Abstract: A model checking system detects violations and conflicts in security and verification policies by running model checking processes. The system detects privilege escalation attacks in misconfigured identification and access management (“IAM”) policies by modeling security policy documents and IAM actions as logical formulas and then running model checking on the model. The system translates non-Boolean variables, such as string variables, into Boolean variables in order to apply an SAT model checker. The model checker also determines whether a policy violation can be achieved in a finite number of steps by elevating privileges of some compromised principal over multiple iterations of the model checking process, or proves absence thereof.