The Terraform Security Audit Checklist 2026

Ensuring your cloud is secure starts with a comprehensive **terraform security audit checklist**. Most breaches are preventable misconfigurations that haunt your `.tf` files for months before exploitation.

The Top 10 Audit Points

1. S3 Public Access: Are buckets truly private by default?
2. Open Ingress: No Port 22/3389 open to `0.0.0.0/0`.
3. Encryption: Are S3, EBS, and RDS encrypted with KMS?
4. IAM Prinicples: Never use wildcards `*` in policy statements.
5. State Security: Remote state stored in a locked versioned bucket.
6. MFA Access: Required for delicate infrastructure changes.
7. Secret Management: No hardcoded keys in `provider.tf`.
8. VPC Isolation: Private subnets are utilized with NAT gateways.
9. Logging: CloudTrail and VPC Flow Logs are enabled.
10. Drift Detection: Periodic audits for "untracked" changes.

Don't audit manually.

Modern DevOps engineers use TFGaurd to automatically scan for all 10 points (and 1200 more) in under 60 seconds.