Elastic Security Detection Rules

GCP Vertex AI Role Granted to Principal

Last updated 5 days ago on 2026-10-23
Created 5 days ago on 2026-10-23

About

Identifies an IAM policy change on a Google Cloud project, folder, or organization that grants a Vertex AI role (`roles/aiplatform.*`) to a principal. Vertex AI roles control who can invoke models, deploy endpoints, run agents, and read prompt and training data. An adversary who has gained IAM administration rights can grant a Vertex AI role to an identity they control to keep model access after the original foothold is removed, or to run LLMjacking workloads under the victim's billing. Google-managed service agent roles are excluded because Google grants them automatically when the API is enabled.
Tags
Domain: CloudDomain: GenAIDomain: IdentityData Source: GCPData Source: Google Cloud PlatformPlatform: GCPService: GCP Vertex AIUse Case: Identity and Access AuditUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: PersistenceTactic: Privilege EscalationThreat: Unauthorized AI UsageMitre Atlas: AML.T0012Rule Type: Custom Query (KQL)Language: kuery
Severity
medium
Risk Score
47
MITRE ATT&CK™

Persistence (TA0003)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Account Manipulation (T1098)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Privilege Escalation (TA0004)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Account Manipulation (T1098)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

False Positive Examples
Platform or ML engineering teams granting Vertex AI access to new users and service accounts. Confirm the grant against change records or the access request process. Infrastructure-as-code pipelines that manage project IAM bindings. Add exceptions for the service accounts that run these pipelines.
License
Elastic License v2(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

Rule Type
Query (Kibana Query Language)
Integration Pack
Prebuilt Security Detection Rules
Index Patterns
logs-gcp.audit-*
Related Integrations

gcp(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Query
text code block:
data_stream.dataset: "gcp.audit"
  and event.action: (
    "SetIamPolicy" or
    google.cloud.resourcemanager.v*.Folders.SetIamPolicy or
    google.cloud.resourcemanager.v*.Organizations.SetIamPolicy or
    google.cloud.resourcemanager.v*.Projects.SetIamPolicy
  )
  and not event.outcome: "failure"
  and gcp.audit.service_data.policy_delta.binding_deltas:{
    action: "ADD" and
    role: (roles/aiplatform.* and not (*ServiceAgent or *serviceAgent))
  }

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect GCP Vertex AI Role Granted to Principal in the Elastic Security detection engine by installing this rule into your Elastic Stack.

To setup this rule, check out the installation guide for Prebuilt Security Detection Rules(external, opens in a new tab or window).