I am using a shared AWS account (Everyone in the account has root access) to deploy servers on an EC2 instance that I created. Is there a way to prevent anyone else that have access to the same AWS account to access the content that I put on the EC2 instance?
As far as I know, creating a separate key pair won't work because someone else can snapshot the instance and launch it with another key pair that they own.
I am using a shared AWS account (Everyone in the account has root
access) to deploy servers on an EC2 instance that I created. Is there
a way to prevent anyone else that have access to the same AWS account
to access the content that I put on the EC2 instance?
No, you cannot achieve your objective.
When it comes to access security, you either have 100% security or none. If other users have root access, you cannot prevent them from doing what they want to your instance. They can delete, modify, clone, and access. There are methods to make this more difficult, but anyone with solid experience will bypass these methods.
My recommendation is to create a separate account. This is not always possible, as in your case, but is a standard best practice (separation of access/responsibility). This would isolate your instance from others.
There are third-party tools that support the encryption of data. You will not be able to store the keys/passphrase on the instance. You will need to enter the keys/passphrase each time you encrypt/decrypt your data.
As far as I know, creating a separate key pair won't work because
someone else can snapshot the instance and launch it with another key
pair that they own.
With root access, there are many ways to access the data stored on your instance's disk. Clone the disk and just mount it on another instance is one example.
By default, IAM Users do not have access to any AWS services. They can't launch any Amazon EC2 instances, access Amazon S3 data or snapshot an instance.
However, for them to do their work, it is necessary to assign permissions to IAM Users. It is generally recommended not to grant Admin access to everyone. Rather, people should be assigned sufficient permissions to do their assigned job.
Some companies separate Dev/Test/Prod resources, giving lots of people permission in Dev environments, but locking-down access to Production. This is done to ensure continuity, recoverability and privacy.
Your requirement is to prevent people from accessing information on a specific Amazon EC2 instance. This can be done by using a keypair that only you know. Thus, nobody can login to the instance.
However, as you point out, there can be ways around this such as copying the disk (EBS Snapshot) and mounting it on another computer, thereby gaining access to the data. This is analogous to security in a traditional data center — if somebody has physical access to a computer, they can extract the disk, attach it to another computer and access the data. This is why traditional data centers have significant physical security to prevent unauthorized access. The AWS equivalent to this physical security are IAM permissions that grant specific users permission to perform certain actions (such as creating a disk snapshot).
If there are people who have Admin/root access on the AWS account, then they can do whatever they wish. This is by design. If you do not wish people to have such access, then do not assign them these permissions.
Sometimes companies face a trade-off: They want Admins to be able to do anything necessary to provide IT services, but they also want to protect sensitive data. An example of this is an HR system that contains sensitive information that they don't want accessible to general staff. A typical way this is handled is to put the HR system in a separate AWS Account that does not provide general access to IT staff, and probably has additional safeguards such as MFA and additional audit logging.
Bottom line: If people have physical access or Admin-like permissions, they can do whatever they like. You should either restrict the granting of permissions, or use a separate AWS Account.
Related
When cleaning up the old/unused resources, at times we may get into trouble deleting the used/current AMIs.
Have to prevent the accidental delete/deregister of the AMIs.
I was thinking to add a tag to the AMI which should never be deleted if that tags exist.
In a similar fashion to instance termination protection,
I would like the ability to have CERTAIN AMI's have a double failsafe mechanism to avoid accidental deletion.
Please suggest a way for the same.
Update: DeregisterImage() now does have Condition Keys, so this answer is out-of-date.
Based on Actions, Resources, and Condition Keys for Amazon EC2 - AWS Identity and Access Management, it appears that DeregisterImage() does not have any Condition Keys.
Therefore, it looks like it would not be possible to restrict this command only to certain AMIs or tags.
Some options:
Restrict this permission only to certain trusted users, or
Put the AMI in a separate AWS account where users can access it (via sharing), but have no permission to delete it
I have several EC2 instances in my AWS amazon account. I have one specific EC2 instance that I want an outsourcer to use (stop,start, manage security group, resize disk space, etc).
I tried to do it with IAM policies, but from what I see, the DescribeInstances allows the user to see all instances in my account. And when I try to edit the policy for a specific resource it shows error because it DescribeInstances is not a resource-level policy, so it must have Resource '*'.
I was thinking maybe allow him access to a different region, and put the instance there. Another option is using organizations (a little complex, but looks promising, would be happy to understand if this is the way to go).
Am I missing something? What is the best solution to achieve what I need?
If you want to give the outsourcer permission to call AWS services in your account, then from a security perspective, it would be much safer to put those resources in a child account.
That way, you are guaranteed that their credentials are not able to impact any of your other resources and services.
The alternative would be way too complex to manage. For example, security groups can be associated with many instances and one instance can have many security groups. That would not be possible to code within an IAM policy.
I was thinking what if My AWS Account get deleted/inaccessible one fine day? (may sound weird). Have anyone implemented any solution for this? Can we have back from one AWS account to another AWS account?
There are several things you can do, one is to make sure you have at least two administrator accounts, one that you use, and one that you store away in a safe place and only use for emergencies.
The second is to setup a completely seperate AWS account as a 'backup', with its own set of credentials. You can grant cross-account access from your primary account, to your backup account but only allow the primary account to 'put' or backup objects to the backup account, so that even if your primary account is compromised, the attacker can't do harm to the second account from the primary account.
The actual process to backup your services on one account to another is going to vary depending on which services you are using, but the concept is the same - backup the data to s3 and then copy the data from s3 in your primary account to s3 in the backup account - and make sure the primary account only has enough access to the second account to 'put' things, not delete. Nobody in your company should have access to both of those sets of credentials (assuming your company is not tiny).
You don't want to be this company that was put out of business when there account was compromised:
https://threatpost.com/hacker-puts-hosting-service-code-spaces-out-of-business/106761/
Also, this video, from AWS Reinvent 2015 (starting around 50 minutes in), listen to how AirBNB protects against these issues in just this way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHg8LD5KNC0
Finally After lot of reasearch and help from Skeddly, I found a solution for Linux machines.
Via Skeddly we can copy EBS snapshots to another AWS account hassle free.It works brilliant.Now even if my Primary AWS account is compromised, I have all EBS snapshots to start with by BCP AWS account for linux machines ;)
Now am hunting for windows machine solution for which I already got an idea... ;)
We all know about what happened to Cold Spaces getting hacked and their AWS account essentially erased. I'm trying to put together recommendation on set of tools, best practices on archiving my entire production AWS account into a backup only where only I would have access to. The backup account will be purely for DR purposes storing EBS snapshots, AMI's, RDS etc.
Thoughts?
Separating the production account from the backup account for DR purposes is an excellent idea.
Setting up a "cross-account" backup solution can be based on the EBS snapshot sharing feature that is currently not available for RDS.
If you want to implement such a solution, please consider the following:
Will the snapshots be stored in both the source and DR accounts? If they are, it will cost you twice.
How do you protect the credentials of the DR account? You should make sure the credentials used to copy snapshots across accounts are not permitted to delete snapshots.
Consider the way older snapshots get deleted at some point. You may want to deal with snapshot deletion separately using different credentials.
Make sure your snapshots can be easily recovered back from the DR account to the original account
Think of ways to automate this cross-account process and make it simple and error free
The company I work for recently released a product called “Cloud Protection Manager (CPM) v1.8.0” in the AWS Marketplace which supports cross-account backup and recovery in AWS and a process where a special account is used for DR only.
I think you would be able to setup A VPC and then use VPC peering to see the other account and access S3 in that account.
To prevent something like coldspaces, make sure you use MFA authentication (no excuse for not using it, the google authentication app for your phone is free and safer than just having a single password as protection.
Also dont use the account owner but setup a separate IAM role with just the permissions you need (and enable MFA on this account as well).
Only issues is that VPC peering doesnt work across regions which would be nicer than having the DR in a different AZ in the same region.
What the title says.
Within the master AWS account, I have several personal accounts, i.e. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users. I would like to assign certain IAM users to groups and prevent them from terminating certain Amazon EC2 instances, de-registering certain Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), etc.
I don't mind if they're playing with their own stuff, but I don't want them to touch my stuff.
Is that possible?
Update
AWS has just announced Resource-Level Permissions for Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS to address this long standing shortcoming of IAM support within EC2 and RDS (in comparison to other AWS services, see my original answer below for details/background):
Today we are making IAM even more powerful with the introduction of resource-level permissions for Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS. [...]
On the EC2 side, you can now construct and use IAM policies to control
access to EC2 instances, EBS volumes, images, and Elastic IP
addresses. [...]
Here are just a few of things that you can do:
Allow users to act on a limited set of resources within a larger, multi-user EC2 environment.
Set different permissions for "development" and "test" resources.
Control which users can terminate which instances.
Require additional security measures, such as MFA authentication, when acting on certain resources.
This solves a plethora of security complications and enables quite a few new use cases as well.
Furthermore, EC2 policy statements can include reference to tags on EC2 resources, which allows to use the same tagging model and schema for permissions and for billing reports. Finally, there's an expanded set of condition tags [...] including ec2:Region, ec2:Owner, and ec2:InstanceType, see Condition Keys for Amazon EC2 for details.
Solution
Here's a variation of Example 3: Allow users to stop and start only particular instances for the use case at hand, which allows users to start and stop [and terminate] only the instances that have the tag "department=dev":
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": [
"ec2:StopInstances",
"ec2:StartInstances",
"ec2:TeminateInstances"
],
"Resource": "arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123456789012:instance/*",
"Condition": {
"StringEquals": {
"ec2:ResourceTag/department": "dev"
}
}
}
]
}
Caveat
Support for resource-level permissions is restricted to the following set of actions on the indicated resources still, which excludes parts of the use case (e.g. de-registering AMIs) - the confidence in the foundation for this complex and far-reaching feature is apparently high enough though to announce that they plan to add support for additional APIs throughout the rest of 2013 (AWS doesn't usually publish any roadmaps):
Instances - Reboot, Start, Stop, Terminate.
EBS Volumes - Attach, Delete, Detach.
Original Answer
I'm afraid this isn't possible the way you'd like to do it (and many others for that matter, including myself).
Problem
You want to restrict access to a particular service's resources rather than its actions - while AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) supports both in principle, not every AWS product/service offers restrictions based on resources yet; unfortunately Amazon EC2 is one of these and even featured as an example for this very difference, see Integrating with Other AWS Products:
The following table summarizes whether you can grant IAM permissions
that control access to a service's actions, resources, or both. For
example, you can use IAM to control which Amazon EC2 actions users
have access to, but you can't use IAM to control users' access to
AMIs, volumes, instances, etc. [emphasis mine]
(Partial) Workaround
Depending on the needs of the other accounts, you might still be able to at least limit their ability to perform those actions considered destructive - you can explore the available actions via the AWS Policy Generator, for example:
ec2:DeregisterImage - obvious effect, when denied for a user/group
ec2:ModifyInstanceAttribute - this would help via Enabling Termination Protection for an Instance, when denied for a user/group:
By default, you can terminate any instances you launch. If you want to
prevent accidental termination of the instance, you can enable
termination protection for the instance.
That is, once you've enabled termination protection, anyone without permission to use ec2:ModifyInstanceAttribute cannot terminate these instances at all.
Obviously the respectively restricted accounts won't be able to facilitate those calls for their own resources anymore.
Furthermore this won't prevent them from running a fancy Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large Instance or so, incurring respective costs in turn ;)
Alternative Approach
Depending on your setup/environment you might want to look into Consolidated Billing instead, which essentially provides a way to gather one or many AWS accounts under another one, which is paying for the resources used by the others.
While this is primarily an accounting feature, it can be used to separate areas of concern as well - for example, it's quite common to facilitate separate development and production accounts to achieve respectively independent operation, not the least regarding IAM rights and the like.
The introductory blog post New AWS Feature: Consolidated Billing provides a good overview, and here is the relevant topic from the AWS Consolidated Billing Guide regarding your apparent use case:
The paying account is billed for all costs of the linked accounts.
However, each linked account is completely independent in every other
way (signing up for services, accessing resources, using AWS Premium
Support, etc.). The paying account owner cannot access data belonging
to the linked account owners (e.g., their files in Amazon S3). Each
account owner uses their own AWS credentials to access their resources
(e.g., their own AWS Secret Access Key). [emphasis mine]
Obviously this functionality is targeted at larger customers, but depending on your scenario you might be able to come up with a solution to separate your AWS accounts and resources as needed still.