Pavora: A New Approach to AWS Cloud Security Auditing

What Pavora Actually Does?

At its core, Pavora is an AWS security scanner that audits your infrastructure for misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance gaps. But the scanner is just the starting point.

Attack Path Visualization:

Most tools give you a flat list of findings. Pavora shows you how they connect.

Take a real example: an S3 bucket with encryption disabled, sitting behind a CloudFront distribution with no origin access identity. Individually, each is a routine finding. Together, they form a data exfiltration path — an attacker can enumerate and pull your data through an unprotected edge.

Pavora’s attack path engine models these chains automatically. The platform includes analyzers for:

• S3 → CloudFront — Public data exposure through CDN origins
• IAM → EC2 → S3 — Privilege escalation via instance profiles
• KMS → CloudWatch — Key rotation gaps and public key policies
• Lambda → SQS — Missing dead letter queues, message loss risk
• RDS → EC2 — Publicly accessible databases with exposed security groups
• EC2 → S3 Exfiltration — VPC endpoints, public IPs, unencrypted transfers

The IAM analysis goes deeper — the engine checks policies against 26 documented privilege escalation paths, drawn from research by Rhino Security Labs, Bishop Fox, and the AWS security community. It doesn’t just list over-permissioned roles; it maps the specific steps an attacker would take to escalate from a given policy to administrative access.

Compliance Mapping:

Every finding is mapped to the compliance frameworks that matter to your organization. The platform tracks pass/fail status per control across:

• SOC 2 — Full trust services criteria mapping
• HIPAA — Administrative, physical, and technical safeguards
• PCI DSS — All 12 requirements with sub-controls
• ISO 27001 — Annex A controls
• NIST SP 800–53 — Control family coverage
• CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark
• GDPR — Article-level data protection mappings
• FedRAMP — Moderate and High baselines

For each control, you see which findings caused a failure, when it was detected, and whether it’s been resolved. You can export a PDF report per framework — the kind you can hand directly to an auditor.

Remediation Playbooks:

Every finding category includes step-by-step remediation guidance: the Terraform resource to add, the CLI commands to run, and links to the relevant AWS documentation. You can copy and paste directly into your infrastructure-as-code. The playbook library covers common scenarios across compute, storage, networking, identity, and serverless services — things like encrypting an S3 bucket, tightening a security group, enabling CloudTrail logging, or rotating KMS keys.

There’s also an AI assistant built into the dashboard that can generate remediation scripts for your specific architecture. Describe your setup, and it produces Terraform, CloudFormation, or CLI fix snippets with the correct resource names and configurations.

Delta Scanning:

Re-scanning your entire infrastructure every time is wasteful. Pavora tracks resource state across scans and only re-checks what actually changed. If you modified three security groups and nothing else, the next scan checks those three — and completes significantly faster than a full scan.

Prowler Migration:

If you’re currently using Prowler for AWS security scanning, Pavora includes a migration tool. Upload your Prowler config.yaml and the platform maps your existing checks to Pavora's service coverage, generates equivalent CLI arguments, and shows you what's covered.

Read-Only Architecture:

Pavora uses a cross-account IAM role with read-only access to your AWS environment. It can audit your infrastructure, but it cannot modify anything. No write permissions. No infrastructure changes. The role is deployed via a CloudFormation template that you control. Scan results are scoped to your organization. Credentials are used for the scan session and not persisted beyond it.

What’s in the Dashboard: Beyond the scanning engine, the platform includes the operational tooling teams actually need:

• Role-based access — Admin, Engineer, and Viewer roles with scoped permissions
• Multi-account support — Manage scans across multiple AWS accounts
• Team management — Invite team members, compliance officers, or external auditors
• Notifications — Slack webhooks and email alerts configurable per severity
• Scheduled scans — Daily, weekly, monthly, or custom cadences
• API and agent access — Connect tools like Claude or Cursor via MCP for AI-assisted security workflows
• Two-factor authentication — TOTP-based MFA for account security
• Google SSO — Sign in with your Google account

Where Pavora Fits?

Pavora is designed for teams who are serious about AWS security but don’t want to stitch together five different tools to get a complete picture.

If you’re a cloud security engineer who needs to audit infrastructure across multiple regions and accounts, the scanner and attack path engine give you depth that basic scanners miss.

If you’re on a platform or DevOps team, the delta scanning and scheduled scans let you shift security left — run a scan after every infrastructure change, not just before the quarterly audit.

If you handle compliance and audit prep, the framework mapping and PDF export turn a multi-week evidence-gathering exercise into a button click.

If you’re a consultant or MSSP managing multiple client environments, multi-account orchestration lets you operate from a single dashboard.

The Bottom Line: Pavora is an actively developed, commercially available AWS security platform. It covers 204+ AWS services, performs cross-service attack path analysis, maps findings to eight compliance frameworks, and provides copy-paste remediation guidance — all through a single dashboard with team collaboration features.

The code is real, the scanner works, and the platform is available at pavoracloud.

If you want to see what it finds in your environment, start a scan. The read-only role takes about five minutes to deploy.