AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the service that defines access to AWS resources. One of the core components of IAM is the policy which, when attached to an identity or a resource, defines its permissions. Policies granting permission to an identity (a user, a group or a role) are called identity-based policies. They add the ability to an identity to perform a predefined set of actions on a list of resources.

For such policies, it is easy to define very broad permissions (by using wildcard `"*"` permissions for example.) This is especially true if it is not yet clear which permissions will be required for a specific workload or use case. However, it is important to limit the amount of permissions that are granted and the amount of resources to which these permissions are granted. Doing so ensures that there are no users or roles that have more permissions than they need.

If this is not done, it can potentially carry security risks in the case that an attacker gets access to one of these identities.
