992 Findings in SadCloud: What Compound Analysis Sees That Scanners Don't

✓ Human-authored analysis; AI used for formatting and proofreading. SadCloud is an open-source Terraform project by NCC Group that deploys misconfigured AWS resources. Security teams use it to test their tooling: if your scanner can't find the misconfigurations in SadCloud, it can't find them in production. We pointed Stave at SadCloud. Then at BishopFox's IAM Vulnerable. A lab focused on IAM privilege escalation paths. The numbers tell a story about what happens when you move from per-resource scanning to compound attack path analysis. The raw numbers Metric SadCloud (NCC Group) IAM Vulnerable (BishopFox) Assets evaluated 36 31 Atomic violations 992 837 Compound chains firing 84 instances (13 unique) 70 instances (6 unique) Near-miss chains 785 instances (40 unique) — A per-resource scanner (Prowler, ScoutSuite, Checkov) would show 992 findings for SadCloud. Each finding stands alone: this bucket is public, this role is overpermissioned, this trail isn't logging. The operator opens a dashboard with 992 items sorted by severity and starts scrolling. Stave's compound-only default output shows 84 findings across 13 named attack paths. Same underlying data. Different composition. The 992 atomic violations still evaluated. They're the detection infrastructure. The 84 compound chains are the findings that reach the operator. That's a 12x reduction by composition. Compound chains Each compound chain fires when multiple controls fail simultaneously on related assets, matching a named attack pattern: Chain Severity Instances What it means iam_escalation_undetected critical 36 IAM roles can escalate privileges and no detective control monitors the escalation path iam_boundary_governance_failure critical 36 No permission boundary constrains IAM principals in the account — any role can reach any resource iam_session_opacity high 2 IAM session activity isn't logged at the detail level needed to detect credential abuse s3_ssec_ransomware_path critical 1 S3 bucket is vulnerable t