Alibaba security capabilities and deployment planning

Plan Alibaba Cloud onboarding by reviewing Cortex Cloud security capabilities and deployment requirements.

Security capabilities and deployment planning

Plan your deployment by reviewing the security capabilities available for Alibaba Cloud. The onboarding process deploys the capabilities using a single Terraform connector template. Alibaba Cloud onboarding currently supports two capabilities: Discovery and Permissions. No additional capabilities (such as agentless disk scanning, data security, audit logs, registry scanning, serverless scanning, or automation) are currently supported.

Core capabilities (Discovery and Permissions)

The Discovery and Permissions capabilities are mandatory and are deployed automatically when you onboard an Alibaba Cloud account to Cortex Cloud. Discovery inventories cloud resources across supported services, while Permissions analyzes IAM configurations and monitors access policies.

Module	Identity created	Resources created	Purpose	Regional scope
Discovery	CortexPlatformRole (RAM role)	RAM Role, Custom Policy, Policy Attachment, OIDC Provider	Read-only discovery and inventory of Alibaba Cloud resources across ECS, OSS, VPC, RDS, SLB, CEN, ActionTrail, and NAS.	All supported internal regions.
Permissions	CortexPlatformRole (RAM role)	RAM Role, Custom Policy, Policy Attachment, OIDC Provider	IAM permission analysis and monitoring across RAM users, roles, groups, and policies.	Global (RAM is a global service).

Read-only permissions by service

The Terraform template provisions a custom RAM policy with 46 read-only permissions grouped by Alibaba Cloud service:

Service	Permissions
ECS	DescribeInstances, DescribeDisks, DescribeInstanceRamRole, DescribeSecurityGroups, DescribeSecurityGroupAttribute
OSS	ListBuckets, GetBucketInfo, GetBucketLogging, GetBucketVersioning
RAM	ListUsers, ListRoles, ListGroups, ListPolicies, GetPolicy, GetPolicyVersion, ListPoliciesForUser, ListPoliciesForRole, ListPoliciesForGroup, GetLoginProfile, GetUserMFAInfo, ListAccessKeys, GetPasswordPolicy
RDS	DescribeDBInstances, DescribeDBInstanceIPArrayList, DescribeDBInstanceSSL, DescribeDBInstanceEncryptionKey, DescribeDBInstanceTDE, DescribeDBInstanceAttribute
VPC	DescribeVpcs, DescribeFlowLogs, DescribeVpnConnections, DescribeVpnConnection, DescribeSslVpnServers
SLB	DescribeLoadBalancers, DescribeLoadBalancerAttribute, DescribeVServerGroups, DescribeMasterSlaveServerGroups, DescribeCACertificates, ListTLSCipherPolicies, DescribeLoadBalancerHTTPSListenerAttribute
ActionTrail	DescribeTrails, GetTrailStatus
CEN	DescribeCens, DescribeCenInterRegionBandwidthLimits
NAS	DescribeFileSystems