Is there a policy action in IAM that will restrict the visibility of resources in the colnsole to only a tagged set? So for example can i use ec2:Describe with a StringEquals condition for the tag such that a group of users will only ever see the set of EC2 servers their project is using?
Ideally i dont want all users in this VPC to see all servers regardless if they are read only
Its not currently possible:
Note Currently, the Amazon EC2 ec2:Describe* API actions do not
support resource-level permissions, so you cannot control which
individual resources users can view in the console. Therefore, the *
wildcard is necessary in the Resource element of the above statement.
For more information about which ARNs you can use with which Amazon
EC2 API actions, see Supported Resource-Level Permissions for Amazon
EC2 API Actions.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/iam-policies-ec2-console.html
On option you have, that might work is to use multiple, independent AWS accounts, so each user can get there own 'sandbox' to play in, but setup consolidate billing so that that aspect of the accounts are all shared by one master account.
Related
We have started initially by defining roles with admin access policy attached. But now we want them to have policy with only specific permissions that are minimum and does not create any issues for using these roles.
Looking at "Access Advisor" tab on each role under AWS IAM console, it gives good amount of information that exactly which AWS services getting used and permission level information only for EC2, IAM, Lambda, and S3 management actions services. But for rest of other AWS services, missing that what specific permission for that particular service is required.
Also not having AWS Organizations master account access as mentioned in this tutorial: Viewing last accessed information for Organizations.
So is there a way I can get the permissions level info for services other than EC2, IAM, Lambda, and S3 management actions?
Thanks.
So is there a way I can get the permissions level info for services other than EC2, IAM, Lambda, and S3 management actions?
Sadly, there is no such way provided by AWS. So basically its try-and-see approach to get what you want. You can try some third party tools, which may be helpful, such as zero-iam, but ultimately, you will need custom solution to match your requirements.
There is also IAM Access Analyzer which is different then Access Advisor. But its also limited to some services only.
I'm totally new to AWS and learning about IAM. I was wondering if there is a way around for an IAM user to check what all permission he/she have? Like as a root user, I created a group of IAM users where they were only allowed to use S3 service but once I logged in as an IAM user, it was showing that I have access to other AWS services as well like running EC2 instances, etc which I reckon shouldn't be the case. Thanks!
No, it isn't possible to "show" which services you have access to use, because the policies can be quite complex (eg permission to access an S3 bucket, but only a particular sub-folder if coming from a given range of IP addresses).
You would need to look the the IAM Policies attached to the IAM User, plus the policies on any IAM Groups they are in. Then, some services like Amazon S3 have additional permissions such as Bucket Policies.
In addition, AWS Organizations can limit the permissions of all users within an AWS Account, so even if a user appears to be granted certain permissions, they might not actually be available for use.
In many situations, you'll only know if you can do something by actually trying it. For example, you might have Read Only permissions, which means you can see resources in the AWS Console, but you would receive an error when you try to change things.
All services are available in the AWS Console, but various parts of the console will only work if you have adequate permission.
Note that there's IAM Policy Simulator from AWS. You can select a service and check if a given user has access to any given action (or all actions relevant to a service)
We have large number of IAM users ( in hundreds, can increase more then 1000 in future ).
All the IAM users have access to create EC2 instances. Simultaneously around 30-40 users will be working and creating EC2 instances.
In AWS Management Console, an IAM user can see all the instances created by other IAM users as well.Is it possible to visibly make him see only those EC2 instances which he created and hide all the other instances created by other IAM users?
I do agree that IAM users can give names and tags to recognise their instances. However i am looking for visibly hiding those resources which he has not created.
If IAM policies allowed specifying a required filter, this would be possible. But you can't specify it, so it's not possible.
What you want is called Organizations - You can give each group their own AWS account, so they can see their own billing, etc.
Reserved Instances can flow from the master account to sub account
Bills flow from the sub accounts to the master account
All your users can remain in the master account, you just give them AssumeRole capabilities to view their account.
You can apply Service Control Policies that prevent sub-accounts from doing things.
You may think management is "easier" with one account - but the opposite is true. Just like you should treat servers as "Cattle not Pets" (i.e. they are disposable), you should think of AWS accounts as disposable. Some organizations give each developer their own AWS account, and only a build server can modify the Staging/Prod accounts via TerraForm or CloudFormation.
What you would typically use for this is resource level permissions. What resources / what you can control varies from API call to API call in AWS. In particular, what you would want is a resource-level permission on the DescribeInstances API call. Unfortunately, AWS does not currently support resource-level permissions on this API Call.
I want to make an account to external consultant to help us with AWS, but I want to allow him to only see certain EC2 instances instead of all.
I've read AWS documents/blogs about AMI and policies setting. I'm aware "describe" action can not have resource level permissions.
Is there any workaround to this? or we really need to let external consultant see all the instances' information?
this is currently not possible as many EC2 actions do not support resource-level permissions. check the answer to this question on their knowledge center site, and here I am quoting.
This is not currently possible for all API actions within EC2, but it is for some. Many essential EC2 actions do not support resource-level permissions or conditions, and isolating IAM users or groups of users’ access to EC2 resources by any criteria other than AWS region does not fit most use cases
I am in the early stages of writing an AWS app for our users that will run our research algorithms using their AWS resources. For example, our code will need to spin up EC2 instances running our 'worker' app, access RDS databases, and create access SQS queues. The AWS Java SDK examples (we are writing this in Java) use a AwsCredentials.properties file to store the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key, which is fine for examples, but obviously not acceptable for our users, who are would be in essence giving us access to all their resources. What is a clean way to go about running our system on their behalf? I discovered AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) which seems to be for this purpose (I haven't got my head around it yet), esp. Cross-account access between AWS accounts. This post makes it sound straightforward:
Use the amazon IAM service to create a set of keys that only has
permission to perform the tasks that you require for your script.
http://aws.amazon.com/iam/
However, other posts (e.g., Within IAM, can I restrict a group of users to access/launch/terminate only certain EC2 AMIs or instances?) suggest there are limitations to using IAM with EC2 in particular.
Any advice would be really helpful!
The key limitation with regards to RDS and EC2 is that while you can restrict access to certain API actions there are no resource level constraints. For example with an IAM S3 policy you can restrict a user to only being able to perform certain actions on certain buckets. You can write a policy for EC2 that says that user is allowed to stop instances, but not one that says you can only stop certain instances.
Another option is for them to provide you with temporary credentials via the Security Token Service. Another variant on that is to use the new IAM roles service. With this an instance has a set of policies associated with it. You don't need to provide an AwsCredentials.proprties file because the SDK can fetch credentials from the metadata service.
Finally one last option might be consolidated billing. If the reason you are using their AWS resources is just because of the billing, then setup a new account which is billed from their account. The accounts are isolated from each other so you can't for example delete their instances by accident. Equally you can't access their RDS snapshots and things like that (access to an RDS instance via mysql (as opposed to the AWS api) would depend on the instance's security group). You can of course combine this with the previous options - they could provide you with credentials that only allow you to perform certain actions within that isolated account.