A cloud engineering team is assessing ingress and egress traffic from a development IaaS public environment. The company security policy states that no public IPs are allowed from development hosts…

While traffic flow logs can show if public traffic has occurred, they are reactive and will not identify hosts with public IPs that have not yet generated traffic or determine potential accessibility based on configuration.

A penetration test aims to exploit vulnerabilities and is an overly aggressive and broad approach for simply verifying if development hosts have public IP addresses or are publicly accessible against a defined policy.

A vulnerability scan identifies known software and configuration weaknesses but is not specifically designed to directly audit whether hosts are provisioned with public IP addresses in violation of a network policy.

Exporting and analyzing debug logs, which can include configuration details about network interfaces, assigned IP addresses, and network security group rules, is the most direct method to determine which hosts are configured with public IPs or are otherwise publicly accessible, thereby violating the company's security policy. This allows for a proactive check of the configured state against the policy.