Least privilege, privileged access, approval flows and toxic combinations.
3 questions in Regulation & Compliance.
Least privilege is a lifecycle problem rather than a grant: narrow entitlements, time-bound elevation instead of standing admin rights, and reviews that can revoke. Separation of duties exists to stop toxic combinations, where two individually reasonable permissions let one person both act and conceal it.
Entitlements change through deployment paths that no access review inspects, so the only reliable detection is a snapshot of effective permissions diffed on every release, with the diff cleared by someone who did not ship it.
Removing humans from production moves the privilege into the pipeline, so the boundary becomes who can change what it runs and which identity it assumes. Duties are separated by branch protection, environment approvals and deploying by digest, and it fails when one change alters both code and workflow.