflows. By injecting tags into Terraform files and modules during the planning phase, each identity can be linked back to the relevant source files and ultimately, the human contributors who wrote or modified them.

For example:

• A Terraform plan enhanced with tags can produce a JSON output linking every identity to its module file, resource file, and input configuration.
• When commits are made, these tagged files identify the developer(s) responsible.

This approach allows DevOps and security teams to map IaC-generated NHIs back to human owners, a crucial step for remediation, troubleshooting, and lifecycle management.

Limitations and Lessons Learned

While powerful, the tag-based solution is not without challenges:

• Tag inheritance doesn’t always work seamlessly across modules.
• Different cloud providers handle state management inconsistently.
• Large-scale deployments may require heavy customization to ensure reliable tagging.

As a result, many organizations explore complementary approaches (log-based analysis, IaC code parsing, or execution tracking) to establish ownership at scale.

Why IaC Ownership Matters

Understanding IaC ownership is more than an operational detail—it is a security imperative. Without clear accountability, orphaned NHIs can accumulate, stale roles linger in environments, and overprivileged access increases the attack surface. By tying identities back to their human creators, organizations can strengthen machine identity governance, incident response, and compliance reporting.

At Token Security, we continue to research advanced methods for mapping IaC-generated NHIs. While tagging alone may not solve everything, it remains a practical technique for DevOps teams seeking greater visibility and ownership in their machine identity security journey.