CONCEPT Cited by 1 source
Permission creep¶
Permission creep (also: privilege accumulation, access bloat) is the gradual accumulation of access rights beyond what a principal actually needs. It occurs when permissions are granted for specific tasks but never revoked once the task is complete, or when broad grants are issued to avoid the friction of fine-grained authorization management.
Causes at scale¶
- Organizational fluidity — people change teams but retain old grants; new grants are added without revoking stale ones.
- Operational expediency — teams open access broadly ("give the whole org read") rather than maintain fine-grained ACLs per asset.
- Identity fragmentation — when workloads are tied to human identities, ownership transfers copy permissions forward without cleanup.
Netflix's approach to mitigation¶
Netflix is investing in an authorization-policy layer that automatically rightsizes permissions based on actual usage patterns — proactively eliminating unnecessary access and preventing permission creep before it accumulates (Source: sources/2026-06-19-netflix-data-projects-managing-data-assets-at-netflix-scale).
This is complemented by concepts/project-level-access-control, which reduces the surface area for creep by managing permissions at project granularity rather than per-asset.