Currently, Our Security engineering team is not allowing to write in secrets manager but read is fine.
We have a common lambda role which is being used by other modules as well.
Is there any way to configure writing limited to only particular secrets ?
Alternatives to AWS secrets manager.
Is there any way to configure writing limited to only particular secrets?
Yes. This official documentation shows how to grant read access to only specific secrets. You could do the same thing with write access.
Alternatives to AWS secrets manager.
AWS SSM Parameter Store
Strong recommendation for using Secrets Manager or SSM Parameter Store to store secrets, but there are also other, non-AWS alternatives like Hashicorp's Vault. It can be found from AWS Marketplace (https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-ngzq6n42psnxa) or downloaded from the vendor website (https://www.vaultproject.io/).
Don't forget to ask security team review and approval before using it in production environments. :-)
Related
How in a work environment with different AWS environments say for example develop, staging and production is it best to store the AWS Access Key and Secret Key other than in the appsettings.json files in .Net Core? I know there is Secret Manager but not sure if that is the best way to store these two values. Looking for someone that may have done this specifically for production and how they handled this within their organization. Thanks for any information.
I believe that your application is running outside of AWS and that it needs to make API calls to AWS services, for example SQS. To make those API calls, your application needs AWS credentials.
Here are approaches for authenticating external applications in a machine-to-machine scenario. In your case, your client seems to need to be able to make arbitrary AWS service requests and that means using AWS signature v4 requests, signed using AWS credentials, which are ideally temporary, rotated credentials from STS rather than persistent credentials (such as IAM user credentials).
Typically, you would configure your application with a base set of IAM credentials that allow the application to assume an IAM role. That role itself, rather than the base credentials, would then give your application the permissions it needs to make SQS API calls etc.
The issue you face is how to securely store the base set of credentials. This is a problem that on-premise applications have had since day one, well before the cloud era, and there are various solutions, depending on the technology you're using.
Typically these credentials would be encrypted, not committed to code repos, and populated on the relevant, locked down application servers in some secure fashion. Some potentially useful resources:
Encrypting sections of a configuration file for an ASP.NET application
Use AWS Secrets Manager to store & read passwords in .Net Core apps
Securely store and retrieve sensitive info in .NET Core apps with Azure Key Vault
AWS Secret Manager securely stores your secrets until you retrieve them at runtime. If your going to be running your ASP.NET Core app in AWS, then AWS Secrets Manager is a great option, as it allows you to finely control the permissions associated with the AWS IAM roles running your apps.
Here are some faqs which were given from the AWS for secrets-manager service and which will clear your doubts also.
Here is the article which you can refer to for implementing secure secrets storage for .net core with AWS Secret Manager
So it says on the github documentation here that
AWS Vault is a tool to securely store and access AWS credentials in a
development environment.
AWS Vault stores IAM credentials in your operating system's secure
keystore and then generates temporary credentials from those to expose
to your shell and applications. It's designed to be complementary to
the AWS CLI tools, and is aware of your
But what does this actually mean? As a developer does this mean to create a kind of lock to prevent anyone from using my code without the aws-vault profile? When should I use this technology? I want to know a bit more about it before I use it.
It actually doesn't have anything related to development.
While working with Amazon managed services we can take advantage of IAM roles but that doesn't work when you're doing it from our local environment or from some other Cloud VM like accessing a S3 bucket. It comes handy when you're doing a lot of work with AWS CLI or even writing terraform for your environment. It is just for a precaution so we don't expose or IAM credentials to external world (you will receive an abuse notification from Amazon whenever your keys are compromised). There are many other ways to make sure your keys don't get compromised like before pushing your code to a version control use git-secrets to make sure you don't push any sensitive information.
I am having properties file specific for dev, test and other environments. I have to store this files in some secure place in aws. I am using AWS Native tools for build and deployment. Please let me know how to store these files in aws
There are many ways to deal with a secret in case of AWS, but one thing is clear it depends on the service where you will use and consume these secret.
But you explore these two
The simplest way is to use the Environment variable.
AWS Secrets Manager
s3 ( for keeping files)
One common approach is to pass your secret as an environment variables, but in case of AWS I will recommend to go with AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Secrets Manager is an AWS service that makes it easier for you to
manage secrets. Secrets can be database credentials, passwords,
third-party API keys, and even arbitrary text. You can store and
control access to these secrets centrally by using the Secrets Manager
console, the Secrets Manager command line interface (CLI), or the
Secrets Manager API and SDKs.
Basic Secrets Manager Scenario
The following diagram illustrates the most basic scenario. It shows
how you can store credentials for a database in Secrets Manager, and
then use those credentials in an application that needs to access the
database.
Compliance with Standards
AWS Secrets Manager has undergone auditing for the these standards and can be part of your solution when you need to obtain compliance certification.
You can explore this article to read and write secret.
If you need to maintain files, not only object then you can store in s3 and pull files during deployment. but better to enable server-side encprtion.
But I will prefer secret manager instead of s3 and environment variable.
You can for s3 here and here
Bajjuri,
As Adil said in answer,
AWS Secret Manager -- if you want to store data as key, value pairs.
AWS S3 -- if you want to store files securely.
Adding to his answer, you can use AWS CodeDeploy Environment
Variables to fetch the files according to the your environment.
Let's say you've CodeDeploy deployment group for dev environment with
name "DEV" and deployment group for prod environment with name "PROD",
you can use this variable in bash script and call it in life cycle
hooks of appspec file to fetch the files or secret accordingly.
I've been using this technique in production for long and it works like a charm.
Is there a way to interact with the AWS SSO service using the AWS-SDK?
https://aws.amazon.com/single-sign-on/
I am just looking for programmatic access to AWS SSO - with the AWS CLI or with the SDK or anything really.
Unfortunately there isn't. There is however an open issue on the AWS CLI for this - go there and upvote, that's probably the only way to make this happen.
https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/issues/3447
4/21/2021: Take a look at the AWS SSO documentation. There is now an API to manage permission sets and assigning them to users: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/singlesignon/latest/APIReference/welcome.html
Here's the blog on this feature that supports this API:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/use-new-account-assignment-apis-for-aws-sso-to-automate-multi-account-access/:
"AWS SSO recently added new account assignment APIs and AWS CloudFormation support to automate access assignment across AWS Organizations accounts. This release addressed feedback from our customers with multi-account environments who wanted to adopt AWS SSO, but faced challenges related to managing AWS account permissions. To automate the previously manual process and save your administration time, you can now use the new AWS SSO account assignment APIs, or AWS CloudFormation templates, to programmatically manage AWS account permission sets in multi-account environments.
With AWS SSO account assignment APIs, you can now build your automation that will assign access for your users and groups to AWS accounts. You can also gain insights into who has access to which permission sets in which accounts across your entire AWS Organizations structure."
I would like to share this tool that I did using docker. https://hub.docker.com/r/javiortizmol/aws_sso_magic
The image contains:
aws cli v2.
Python 3.9.
aws-sso-magic
Or just install it from pypi.org https://pypi.org/project/aws-sso-magic/
How to configure the credential to use AWS service from inside the EKS. I can not use AWS SDK for this specific purpose. I have mentioned a role with required permission in the yaml file but it does not seem like it is picking up the role.
ThankYou
Any help is appreciated.
Typically you'd want to apply some level of logic to allow the pods themselves to obtain IAM credentials from STS. AWS does not currently (its re:Invent now so you never know) provide a native-way to do this. The two community solutions we've implemented are:
kube2IAM: https://github.com/jtblin/kube2iam
kIAM: https://github.com/uswitch/kiam
Both work well in production/large environments in my experience. I prefer kIAM's security model, but both get the job done.
Essentially the work the same basic way ... intercepting (for lack of a better word) communications b/t the SDK libraries in the container and STS, matching identity of the pod with an internal role dictionary, and then obtaining STS credentials for that role and handing those creds back to the container. The SDK isn't inherently aware its in a container, its just doing what it does anywhere ... walking its access tree until it sees the need to obtain creds from STS and receiving those.