Is it possible to use the IAM API as a user registration service for my application.
I.e. if i present the user to create an account and password. Can they then log in with the IAM and use my application.
Or is it more for developers who are tinkering around with the actual AWS platform?
Thanks,
Ben
That's not what AWS Identity and Access Management is made for. I guess you don't want your users to have access to your infrastructure … If you want an user registration you should implement it inside your application.
Related
Is there a way to grant admin access to a third party in AWS without manually creating IAM role etc, purely via OAuth flow or similar?
Context: making an app that simplifies AWS account management, and want to make the UX to "connect to my account" as simple as possible. Failed to find anything like that in AWS docs. Want the app to be able to provision and manage resources, run terraform etc.
Check this out: Identity Providers and Federation. You will still have to create pre-defined IAM roles to define what permission users will assume
Yes it's doable. You do need to create IAM roles, if you want to give your users access to everything just create an admin role with permissions of ':' on all resources.
Then you should set up some type of SAML server, active directory federation services comes with everything out of the box. You can look for some open source SAML servers.
Then you have to setup SAML federation between your user account and your SAML backend.
For the last few years, I've built a PHP and MySQL based website where users can submit reprographics and IT requests. I'm hoping to make this cloud-based rather than running it from a local webserver. My initial idea was to have an EC2 instance running as a web server for each company which uses my system, but as the system is PHP session based I'm assuming the security would not be great so I think I need to move towards more of an AWS system using Cognito for user management and the API Gateway with Lambda to do the job of getting the data from the databases. My question is, my current system has an admin console where the admin user can access the lists of users, and assign them permissions (session variables) which allows them access to specific pages. How would I make a webpage where users can manage the users in a Cognito user pool without giving them access to the AWS console.
Implement a Cognito AdminAddUserToGroup operation in your Lambda function for admin users to manage what Cognito Groups your users belong to. Your admins will be the only ones that are able to invoke the API call to the Lambda function because they'll be included in the Cognito Admin Group with appropriate permissions to invoke the Lambda function that you specified as the developer.
Specify permissions of what each Congito Group has access to by assigning roles for each Cognito Group.
You can also decode the jwt on the backend to determine what Cognito Group the user belongs to that made the request and use Amplify on the FrontEnd to manage the FrontEnd's display of content based on the Group (links, etc). More info about that can be found in this thread: How do I access the group for a Cognito User account?
I do not have enough points to comment on the CLI update-user-pool suggestion, but wanted you to know that wouldn't work because 1.) It would impact the entire user pool and affect ALL users in the user pool and 2.) It would make no difference in regards to what your users were able to have permission to access in your application.
I am setting up an AWS Account, the account will be used by an organization of employees for EC2 use/experimentation. Obviously, I do not want to distribute the root login info or set up one single IAM user for everyone to use. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to manage creating individual IAM users for everyone on a regular basis.
So, is there a way to auto-create IAM users based on a given email's domain on their first login attempt? The users should have read-only roles to begin, then an Administrator could give more roles as needed to each user. I am open to suggestions, perhaps lambda functions or linking to an identity provider?
Keep in mind that these new IAM users need to have access to the AWS Management Console, this is not necessarily intended for login to applications hosted on AWS.
Update:
Moving forward using this AWS Management Console Federation Proxy Sample found in Amazon's code reference, using with Microsoft Exchange hosted email.
If your existing identity provider supports SAML2 Federation, you can set it up to login to the AWS Management Console.
For more details refer Enabling SAML 2.0 Federated Users to Access the AWS Management Console.
Else you can implement a custom Federation Broker to return an URL to the user, after they authenticate with their corporate credentials.
For more details refer Creating a URL that Enables Federated Users to Access the AWS Management Console (Custom Federation Broker).
I volunteer at a small local school that teaches data science and I'm trying to understand the procedure behind federated logins, but the Amazon documentation isn't helping and their forums don't seem interested.
We'd like for the students to be able to sign in to our AWS environment using either Facebook, Google, or Amazon.com, instead of manually trying to create a user for everyone who signs up.
The main thing that's unclear is how the students should sign in. Do we need to create a custom webpage using the provided javascript or .net code? We would have to contact our web developer if so. Or do we use the provided domain name? (in this case, https://weclouddata.auth.us-east-1.amazoncognito.com) This comes from the Cognito user pools though, and doesn't seem like it would apply. Besides, when I use it in conjunction with the Google client ID, I get an "invalid request" error.
You can create a custom app "Identity Broker" to create a URL that lets users sign in with Facebook/Google credentials and securely access the AWS Management Console. The broker would perform the following steps:
Verify that the user is authenticated by identity system(Facebook or Google) or use AWS Congnito.
Call the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) API operations to obtain temporary security credentials for the user.
Construct a URL for the console that includes the token and redirects the user to the URL on the user's behalf.
Amazon Cognito lets you to easily create customizable UI to sign in users and provides built-in federation with Facebook, Google, Login with Amazon. So you don't have worry about authentication and concentrate building your actual logic(above steps)
Here is a sample app from AWS that shows how to implement a single sign-on solution with C# and windows AD.
Python Code:
Here is the python code on how to construct the console login URL. I have used the sample python code from AWS and 'Hello world' flask app. When you hit the URL it should redirect to the console login, you can set permission using IAM role.
You can provide any login mechanism (Facebook, Google, Amazon etc) to create student account first time.
Ask user to create account using any app login (Facebook, Google, Amazon etc)
On successful login, create user in AWS using https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/APIReference/API_CreateUser.html API.
Add newly created user in the group https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/APIReference/API_AddUserToGroup.html
You can create the user group with some specified roles and give permission (Launch EC2 Instances, Access to DynamoDB etc) accordingly.
I am planning on a web page that creates an instance for an user using a specific AMI. Is there any AWS method to let the user approve my web application to do this using their credentials? (i. e. getting a secret token with certain privileges)
Similar to when you let a Facebook application have access to certain information of your profile. I am looking for a way to get a token from the user signed in so that I can create an instance for them.
I want to avoid the user the pain of doing all the manual steps of going to IAM, create a new user, get the token and then upload them to my site.
I looked into AWS Cognito but this doesn't seem to be what I am looking for.
Similar to when you let a Facebook application have access to certain information of your profile.
AWS and Facebook are not similar in any sense. Facebook is a web application. AWS something entirely different.
Facebook has users, but AWS has accounts, which in turn have users... but in AWS, don't need a user's permission to do things to resources -- what you actually need is an account's permission to do things to its resources, because resources are associated with the account, not the user.
I am looking for a way to get a token from the user signed in so that I can create an instance for them.
Users sign in to the AWS console. After this, there is no such concept as a user allowing an external application doing things under the "signed in" user's auspices.
The user has to have sufficient permissions to either create sufficiently-privileged temporary IAM credentials (such as with GetSessionToken or AssumeRole from the IAM API) and hand them over to you, or create an IAM user with sufficient privilege and hand the keys to that user over to you... or you provide them with the ARN of one of your IAM users, and your customer gives your user permission to perform the actions or assume a role in your customer's account, created for the purpose.
I want to avoid the user the pain of doing all the manual steps of going to IAM, create a new user, get the token and then upload them to my site.
That can't be avoided, by design... and, in any event, whatever exactly you are planning, your model seems flawed: it would only be a naïve user who would allow you to do this. I have accounts that are allowed to launch hundreds of instances concurrently. Does it make sense that I would allow a third party to have access to credentials that could run up a huge bill for me? (If AWS trusts a set of credentials to launch instances, then it trusts them to launch instances -- all the way up to the account's instance limits).
If you want a user to be able to launch an instance from your AMI, you can simply list it on the AWS Marketplace, or you can share the AMI with the user's account, or even just make the AMI public.