Methods for mitigating unauthorized access threats in automated infrastructure deployment using Ansible and Terraform

Abstract

The Infrastructure-as-Code paradigm shifts into the realm of code artifacts what previously existed as a heterogeneous set of manual administrator operations. Along with obvious gains in reproducibility and deployment speed, a new class of risks emerges: unauthorized access becomes possible through declarative configurations, environment variables, Terraform state files, Ansible Vault variables, and orchestrator secrets. The existing literature is fragmented – Kubernetes cluster protection, DevSecOps practices, and secret management are discussed separately; a holistic threat model for the Ansible + Terraform stack has not been formally established. The aim of the work is to systematize unauthorized access threats specific to automated deployment using these two tools and to propose a set of countermeasures verifiable on a testbed. Content analysis of 2022-2025 incidents, comparison of configuration patterns, and a matrix-based threat assessment by detectability, exploitability, and criticality were applied. Four classes of threats were identified; for each, a set of technical and organizational-process measures is proposed; coverage completeness rises from 0.42 to 0.89 when moving from a baseline configuration to a hardened one. The results are applicable in the design of CI/CD pipelines using Ansible and Terraform, as well as in the development of corporate standards for secure infrastructure code development.