Pretty simple question but I can't find any online resources to clarify if it is possible to do this. I want to transfer data from WinSCP to an S3 bucket in an Amazon environment but instead of creating an IAM user with an IAM policy I want to utilize SSH.
The reasoning behind using this method is to bypass the new AWS requirement that requires IAM credentials to be rotated every 90 days. Any insight would be much appreciated.
It can't be done. AWS S3 doesn't speak SSH. Its requests must be signed by the AWS Signature process, which uses IAM key, secret, and session token.
If your s3 action is running on an EC2 instance, you can use an instance profile to provide short term access credentials for your application. Same for ecs including fargate and lambda.
If you're running the script as a human user, you can use aws sso or IAM federation to move from long lived access keys to short lived credentials.
Or, you could use something like code pipeline to automatically operate on your behalf based on changes coming from version control like Github, which would remove your need for AWS access credentials, instead delegating that access to code pipeline or something in AWS. Hard to say much about that option without knowing more about your use case.
Otherwise, you're stuck handling the credentials. And in my humble opinion, you should consider that 90 day rotation an acceptable cost for the security it provides.
The reasoning behind using this method is to bypass the new AWS requirement that requires IAM credentials to be rotated every 90 days
This sounds like a requirement your account imposes itself - and a good one. I'm not aware of any such requirement being imposed by AWS. Can you provide a source for your assertion?
Related
I'm trying to set up AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On) for my organisation, and my team has a strong preference for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) wherever practical.
While exploring solutions, I was able to set up an Instance with several Users, Groups and Permission Sets using the Management Console UI. However, now I have come to set up something more long-term, I can't find any way to create an Instance via either CloudFormation or the AWS CLI.
When looking for documentation, I found the CloudFormation reference for AWS SSO, as well as the AWS CLI reference for the sso-admin subcommand. Neither mention any operations that create instances. Neither does the AWS SSO API reference, which leads me to think programmatic access may not be possible.
Is it possible to create an Instance through code rather than the Management Console?
If it is possible, what have I missed?
My requirement is to access some AWS APIs from a mobile application(Written in flutter). Currently how I have done it is by creating an IAM user with only the permissions required and using the access credentials of that user I sign my APIs.
What I am looking to do is instead of storing these credentials with in my app. Is there a way to use some sort of sign in mechanism to obtain some credentials and use those for signing my APIs?
Update 1:
To add more context. This is purely a hobby project and mostly for personal use. And for my use case storing credentials with in application is more than enough. Anyway I have intention to publish it as an open source project and I want to add a better way to handle this. Currently am not storing any credential in my code but am adding it as a an ENV during build process.
I think I would be able to handle this if I create my own backend to generate temporary credentials. But if there is some other standard solution out there I would like to utilize that.
Storing credentials in an application is an antipattern, and AWS provides features that prevent the need for you to do so.
Two alternatives off the top of my head.
The most obvious of these is AWS IAM Instance Profiles. These permit you to bind IAM permissions to an EC2. Any application or service on this ec2 is then permitted to perform the actions permitted by the IAM profile bound to the Instance Profile.
If you are running your application in EKS, you can leverage IRSA to bind IAM permissions to a service-account in the EKS cluster.
I assume you're running your service on EC2, and that therefore the InstanceProfile approach is easiest.
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.
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.
Can AWS IAM be used to control access for custom applications? I heavily rely on IAM for controlling access to AWS resources. I have a custom Python app that I would like to extend to work with IAM, but I can't find any references to this being done by anyone.
I've considered the same thing, and I think it's theoretically possible. The main issue is that there's no call available in IAM that determines if a particular call is allowed (SimulateCustomPolicy may work, but that doesn't seem to be its purpose so I'm not sure it would have the throughput to handle high volumes).
As a result, you'd have to write your own IAM policy evaluator for those custom calls. I don't think that's inherently a bad thing, since it's also something you'd have to build for any other policy-based system. And the IAM policy format seems reasonable enough to be used.
I guess the short answer is, yes, it's possible, with some work. And if you do it, please open source the code so the rest of us can use it.
The only way you can manage users, create roles and groups is if you have admin access. Power users can do everything but that.
You can create a group with all the privileges you want to grant and create a user with policies attached from the group created. Create a user strictly with only programmatic access, so the app can connect with access key ID and secure key from AWS CLI.
Normally, IAM can be used to create and manage AWS users and groups, and permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources.
If your Python app is somehow consuming or interfacing to any AWS resource as S3, then probably you might want to look into this.
connect-on-premise-python-application-with-aws
The Python application can be upload to an S3 bucket. The application is running on a server inside the on-premise data center of a company. The focus of this tutorial is on the connection made to AWS.
Consider placing API Gateway in front of your Python app's routes.
Then you could control access using IAM.