Google Identity and Access Management (IAM) API
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For Agents
Manage Google Cloud IAM deny policies on organisations, folders, and projects to enforce hard boundaries that no allow rule can override.
Use for: Create a deny policy that blocks deletion of production buckets, List deny policies attached to a Google Cloud project, Update a deny policy to add an exception principal, Get the current deny policy on folders/123456
Not supported: Does not manage allow bindings, service-account keys, or workload identity federation — use for IAM v2 deny-policy lifecycle on organisations, folders, and projects only.
The Identity and Access Management (IAM) API v2 manages deny policies that supplement Google Cloud's allow-based IAM bindings. A deny policy is attached to an organisation, folder, or project resource and lists permissions that must not be granted regardless of any allow rule. The v2 API provides CRUD over these deny policies and supports long-running operation tracking for asynchronous policy updates. It is the modern surface for fine-grained, exception-based access control on Google Cloud and is paired with the broader IAM v1 surface for service accounts, allow policies, and roles.
Install Jentic One Beta
Connect the Identity and Access Management (IAM) API to your agent
Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the Identity and Access Management (IAM) API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.
Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.
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Step 1: Jentic One Host machine
# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh2
Step 2: Agent machine
# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jentic/jentic-one/main/tools/install.sh | sh
jentic register # connects your agent to your Jentic One instanceJentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.
Capabilities
What an agent can do with Identity and Access Management (IAM) API.
Create deny policies attached to a Google Cloud organisation, folder, or project resource
List deny policies currently attached to a given Cloud resource
Read a specific deny policy to inspect denied permissions and exception principals
Update a deny policy to refine principals, denied permissions, or exception conditions
Delete a deny policy when its denial scope is no longer needed
Track long-running policy operations to confirm propagation across IAM
Use Cases
Patterns agents use Identity and Access Management (IAM) API for, with concrete tasks.
★ Hard Guardrails on Production Resources
Platform security teams attach IAM deny policies to production folders to guarantee that no allow rule, however accidental, can grant destructive permissions like storage.buckets.delete or compute.instances.delete to the wrong principals. Deny policies are evaluated before allow policies, so a misconfigured project owner role can still be over-ridden by an organisation-level deny policy. Teams manage these policies as code and roll them out via the v2 API.
Attach a new deny policy to folders/prod-folder that denies storage.buckets.delete for all principals except group:platform-admins@example.com, and return the resulting policy name and etag.
Exception-Based Privileged Access
Engineering teams use deny policies with exception principals to express "nobody can do X except this one break-glass group." The deny rule denies impersonation or token creation across the organisation, with an exception list of approved emergency-access principals. This is more auditable than relying on absence of an allow binding because the intent is explicit in the policy document.
Update deny policy operations/p/policies/no-impersonation on organisations/12345 to add user:oncall-admin@example.com to the exceptionPrincipals for the iam.serviceAccounts.implicitDelegation permission.
Compliance Reporting on Deny Policies
GRC teams pull the list of all deny policies attached to a top-level folder or organisation each quarter to evidence that compensating controls remain in place. The list operation returns the policy name, etag, denied permissions, and principal lists for each policy attached to the parent resource.
List all deny policies attached to folders/audit-scope, then for each one read the full policy and emit a CSV with policy name, denied permissions, and principal counts.
AI Agent Policy Drift Detection
An AI agent compares declared deny policies in source control against the live policies on each Google Cloud resource via Jentic. Drift is reported back to the platform team with a suggested update payload. Jentic isolates the IAM admin credential so the agent never holds raw service-account JSON.
For each entry in declared-policies.yaml, call GET /v2/{+name} to fetch the live deny policy and produce a diff highlighting any added or removed principals or denied permissions.
Key Endpoints
5 endpoints — the identity and access management (iam) api v2 manages deny policies that supplement google cloud's allow-based iam bindings.
METHOD
PATH
DESCRIPTION
GET
/v2/{+parent}
List deny policies attached to a parent resource
POST
/v2/{+parent}
Create a deny policy on a parent resource
GET
/v2/{+name}
Get a specific deny policy by name
PUT
/v2/{+name}
Update a deny policy
DELETE
/v2/{+name}
Delete a deny policy
GET
/v2/{+parent}
List deny policies attached to a parent resource
POST
/v2/{+parent}
Create a deny policy on a parent resource
GET
/v2/{+name}
Get a specific deny policy by name
PUT
/v2/{+name}
Update a deny policy
DELETE
/v2/{+name}
Delete a deny policy
Why Jentic?
Three things that make agents converge on Jentic-routed access.
Credential isolation
IAM admin OAuth credentials live encrypted in the Jentic vault. Each call to the IAM v2 API mints a short-lived token scoped to cloud-platform so raw service-account keys never enter the agent runtime.
Intent-based discovery
Agents search 'create iam deny policy' or 'list deny policies on a folder' and Jentic returns the matching v2 operation with its parameter and body schema, so the agent constructs the right URL-encoded parent without reading docs.
Time to first call
Direct integration: 1-2 days for OAuth, URL-encoded resource-name conventions, and long-running-operation polling. Through Jentic: under 1 hour for the same workflow.
Related APIs
Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.
FAQs
Specific to using Identity and Access Management (IAM) API through Jentic.
What authentication does the IAM API use?
Google OAuth 2.0 with the cloud-platform scope and an IAM principal that holds iam.denypolicies.* permissions on the parent resource. Through Jentic the credential is stored encrypted and exchanged for a short-lived access token at call time.
Can I attach an IAM deny policy to a project?
Yes. Call POST /v2/{+parent} where parent is policies/cloudresourcemanager.googleapis.com%2Fprojects%2F{projectNumber}/denypolicies and supply a deny policy body listing denied permissions, principals, and any exception principals.
What are the rate limits for the IAM API?
Google enforces per-project quotas on IAM admin operations (default in the low hundreds of QPS). Deny-policy writes are eventually consistent and are completed via long-running operations, so callers should poll the returned operation until done.
How do I create a deny policy through Jentic?
Search Jentic with 'create iam deny policy', load the POST /v2/{+parent} operation, and execute with the parent set to the policy attachment point and a request body listing deniedPermissions and principals. Jentic handles OAuth and returns the operation name.
How are deny policies different from allow bindings?
Allow bindings (managed in IAM v1 / setIamPolicy) grant permissions; deny policies (this v2 API) explicitly remove permissions even if an allow binding grants them. Deny rules win against allow rules, which makes them suitable for hard guardrails.
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