What are common mistakes with Wildcard Permissions?

Why Wildcard Permissions Fail in Practice

wildcard permissions are attractive because they reduce policy writing effort, but they also hide the real scope of access. Once a pattern is accepted, it tends to spread into other roles, workloads, and environments, so the policy stops expressing intent and starts expressing convenience. That is when least privilege breaks down and review becomes much harder than the original setup.

Broad permissions are especially risky when they are applied to admin-like actions or high-value data paths, because a single overly broad statement can cover far more than the team intended. A useful rule of thumb is that if a person cannot explain exactly what the wildcard grants, the policy is already too broad for production use.

How Overbroad Wildcards Become a Privilege Problem

Wildcard use is most dangerous when it is copied forward. Teams often inherit a permissive policy from a prototype, duplicate it for a new workload, and keep expanding the same pattern until nobody knows which permissions are actually required. That creates privilege creep, makes access reviews unreliable, and leaves cleanup until after a security incident or audit finding.

Wildcards also make escalation paths easier to miss. If a policy can touch a broad set of actions or resources, an attacker or careless operator may be able to move from ordinary use to administrative impact without needing a separate approval step. Cloud PAM and CIEM Guide is useful here because it frames how effective permissions differ from what is merely granted on paper.

In practice, inherited wildcard access is often the hardest form of overpermission to spot because it looks normal in isolation. One policy may be broad enough to pass review, but several broad policies together can produce a far larger blast radius than anyone intended.

What to Replace Wildcards With Instead

Prefer explicit actions, explicit resources, and explicit conditions wherever the platform supports them. The goal is not to eliminate all flexibility, but to make the permission model match the real task. That usually means splitting policies by workload role, separating administrative functions from routine operations, and avoiding one-size-fits-all templates for sensitive environments.

For cloud and platform teams, the strongest replacement pattern is to pair narrow permissions with guardrails that keep privilege from drifting upward over time. Top 10 AWS IAM Mistakes is a direct companion because wildcard policies are one of the classic ways teams lose control of effective access. Authorisation Models Guide helps when you need to choose between role-based, attribute-based, or policy-based ways to express that access more precisely.

Where elevation is involved, temporary access is safer than permanent breadth. Just-in-Time Access and Zero Standing Privilege Guide supports that model by making the decision to elevate explicit, time-bound, and easier to review later.

Practitioner Guidance

What to verify: Check whether any wildcard permission can reach production data, admin functions, or cross-account trust paths. Those are the places where convenience turns into material risk fastest.

Decision rule: If a wildcard is only there because the team has not yet enumerated the real permissions, treat it as a temporary exception and set a removal date. If it exists because enumeration is genuinely hard, scope it with conditions rather than leaving it broad by default.

Common mistake: Do not review the policy text in isolation. Review the effective access created by the full set of attached policies, inherited roles, and trusted relationships, because that combined view is what actually governs privilege.

What good looks like: A mature permission model has few or no wildcards in sensitive paths, clear ownership for policy changes, and a review process that can explain why each broad permission still exists.

Practitioner takeaway: Wildcards are sometimes acceptable as a short-term control, but they should never become the control design itself; the longer they remain, the more they hide privilege creep and enlarge blast radius.

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