Show
Chris Kuo/Dr. Dataman Aug 19, 2021 20 min read Security: People may concern if their data are safe on cloud. AWS had designed multiple layers to secure data and services at the highest level. Security is achieved by controlling who can access (authorize) to what services (authenticate). In this Section you will learn how to use the Identity and Access Management (IAM) service to control who… AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an AWS service that helps an administrator securely control access to AWS resources. IAM administrators control who can be authenticated (signed in) and authorized (have permissions) to use IAM Roles Anywhere resources. IAM is an AWS service that you can use with no additional charge. Topics
AudienceHow you use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) differs, depending on the work that you do in IAM Roles Anywhere. Service user – If you use the IAM Roles Anywhere service to do your job, then your administrator provides you with the credentials and permissions that you need. As you use more IAM Roles Anywhere features to do your work, you might need additional permissions. Understanding how access is managed can help you request the right permissions from your administrator. If you cannot access a feature in IAM Roles Anywhere, see Troubleshooting AWS Identity and Access Management Roles Anywhere identity and access. Service administrator – If you're in charge of IAM Roles Anywhere resources at your company, you probably have full access to IAM Roles Anywhere. It's your job to determine which IAM Roles Anywhere features and resources your service users should access. You must then submit requests to your IAM administrator to change the permissions of your service users. Review the information on this page to understand the basic concepts of IAM. To learn more about how your company can use IAM with IAM Roles Anywhere, see How AWS Identity and Access Management Roles Anywhere works with IAM. IAM administrator – If you're an IAM administrator, you might want to learn details about how you can write policies to manage access to IAM Roles Anywhere. To view example IAM Roles Anywhere identity-based policies that you can use in IAM, see Identity-based policy examples for AWS Identity and Access Management Roles Anywhere. Authenticating with identitiesAuthentication is how you sign in to AWS using your identity credentials. You must be authenticated (signed in to AWS) as the AWS account root user, as an IAM user, or by assuming an IAM role. You can sign in to AWS as a federated identity by using credentials provided through an identity source. AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On) (IAM Identity Center) users, your company's single sign-on authentication, and your Google or Facebook credentials are examples of federated identities. When you sign in as a federated identity, your administrator previously set up identity federation using IAM roles. When you access AWS by using federation, you are indirectly assuming a role. Depending on the type of user you are, you can sign in to the AWS Management Console or the AWS access portal. For more information about signing in to AWS, see How to sign in to your AWS account in the AWS Sign-In User Guide. If you access AWS programmatically, AWS provides a software development kit (SDK) and a command line interface (CLI) to cryptographically sign your requests using your credentials. If you don't use AWS tools, you must sign requests yourself. For more information about using the recommended method to sign requests yourself, see Signature Version 4 signing process in the AWS General Reference. Regardless of the authentication method that you use, you might be required to provide additional security information. For example, AWS recommends that you use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to increase the security of your account. To learn more, see Multi-factor authentication in the AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On) User Guide and Using multi-factor authentication (MFA) in AWS in the IAM User Guide. AWS account root userWhen you create an AWS account, you begin with one sign-in identity that has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. This identity is called the AWS account root user and is accessed by signing in with the email address and password that you used to create the account. We strongly recommend that you don't use the root user for your everyday tasks. Safeguard your root user credentials and use them to perform the tasks that only the root user can perform. For the complete list of tasks that require you to sign in as the root user, see Tasks that require root user credentials in the AWS Account Management Reference Guide. Federated identityAs a best practice, require human users, including users that require administrator access, to use federation with an identity provider to access AWS services by using temporary credentials. A federated identity is a user from your enterprise user directory, a web identity provider, the AWS Directory Service, the Identity Center directory, or any user that accesses AWS services by using credentials provided through an identity source. When federated identities access AWS accounts, they assume roles, and the roles provide temporary credentials. For centralized access management, we recommend that you use AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On). You can create users and groups in IAM Identity Center, or you can connect and synchronize to a set of users and groups in your own identity source for use across all your AWS accounts and applications. For information about IAM Identity Center, see What is IAM Identity Center? in the AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On) User Guide. IAM users and groupsAn IAM user is an identity within your AWS account that has specific permissions for a single person or application. Where possible, we recommend relying on temporary credentials instead of creating IAM users who have long-term credentials such as passwords and access keys. However, if you have specific use cases that require long-term credentials with IAM users, we recommend that you rotate access keys. For more information, see Rotate access keys regularly for use cases that require long-term credentials in the IAM User Guide. An IAM group is an identity that specifies a collection of IAM users. You can't sign in as a group. You can use groups to specify permissions for multiple users at a time. Groups make permissions easier to manage for large sets of users. For example, you could have a group named IAMAdmins and give that group permissions to administer IAM resources. Users are different from roles. A user is uniquely associated with one person or application, but a role is intended to be assumable by anyone who needs it. Users have permanent long-term credentials, but roles provide temporary credentials. To learn more, see When to create an IAM user (instead of a role) in the IAM User Guide. IAM rolesAn IAM role is an identity within your AWS account that has specific permissions. It is similar to an IAM user, but is not associated with a specific person. You can temporarily assume an IAM role in the AWS Management Console by switching roles. You can assume a role by calling an AWS CLI or AWS API operation or by using a custom URL. For more information about methods for using roles, see Using IAM roles in the IAM User Guide. IAM roles with temporary credentials are useful in the following situations:
To learn whether to use IAM roles or IAM users, see When to create an IAM role (instead of a user) in the IAM User Guide. Managing access using policiesYou control access in AWS by creating policies and attaching them to AWS identities or resources. A policy is an object in AWS that, when associated with an identity or resource, defines their permissions. AWS evaluates these policies when a principal (user, root user, or role session) makes a request. Permissions in the policies determine whether the request is allowed or denied. Most policies are stored in AWS as JSON documents. For more information about the structure and contents of JSON policy documents, see Overview of JSON policies in the IAM User Guide. Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions. Every IAM entity (user or role) starts with no permissions. By default, users can do nothing, not even change their own password. To give a user permission to do something, an administrator must attach a permissions policy to a user. Or the administrator can add the user to a group that has the intended permissions. When an administrator gives permissions to a group, all users in that group are granted those permissions. IAM policies define permissions for an action regardless of the method that you use to perform the operation. For example, suppose that you have a policy that allows the Identity-based policiesIdentity-based policies are JSON permissions policy documents that you can attach to an identity, such as an IAM user, group of users, or role. These policies control what actions users and roles can perform, on which resources, and under what conditions. To learn how to create an identity-based policy, see Creating IAM policies in the IAM User Guide. Identity-based policies can be further categorized as inline policies or managed policies. Inline policies are embedded directly into a single user, group, or role. Managed policies are standalone policies that you can attach to multiple users, groups, and roles in your AWS account. Managed policies include AWS managed policies and customer managed policies. To learn how to choose between a managed policy or an inline policy, see Choosing between managed policies and inline policies in the IAM User Guide. Resource-based policiesResource-based policies are JSON policy documents that you attach to a resource. Examples of resource-based policies are IAM role trust policies and Amazon S3 bucket policies. In services that support resource-based policies, service administrators can use them to control access to a specific resource. For the resource where the policy is attached, the policy defines what actions a specified principal can perform on that resource and under what conditions. You must specify a principal in a resource-based policy. Principals can include accounts, users, roles, federated users, or AWS services. Resource-based policies are inline policies that are located in that service. You can't use AWS managed policies from IAM in a resource-based policy. Access control lists (ACLs)Access control lists (ACLs) control which principals (account members, users, or roles) have permissions to access a resource. ACLs are similar to resource-based policies, although they do not use the JSON policy document format. Amazon S3, AWS WAF, and Amazon VPC are examples of services that support ACLs. To learn more about ACLs, see Access control list (ACL) overview in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide. Other policy typesAWS supports additional, less-common policy types. These policy types can set the maximum permissions granted to you by the more common policy types.
Multiple policy typesWhen multiple types of policies apply to a request, the resulting permissions are more complicated to understand. To learn how AWS determines whether to allow a request when multiple policy types are involved, see Policy evaluation logic in the IAM User Guide. Which AWS IAM feature is used to associate a set of permissions with multiple users?An IAM user group is a collection of IAM users. User groups let you specify permissions for multiple users, which can make it easier to manage the permissions for those users. For example, you could have a user group called Admins and give that user group typical administrator permissions.
Which AWS service or feature can be used to restrict the individual API actions that users and roles in each member account can access?In SCPs, you can restrict which AWS services, resources, and individual API actions the users and roles in each member account can access.
Which of the following must an IAM user provide to interact with AWS?Create credentials for the user, depending on the type of access the user requires: Programmatic access: The IAM user might need to make API calls, use the AWS CLI, or use the Tools for Windows PowerShell. In that case, create an access key (access key ID and a secret access key) for that user.
Which of the following options can be used to access and manage all AWS services?Answer : AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
|