Elastic Security Detection Rules

AWS IAM Roles Anywhere Trust Anchor Created with External CA

Last updated a month ago on 2025-11-12
Created 2 years ago on 2024-04-20

About

Detects the creation of an AWS IAM Roles Anywhere Trust Anchor that uses an external certificate authority (CA) rather than an AWS-managed Certificate Manager Private CA (ACM PCA). While Roles Anywhere enables secure, short-term credential issuance for workloads outside AWS, adversaries can exploit this feature by registering their own external CA as a trusted root. This allows them to generate valid client certificates that persistently authenticate to AWS roles from any location, even after key rotation or credential revocation events. This rule helps detect persistence or unauthorized federation attempts by flagging trust anchors configured with non-AWS CAs.
Tags
Domain: CloudData Source: AWSData Source: Amazon Web ServicesData Source: AWS IAMUse Case: Identity and Access AuditTactic: PersistenceLanguage: eql
Severity
medium
Risk Score
47
MITRE ATT&CK™

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

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

False Positive Examples
AWS IAM Roles Anywhere Trust Anchors are legitimate profiles that can be created by administrators to allow access from any location. Ensure that the trust anchor is created by a legitimate administrator and that the external certificate authority is authorized.
License
Elastic License v2(opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

Rule Type
Event Correlation Rule
Integration Pack
Prebuilt Security Detection Rules
Index Patterns
filebeat-*logs-aws.cloudtrail-*
Related Integrations

aws(opens in a new tab or window)

Query
info where event.dataset == "aws.cloudtrail"
  and event.provider == "rolesanywhere.amazonaws.com"
  and event.action == "CreateTrustAnchor"
  and event.outcome == "success"
  and not stringContains(aws.cloudtrail.request_parameters, "sourceType=AWS_ACM_PCA")

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect AWS IAM Roles Anywhere Trust Anchor Created with External CA 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(opens in a new tab or window).