Least Privilege is a Conversation: Building an Agentic Role Engineering Pipeline
Alex Smolen
fwd:cloudsec North America 2026 · Day 1
In the intricate landscape of cloud security, establishing and maintaining **least privilege** in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) remains a formidable challenge, particularly for human-initiated actions. Alex Smolen, founder of NSEC Labs and former security lead at LaunchDarkly and Clever, tackles this persistent problem head-on in his fwd:cloudsec talk. He introduces a novel approach that leverages the power of **AI agents** to automate and streamline the complex process of **role engineering**, transforming it from a manual, reactive task into a proactive, conversation-driven pipeline.
AI review
Smolen is clearly a practitioner who has lived the IAM pain, and Trail Tool plus the IAM Agent Proxy represent genuinely useful open-source contributions. The talk lands solidly in the technical-practitioner lane — not a research drop, but a working-tools session — and it delivers on that promise without much padding.