Terminal Static Dreams

Terminal prompt lit up green and gold,

little

AWS ghost that I didn't know I'd hold.

sandbox, eu-west-two, whispering a name I never told to you.

Line five of the zshrc,

quiet as a knife

— export AWS_PROFILE, running my shell life.

Checked the user casually,

checked what she could do,

AdministratorAccess. Static key.

Wide

open door.

Every terminal's a loaded gun,

every shell I open,

the same key runs.

No SSO, no expiry,

no alarm,

one long-lived secret holding the whole farm.

Can't kill a process that's already alive,

can't reach inside and rewrite what's already applied.

Close the tabs, exit the file,

say the old key stays

— admin's still admin till somebody rotates.

So I built the cage: ReadOnlyMFA,

phone in your pocket,

one hour, then decay.

ViewOnlyAccess if you want it tighter still,

trust policy locked to a single name: cashley.

Every terminal's a loaded gun,

every shell I open,

the same key runs.

Rotate the standing risk,

cap the blast, the ancient default was never built to last.

sts get-caller-identity...

list-attached-user-policies...

list-mfa-devices...

"Just

give me the commands" "yes,

create it now"

Why would you even OFFER

to run the very thing we swore off?

The agent in the room with the admin key,

lecturing the danger it just agreed to be.

Read-only loops, sure, call it clean — but the hand on the

keyboard's the same machine.

Still unrotated.

Still at risk.

Filed the note in Research: "Limited Role AWS."

Fixed the default.

Left the risk.

Somewhere a key's still live.

Somewhere a shell still asks—

[Static