hacktricks/aws-security.md

AWS Security

IAM - Identity and Access Management

IAM can be defined by its ability to manage, control and govern authentication, authorization and access control mechanisms of identities to your resources within your AWS account.

• Users: This could be a real person within your organization who requires access to operate and maintain your AWS environment. Or it could be an account to be used by an application that may require permissions to access your AWS resources programmatically.
• Groups: These are objects that contain multiple users. Permissions can be assigned to a user or inherit form a group. Giving permission to groups and not to users the secure way to grant permissions.
• Roles: Roles are used to grant identities a set of permissions. Roles don't have any access keys or credentials associated with them. Role are usually used with resources like EC2 machines but they can also be useful to grant temporary privileges to a user
• Policy Permissions: These are JSON policies that define what resources can and can't be accessed. There are 2 types:
  • AWS managed policies preconfigured by AWS
  • Customer Managed Policies: Configured by you. You can create policies based on AWS managed policies by copy/pasting or using the policy generator.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",  //Version of the policy
    "Statement": [  //Main element, there can be more than 1 entry in this array
        {
            "Sid": "Stmt32894y234276923" //Unique identifier
            "Effect": "Allow", //Allow or deny
            "Action": [  //Actions that will be allowed or denied
                "ec2:AttachVolume",
                "ec2:DetachVolume"
            ], 
            "Resource": [ //Resource the action and effect will be applied to
                "arn:aws:ec2:*:*:volume/*",
                "arn:aws:ec2:*:*:instance/*"
            ],
            "Condition": { //Optional element that allow to control when the permission will be effective
                "ArnEquals": {"ec2:SourceInstanceARN": "arn:aws:ec2:*:*:instance/instance-id"}
            }
        }
    ]
}

• And Access Control Mechanisms: These are mechanisms that govern how a resource is accessed.

Access Key ID: 20 random uppercase alphanumeric characters like AKHDNAPO86BSHKDIRYT
Secret access key ID: 40 random upper and lowercase characters: S836fh/J73yHSb64Ag3Rkdi/jaD6sPl6/antFtU It's not possible to retrieve lost secret access key IDs.