Keywords
bastion host security
cloud vulnerability risk quantification
policy-driven risk scoring
administrator session audit
cloud data security
access governance
Abstract
Privileged access sessions are widely used in cloud infrastructure for system administration, database maintenance, incident response, and production troubleshooting. However, vulnerable bastion hosts, weak session controls, excessive administrator privileges, and incomplete command auditing may create serious data-security risks. This study proposes a policy-driven risk quantification framework for vulnerable privileged access sessions in large-scale cloud environments. The framework combines session privilege level, target asset sensitivity, bastion-host vulnerability status, command-audit completeness, session duration, just-in-time access compliance, and policy violation records into a unified risk score. Policy constraints are derived from privileged access management requirements, session recording rules, administrator separation policies, database access controls, and emergency-access approval standards. Experiments are conducted on a cloud operation environment containing 620 bastion hosts, 18,400 administrator identities, 76,000 privileged session records, 9,300 production assets, 2,870 sensitive databases, and 13,600 vulnerability findings from bastion systems, remote access agents, and management interfaces. The proposed framework identifies 1,360 high-risk privileged-access chains, including vulnerable bastion hosts connected to sensitive databases, long-lived emergency sessions, administrators with cross-environment privileges, and sessions lacking complete command logs. It consolidates 13,600 vulnerability findings into 1,890 privileged-access remediation cases. The median risk-scoring time is 33 ms per session, and the full privileged-access assessment completes in 9.7 minutes. After one remediation batch, high-risk database administration paths decrease from 486 to 173, while incomplete session-audit cases drop by 2,140 records. Risk-score drift remains below 0.16 points on a ten-point scale across four access-policy snapshots. The results show that policy-driven risk quantification can help prioritize privileged-access vulnerabilities that directly affect cloud data confidentiality and operational accountability.
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