Identity Drift in Growing Cloud Teams: A Structural Risk Model

Identity drift is a structural security risk that emerges as cloud-native organizations scale identities, permissions, and federated access across hybrid and multicloud environments. As workforce and workload identities proliferate, effective permissions frequently diverge from intended access due to lifecycle latency, over-granting, token persistence, and fragmented governance across identity providers and cloud platforms. This divergence increases the blast radius associated with compromised credentials and access tokens. This working paper introduces the Structural Risk Model for Identity Drift (SRM-ID), a formal framework for representing and quantifying authorization divergence in operational cloud systems. The model defines an identity–entitlement graph, formalizes excess authorization as measurable drift, and proposes a weighted drift index derived from effective versus intended permissions. Drift conditions are mapped to threat scenarios aligned with established adversary techniques involving valid account abuse and token theft. A parameterized synthetic simulation evaluates drift accumulation under workforce growth, workload identity expansion, and imperfect deprovisioning, and analyzes the sensitivity of risk outcomes to governance cadence and continuous remediation controls. SRM-ID is designed to operationalize drift measurement, prioritize remediation, and align identity governance with continuous authorization principles in Zero Trust architectures. The manuscript is released as a working paper and has not yet undergone peer review.