Why is the iam:PassRole permission a privilege escalation risk?

Question

Accepted Answer

It lets a principal hand a more privileged role to a service that will then run as it — Passing a role is how a principal hands an execution role to a service such as Lambda or EC2; if it can pass an administrator role, whatever it launches runs with those permissions even though the principal never held them. It is not a policy-attachment permission, does not bypass trust policies, and cannot change a boundary.

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It lets a principal attach any managed policy to a role they already own

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It lets a principal assume a role without appearing in that role's trust policy

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It lets a principal raise their own permissions boundary to the account maximum

Why is the iam:PassRole permission a privilege escalation risk?

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