I am writing an application for AWS platform, which was planned to be launched from the root account, with root credentials. At this point I need to stop some of the machines started by the AWS organizations member accounts.
By default AWS organizations doesn't give access to root account to look or manage resources to other member's account. So I tried using temporary credentials and tried to assume a role created by the target account.
More on that here.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/AuthUsingTempSessionTokenJava.html
On the other hand it doesn't allow root account to assume roles, and throws such exception.
com.amazonaws.services.securitytoken.model.AWSSecurityTokenServiceException: Roles may not be assumed by root accounts. (Service: AWSSecurityTokenService; Status Code: 403; Error Code: AccessDenied; Request ID: 7bee7537-48e0-11e9-bb1a-bb36134736e4)
at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.handleErrorResponse(AmazonHttpClient.java:1695) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.475.jar:na]
at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.executeOneRequest(AmazonHttpClient.java:1350) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.475.jar:na]
at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.executeHelper(AmazonHttpClient.java:1101) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.475.jar:na]
at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.doExecute(AmazonHttpClient.java:758) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.475.jar:na]
at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.executeWithTimer(AmazonHttpClient.java:732) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.475.jar:na]
at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.execute(AmazonHttpClient.java:714) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.475.jar:na]
at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutor.access$500(AmazonHttpClient.java:674) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.475.jar:na]
at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient$RequestExecutionBuilderImpl.execute(AmazonHttpClient.java:656) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.475.jar:na]
at com.amazonaws.http.AmazonHttpClient.execute(AmazonHttpClient.java:520) ~[aws-java-sdk-core-1.11.475.jar:na]
at...
Is there any way get around this problem? For example, somehow to give the root access to everything or let it assume roles?
Firstly, please don't use your Root account! Best practice is to remove access keys from the root account, add an MFA token and lock it away. We have a large AWS Organization structure and we don't use the root accounts for anything other than where it's absolutely required.
See the IAM Best Practices user guide, specifically the section: Lock Away Your AWS Account Root User Access Keys
For your described administrative purposes, use IAM Users
IAM Users can assume Roles. Recommended steps:
Create IAM Group and attach the required policy for admin permissions. The AdministratorAccess policy is an easy pre-built policy that gives full admin access within the current account, but to assume roles into sub-accounts, all you really need to allow is the sts:AssumeRole action.
Creating Your First IAM Admin User and Group
Granting a User Permissions to Switch Roles
Create an IAM User and assign it to the IAM Group.
Adding and Removing Users in an IAM Group
Create the target Role in your sub-accounts with a Policy to allow actions in that sub-account and with a Trust Relationship defined for your IAM user in the master Org account.
Creating a Role to Delegate Permissions to an IAM User
NOTE: Sounds like you may already have this, but check the trust relationship to make sure.
Authenticate your app via IAM user credentials, temp credentials, etc.
NOTE: The temp credentials doc that you linked is for IAM Users, I'd recommend trying it again once you have a proper IAM user setup.
There are many ways to authenticate to AWS services, as another example see: Assuming an IAM Role in the AWS CLI
Additional: Not sure what you're building, but if appropriate, Consider Using Service-linked Roles to directly provide the app the specific permissions it needs--rather than dealing with user credentials.
Related
I'm trying to setup my aws cli. I downloaded it and everything worked.
Now I wanted to log in from my powershell script.
Set-AWSCredentials –AccessKey key-name –SecretKey key-name
Because I don't have any users at the moment I had to create one. I have given the user admin rights.
When creating the user aws throws this error:
User: arn:aws:sts::37197122623409:assumed-role/voclabs/user2135080=.... is not authorized to perform: iam:CreateUser on resource: arn:aws:iam::371237422423709:user/.... because no identity-based policy allows the iam:CreateUser action
My first thought was that my education account is having a problem. But I didn't find anything about it. Thanks for your help in advance.
The "voclab" part of the error suggests you are not logged as the account root user but instead assuming a role in an account used for teaching purposes.
This role is probably designed to disallow IAM actions, in order to prevent privilege escalation.
Read
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/singlesignon/latest/userguide/howtogetcredentials.html to get role credentials for the role you're assuming
You can't make any IAM roles, policies or users as a student using voclabs account. AWS Academy does not allow to do that and its a hard limit which you nor your educator can change.
I have created a couple of Cognito User Groups named "admins" and "editors" which has in turn created IAM roles as expected {USERPOOLID}-adminsGroupRole. These IAM roles have no policies attached and when a user becomes a member of this group it appears that any permissions they were granted via the default authRole as a non-group user are completely ignored.
I would expected the authRole to be applied to anyone who is authenticated and my admins/editors group to provide additional permissions. If this is the way it works I am then expected to generate custom policies in my CloudFormation templates which already exist elsewhere, and they'd need to be dynamic to work for multiple environments/buckets etc. which is a ballache.
Am I approaching this wrong or misunderstanding? This behavior seems very odd.
Thanks
When using Amazon Cognito User Pools (and not Identity Pools), when you create a group and specify an IAM Role, their permissions are determined by the group's associated IAM Role.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but when you say: I would expected the authRole to be applied to anyone who is authenticated and my admins/editors group to provide additional permissions.
This authRole is the IAM Role defined in the Identity Pool for all users that have been authorized. You can control which role is being selected in the settings of your Identity Pool.
More information in this answer:
AWS Cognito role: Distinguish between Federated Identity Pool roles and User Pool Group roles
I cloned this solution azure-devops-on-aws and used dotnet lambda deploy-serverless ... to deploy the MyLizardApp to my personal AWS account.
During the learning curve, I created an S3 bucket my-lizard-test, IAM user group MyLizardGroup with user lizard-user and group policy MyLizardApp-Policy. Included in the policy are these services:
API Gateway (full access, all resources)
CloudFormation (full access, all resources)
Lambda (full access, all resources)
S3 (full access, all resources)
(Eventually) the deployment succeeded and I had a Lambda application serving the simple razor page showing the time.
I then copied the LambdaEntryPoint.cs, aws-lambda-tools-defaults.json and serverless.template files to my own dotnet core webapp (also a razor project) and attempted to deploy it to the same AWS account with the same command. The only changes made were the namespace of the LambdaEntryPoint class (reflected in the serverless.template file) and the .csproj file to include:
<AWSProjectType>Lambda</AWSProjectType>
and:
<PackageReference Include="Amazon.Lambda.AspNetCoreServer" Version="5.0.0" />
The dotnet lambda deploy-serverless ... command failed with the message:
User: arn:aws:iam::123456789120:user/lizard-user is not authorized to perform: iam:PassRole on resource: arn:aws:iam::123456789120:role/MyLizardAppServiceRole (Service: AWSLambdaInternal; Status Code: 403; Error Code: AccessDeniedException; Request ID: 12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012; Proxy: null)
I got the command to succeed by adding the IAM service to the MyLizardApp-Policy with the PassRole (all resources).
Why was this necessary for my personal app and not the demo solution from github? If the answer is not clear, what should I be looking for as differences? My personal app is not significantly different from the demo solution and I don't think the functional differences (in C#) would matter.
Whenever an AWS Service assumes (uses) an IAM Role, the service must have iam:PassRole permission to grant permission to use the Role. This required to prevent users from gaining too much permission.
For example, imagine a normal (non-Admin) user who launches an Amazon EC2 instance. When launching the instance, they can nominate an IAM Role to be assigned to the instance. If this user was permitted to select any IAM Role, they could select an Admin role and assign it to the EC2 instance. They could then login to the instance and use the credentials to make API calls as an Admin. This is an unwanted "privilege escalation".
Similarly, when an AWS Lambda function executes, it uses an IAM Role to obtain permissions. The iam:PassRole permission is used to control which roles a user can assign to the Lambda function.
So, there is something in that project that is trying to use an IAM Role and needs appropriate permissions.
First of all, we need to know what PassRole is:
iam:PassRole is the permission that controls which users can delegate an IAM role to an AWS resource.
As I can see in the repo, there is a file for CodeDeploy which already have credentials so maybe you are using CodeDeploy.
But btw, you are using an instances to deploy a Lambda function, and you need to pass the role to that Lambda so that is what PassRole do
AWS Services cannot directly assume service-linked roles. The role must be passed to the service by a user with the iam::PassRole permission.
The role-passing needs to be done only once, when a resource (e.g. EC2 instance) is created. After that the resource can assume the role repeatedly.
EC2 Instance profile is implemented this way. When a user launches an instance, it passes a role to the instance to act as an instance profile (it in addition needs iam:AddRoleToInstanceProfile for this case).
Other service-linked roles are also passed in this way.
Do not confuse it with the iam::CreateRole permission. A user may freely create service-linked roles, but is unable to pass the role to a service when needed.
In the management console, and to some extent in the CLI commands, role-passing is implicit, so you may encounter it without clear error messages when using non-root accounts.
As for why sometimes you need this permission, ands sometimes you don't, that is because when you use the root user, it will have AdministratorAccess which basically allows all actions on all resources.
If you create a new IAM user or account with blank permissions then you will need to add this permission manually.
Suppose, I am AWS IAM user, is there any way so that I can check what resource permission has been given to me, using CLI or Console.
Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive tool for that. In IAM console you can only check your user's IAM profile or group permission you belong to.
But full set of privileges is a very complex thing to get. Apart from obvious IAM user or group permissions you can have:
IAM roles which you can assume,
resource policies which you are listed as a principle (e.g. bucket policy, kms key policy),
resource policies where a role you can assume is a principle,
cross-account permissions in IAM roles or resource policies,
AWS Organization level SCP permissions.
If the reason for asking this question is related to security, e.g., to check what resources were accessed by a compromised IAM user credentials, you suspend the credentials or delete the user. Also can inspect the CloudTrial history to check what resources a given IAM user accessed.
After setting up AWS Organizations, I created a member account with a custom IAM role name. I've now forgotten the role name used and I'm unable to assume role as root into that account. I need to create IAM users in the member account but without the ability to assume role using the custom OrganizationAccountAccessRole it seems I'm unable to.
I've tried getting access by
Using the member account root user but it doesn't have permissions to IAM
Signing in to member account using AWS SSO user with IAMFullAccess and AdministratorAccess policies attached to the policy set but user cannot access IAM.
Attempting to describe member account using the master account admin user but the role isn't there
At this point, I'm thinking the only way out is to recreate the member account. Please tell me there is a better way.
UPDATE:
- Found that 1 & 2 didn't work because of a restrictive Service Control Policy (SCP) on the account which didn't include IAM access permissions.
Based on the comments.
The solution was to inspect CloudTrial logs to find the API call used to create the role.