Security groups and firewall rules opened for temporary testing are routinely forgotten. ExceptionLease introduces revision-bound leases, CAS live drift protection, and automated read-back verification so you can prove to auditors the door was shut.
Simulate an end-to-end exception request: dual-custody approval, heartbeat renewal, expiry revocation, and read-back closure.
Compare-and-Swap (CAS) Drift Guard
Blindly running RevokeSecurityGroupIngress when a lease expires can take down production if someone changed the rule out-of-band.
An engineer expands a temporary single-IP rule (/32) to a broader office subnet (/24) directly in AWS Console. When a dumb cron job revokes it, production traffic breaks without warning.
ExceptionLease computes the SHA-256 fingerprint of the exact rule. Before revocation, it reads live provider state. If the live rule does not match the fingerprint, it halts revocation and flags drifted for human review.
A 200 response from AWS API is not enough. ExceptionLease issues an immediate read-back query to prove the rule is completely absent from the security group before issuing the signed closure certificate.
Billed per AWS Account with Zero Surprises
Lightweight customer runner polls outbound over TLS. No inbound ports required.
Single AWS account setup with Slack integration and policy baseline.
Full lifecycle automation with separate approver & CAS drift guard.
Multi-account AWS Organizations with Okta/SAML SSO.
No. ExceptionLease enforces strict separate approver dual-custody. The owner_id who submitted the request cannot be the approver_id who authorizes rule provisioning, satisfying SOC 2 CC6.1 and CC6.3 controls.
ExceptionLease uses fencing epochs and revision counters. When a lease is renewed, the revision counter increments and a new epoch is generated. Any background worker carrying an obsolete epoch is fenced and rejected, preventing premature revocation.
The runner operates with least-privilege IAM permissions: ec2:AuthorizeSecurityGroupIngress, ec2:RevokeSecurityGroupIngress, and ec2:DescribeSecurityGroups scoped strictly to tagged security groups. No administrator access is needed.