Managing identity and access in large Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) environments can be complex. As organizations scale, so does the number of compartments, groups, dynamic groups, and policy statements. Assessing who can do what—across thousands of permissions—can quickly become challenging, especially for administrators tasked with strengthening security and reducing risk.
To address these challenges, the OCI Policy Analysis Tool has emerged as an essential utility for OCI administrators and security practitioners. Designed to help visualize, interpret, and analyze OCI Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, this tool provides clarity and insight into effective permissions across your cloud tenancy.
What Is the OCI Policy Analysis Tool?
The OCI Policy Analysis Tool is an unofficial, open-source application targeted at users who need a deeper understanding of their OCI IAM posture. It goes beyond simple policy listing by loading all relevant identity and policy data and organizing it into a cohesive, searchable format. This empowers administrators to answer questions such as:
Which principals have excessive privileges in sensitive compartments?
Why is a particular service unable to perform an expected action?
How have policies changed over time?
Built entirely with Python and leveraging the OCI Python SDK, the tool demonstrates how custom scripts and utilities can be authored to fill functional gaps and make cloud security operations more manageable.
Key Capabilities and Features
Once loaded with the necessary data from your tenancy or a compliance extract, the OCI Policy Analysis Tool provides several analytical and visibility features:
Policy Browser: Explore and search policy statements across all compartments.
Policy Analysis: Filter and inspect parsed IAM policies, including subjects, actions, resources, and conditions.
Dynamic Group Insights: Review dynamic group matching rules to identify misconfigurations or unused groups.
User & Resource Principal Analysis: Determine effective permissions for users and resources based on group memberships.
Cross-Tenancy View: Analyze global policy statements such as
Define,Admit, andEndorse.Historical Comparison: Compare policy sets at different points in time to detect changes or anomalies.
These features are accessible through an intuitive, tabbed interface that helps administrators quickly locate information and understand complex relationships within IAM configurations.
Additional Utility Functions
Beyond policy inspection, the tool offers usability enhancements that improve flexibility and extend analysis capabilities:
Caching: Load and save OCI policy and identity data locally for offline analysis.
Export / Import: Export analysis results to CSV or JSON for reporting or auditing.
Compliance Script Integration: Import data from standard compliance scripts to enrich policy insights.
AI-Assisted Insights: Receive natural-language explanations and risk annotations for policy statements.
Contextual Help: Each view provides embedded help to explain the relevance of data fields or features.
Advanced Analysis & Simulation
For deeper investigations, the tool also incorporates powerful extensions:
API Simulation: Test hypothetical API calls as specific principals to determine allowed or denied actions.
Policy Recommendations: Generate suggested remediation steps based on detected misconfigurations or over-privileged access patterns.
MCP Server Integration: Expose your OCI tenancy data to tools such as VS Code or generative AI systems for interactive analysis.
Getting Started
There are two main ways to run the OCI Policy Analysis Tool:
Direct Python Execution:
Ensure Python 3.12 or newer is installed.
Create and activate a virtual environment.
Install the tool dependencies and run the UI program through Python.
Load your OCI configuration or authenticate using an instance principal.
Packaged Executable:
Download the binaries from the project’s GitHub releases.
Launch the platform-specific executable and follow on-screen prompts.
Once started, you can import tenancy data and begin exploring policies, dynamic groups, and user permissions from a consolidated view.
Conclusion
In complex OCI deployments, maintaining an accurate understanding of IAM policies and the effective permissions they grant is essential for security and compliance. The OCI Policy Analysis Tool provides administrators with a comprehensive way to visualize, analyze and assess policy configurations across an entire tenancy. Whether it’s identifying over-privileged users or tracking changes over time, this tool transforms raw policy data into actionable insights.
Part 1 of this series focuses on the tool and how to get started; an upcoming Part 2 will explore the development journey and strategy behind the tool’s creation.
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