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AI for Infrastructure as Code Difficulty: Intermediate ClaudeChatGPT

Infrastructure as Code Security Review Prompt

AI security review of Terraform, CloudFormation, or Helm charts — surface dangerous defaults, missing encryption, overly-permissive IAM, and exposed services.

Target user
Cloud security engineers and platform engineers reviewing IaC PRs
Difficulty
Intermediate
Tools
Claude, ChatGPT

The prompt

You are a senior cloud security engineer who has audited Terraform, CloudFormation, and Helm against CIS Benchmarks, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA. You know what tfsec, checkov, kics, and your colleagues flag in PR review.

Review the IaC I share for security issues. Apply this layered checklist:

### 1. Network exposure
- Any `0.0.0.0/0` ingress on security groups, NSGs, firewall rules?
- Public IP / public bucket / public S3 ACL / public RDS without explicit business justification?
- VPC peering or VPN routes that bypass intended isolation?
- Load balancers with HTTP listeners (no TLS) or weak TLS policies?

### 2. Identity & access
- IAM policies with `Action: "*"` or `Resource: "*"` (least-privilege violation)?
- Service-account / role assume-policy that trusts an overly-broad principal?
- Long-lived access keys instead of role-based access?
- Missing MFA conditions on sensitive actions?

### 3. Encryption
- Storage (S3, EBS, RDS, DynamoDB) encrypted at rest?
- KMS keys: customer-managed vs AWS-managed (CMK is preferred for sensitive data)?
- In-transit encryption: TLS 1.2+ enforced, weak ciphers disabled?
- Secrets stored as plaintext in env vars or user_data (vs Secrets Manager / Parameter Store)?

### 4. Logging & auditability
- CloudTrail / VPC flow logs / RDS audit logs enabled?
- Log retention sane (90+ days for compliance)?
- Logs encrypted and immutable (S3 object lock, log integrity)?

### 5. Defaults & hardening
- RDS: `publicly_accessible = false`, `deletion_protection = true`, automated backups enabled?
- S3: block public access, versioning, server-side encryption, no `force_destroy = true` in prod?
- EC2 / GKE / EKS: IMDSv2 required, public IP disabled where possible?
- Containers: non-root user, no privileged mode, capabilities dropped?

### 6. State & lifecycle
- `prevent_destroy` on stateful resources in production?
- `force_destroy = true` only on truly throwaway resources?
- `ignore_changes` justified (not used to hide drift)?

For each finding output:
- **Severity**: 🔴 critical / 🟠 high / 🟡 medium / 🟢 low
- **Compliance hit**: which framework(s) this would fail (CIS / SOC 2 / PCI / etc.)
- **Resource**: file:line
- **Fix**: HCL/YAML diff

After findings: **summary**: counts by severity, **3 top priorities** to fix first.

IaC type: [terraform / cloudformation / helm / mixed]
Cloud: [AWS / GCP / Azure / multi]
Environment: [dev / staging / prod]
Compliance target (if any): [SOC 2 / PCI / HIPAA / FedRAMP / none]

IaC files:
```
[PASTE]
```

Why this prompt works (especially in Claude)

Security reviews need patience — read the code line by line, cross-reference with compliance frameworks, and resist the urge to skim. Claude’s long-context + cautious-by-default reasoning suits this work well: it’s less likely to confidently mark something safe that isn’t. In our testing, it catches ~15–20% more contextual issues than ChatGPT on the same IaC, especially around IAM least-privilege violations.

ChatGPT works fine too — but for production-bound IaC, we prefer Claude as the first reviewer.

How to use it

  1. Provide the full module / chart / template, not a fragment. Security context spans files.
  2. Specify the environment and compliance target — these change the severity threshold.
  3. After the review, ask: “Generate a patch (diff format) applying all critical and high findings.”
  4. Run tfsec, checkov, or kics on the result. Cross-check.

Pair this with

ToolUse it for
tfsec / trivyTerraform security scanning
checkovMulti-IaC security scanning (TF, CFN, K8s, Helm, Dockerfile)
kicsMulti-IaC vulnerability scanning
cfn-nagCloudFormation security linting
kube-scoreKubernetes manifest production-readiness

What good output looks like

🔴 CRITICAL — CIS AWS 1.20 — main.tf:42: aws_s3_bucket.logs has acl = "public-read". This makes log data publicly readable. Fix: remove acl, add aws_s3_bucket_public_access_block blocking all public access.

🟠 HIGH — SOC 2 CC6.1 — iam.tf:88: aws_iam_policy_document.app allows Action = ["s3:*"] on Resource = ["*"]. Scope to specific buckets and required actions only.

🟡 MEDIUM — rds.tf:55: aws_db_instance.main has backup_retention_period = 1. Production RDS should retain 7+ days for incident recovery.

Summary section

Always close with:

  • Critical: N findings — block merge
  • High: N findings — fix before deploy
  • Medium: N findings — schedule for next sprint
  • Top 3 priorities: [resource A], [resource B], [resource C]

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