AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now makes it easier for you to control access to your AWS resources by using the AWS organization of IAM principals (users and roles). For some services, you grant permissions using resource-based policies to specify the accounts and principals that can access the resource and what actions they can perform on it. Now, you can use a new condition key, aws:PrincipalOrgID, in these policies to require all principals accessing the resource to be from an account in the organization. For example, let’s say you have an Amazon S3 bucket policy and you want to restrict access to only principals from AWS accounts inside of your organization. To accomplish this, you can define the aws:PrincipalOrgID condition and set the value to your organization ID in the bucket policy. Your organization ID is what sets the access control on the S3 bucket. Additionally, when you use this condition, policy permissions apply when you add new accounts to this organization without requiring an update to the policy.
In this post, I walk through the details of the new condition and show you how to restrict access to only principals in your organization using S3.
Condition concepts
Before I introduce the new condition, let’s review the condition element of an IAM policy. A condition is an optional IAM policy element you can use to specify special circumstances under which the policy grants or denies permission. A condition includes a condition key, operator, and value for the condition. There are two types of conditions: service-specific conditions and global conditions. Service-specific conditions are specific to certain actions in an AWS service. For example, the condition key ec2:InstanceType supports specific EC2 actions. Global conditions support all actions across all AWS services.
Now that I’ve reviewed the condition element in an IAM policy, let me introduce the new condition.
AWS:PrincipalOrgID Condition Key
You can use this condition key to apply a filter to the Principal element of a resource-based policy. You can use any string operator, such as StringLike, with this condition and specify the AWS organization ID for as its value.
Condition key
Description
Operator(s)
Value
aws:PrincipalOrgID
Validates if the principal accessing the resource belongs to an account in your organization.
Example: Restrict access to only principals from my organization
Let’s consider an example where I want to give specific IAM principals in my organization direct access to my S3 bucket, 2018-Financial-Data, that contains sensitive financial information. I have two accounts in my AWS organization with multiple account IDs, and only some IAM users from these accounts need access to this financial report.
To grant this access, I author a resource-based policy for my S3 bucket as shown below. In this policy, I list the individuals who I want to grant access. For the sake of this example, let’s say that while doing so, I accidentally specify an incorrect account ID. This means a user named Steve, who is not in an account in my organization, can now access my financial report. To require the principal account to be in my organization, I add a condition to my policy using the global condition key aws:PrincipalOrgID. This condition requires that only principals from accounts in my organization can access the S3 bucket. This means that although Steve is one of the principals in the policy, he can’t access the financial report because the account that he is a member of doesn’t belong to my organization.
In the policy above, I specify the principals that I grant access to using the principal element of the statement. Next, I add s3:GetObject as the action and 2018-Financial-Data/* as the resource to grant read access to my S3 bucket. Finally, I add the new condition key aws:PrincipalOrgID and specify my organization ID in the condition element of the statement to make sure only the principals from the accounts in my organization can access this bucket.
Summary
You can now use the aws:PrincipalOrgID condition key in your resource-based policies to more easily restrict access to IAM principals from accounts in your AWS organization. For more information about this global condition key and policy examples using aws:PrincipalOrgID, read the IAM documentation.
If you have comments about this post, submit them in the Comments section below. If you have questions about or suggestions for this solution, start a new thread on the IAM forum or contact AWS Support.
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AWS Config enables continuous monitoring of your AWS resources, making it simple to assess, audit, and record resource configurations and changes. AWS Config does this through the use of rules that define the desired configuration state of your AWS resources. AWS Config provides a number of AWS managed rules that address a wide range of security concerns such as checking if you encrypted your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, tagged your resources appropriately, and enabled multi-factor authentication (MFA) for root accounts. You can also create custom rules to codify your compliance requirements through the use of AWS Lambda functions.
In this post we’ll show you how to use AWS Config to monitor our Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket ACLs and policies for violations which allow public read or public write access. If AWS Config finds a policy violation, we’ll have it trigger an Amazon CloudWatch Event rule to trigger an AWS Lambda function which either corrects the S3 bucket ACL, or notifies you via Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) that the policy is in violation and allows public read or public write access. We’ll show you how to do this in five main steps.
Enable AWS Config to monitor Amazon S3 bucket ACLs and policies for compliance violations.
Create an IAM Role and Policy that grants a Lambda function permissions to read S3 bucket policies and send alerts through SNS.
Create and configure a CloudWatch Events rule that triggers the Lambda function when AWS Config detects an S3 bucket ACL or policy violation.
Create a Lambda function that uses the IAM role to review S3 bucket ACLs and policies, correct the ACLs, and notify your team of out-of-compliance policies.
Verify the monitoring solution.
Note: This post assumes your compliance policies require the buckets you monitor not allow public read or write access. If you have intentionally open buckets serving static content, for example, you can use this post as a jumping-off point for a solution tailored to your needs.
At the end of this post, we provide an AWS CloudFormation template that implements the solution outlined. The template enables you to deploy the solution in multiple regions quickly.
Important: The use of some of the resources deployed, including those deployed using the provided CloudFormation template, will incur costs as long as they are in use. AWS Config Rules incur costs in each region they are active.
Architecture
Here’s an architecture diagram of what we’ll implement:
Figure 1: Architecture diagram
Step 1: Enable AWS Config and Amazon S3 Bucket monitoring
The following steps demonstrate how to set up AWS Config to monitor Amazon S3 buckets.
If this is your first time using AWS Config, select Get started. If you’ve already used AWS Config, select Settings.
In the Settings page, under Resource types to record, clear the All resources checkbox. In the Specific types list, select Bucket under S3.
Figure 2: The Settings dialog box showing the “Specific types” list
Choose the Amazon S3 bucket for storing configuration history and snapshots. We’ll create a new Amazon S3 bucket.
Figure 3: Creating an S3 bucket
If you prefer to use an existing Amazon S3 bucket in your account, select the Choose a bucket from your account radio button and, using the dropdown, select an existing bucket.
Figure 4: Selecting an existing S3 bucket
Under Amazon SNS topic, check the box next to Stream configuration changes and notifications to an Amazon SNS topic, and then select the radio button to Create a topic.
Alternatively, you can choose a topic that you have previously created and subscribed to.
Figure 5: Selecting a topic that you’ve previously created and subscribed to
If you created a new SNS topic you need to subscribe to it to receive notifications. We’ll cover this in a later step.
Under AWS Config role, choose Create a role (unless you already have a role you want to use). We’re using the auto-suggested role name.
Figure 6: Creating a role
Select Next.
Configure Amazon S3 bucket monitoring rules:
On the AWS Config rules page, search for S3 and choose the s3-bucket-publice-read-prohibited and s3-bucket-public-write-prohibited rules, then click Next.
Figure 7: AWS Config rules dialog
On the Review page, select Confirm. AWS Config is now analyzing your Amazon S3 buckets, capturing their current configurations, and evaluating the configurations against the rules we selected.
If you created a new Amazon SNS topic, open the Amazon SNS Management Console and locate the topic you created:
Figure 8: Amazon SNS topic list
Copy the ARN of the topic (the string that begins with arn:) because you’ll need it in a later step.
Select the checkbox next to the topic, and then, under the Actions menu, select Subscribe to topic.
Select Email as the protocol, enter your email address, and then select Create subscription.
After several minutes, you’ll receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription for notifications for this topic. Select the link to confirm the subscription.
Step 2: Create a Role for Lambda
Our Lambda will need permissions that enable it to inspect and modify Amazon S3 bucket ACLs and policies, log to CloudWatch Logs, and publishing to an Amazon SNS topic. We’ll now set up a custom AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy and role to support these actions and assign them to the Lambda function we’ll create in the next section.
In the AWS Management Console, under Services, select IAM to access the IAM Console.
Create a policy with the following permissions, or copy the following policy:
Select Lambda from the list of services that will use this role.
Select the check box next to the policy you created previously, and then select Next: Review
Name your role, give it a description, and then select Create Role. In this example, we’re naming the role LambdaS3PolicySecuringRole.
Step 3: Create and Configure a CloudWatch Rule
In this section, we’ll create a CloudWatch Rule to trigger the Lambda function when AWS Config determines that your Amazon S3 buckets are non-compliant.
In the AWS Management Console, under Services, select CloudWatch.
On the left-hand side, under Events, select Rules.
Click Create rule.
In Step 1: Create rule, under Event Source, select the dropdown list and select Build custom event pattern.
Copy the following pattern and paste it into the text box:
The pattern matches events generated by AWS Config when it checks the Amazon S3 bucket for public accessibility.
We’ll add a Lambda target later. For now, select your Amazon SNS topic created earlier, and then select Configure details.
Figure 9: The “Create rule” dialog
Give your rule a name and description. For this example, we’ll name ours AWSConfigFoundOpenBucket
Click Create rule.
Step 4: Create a Lambda Function
In this section, we’ll create a new Lambda function to examine an Amazon S3 bucket’s ACL and bucket policy. If the bucket ACL is found to allow public access, the Lambda function overwrites it to be private. If a bucket policy is found, the Lambda function creates an SNS message, puts the policy in the message body, and publishes it to the Amazon SNS topic we created. Bucket policies can be complex, and overwriting your policy may cause unexpected loss of access, so this Lambda function doesn’t attempt to alter your policy in any way.
Get the ARN of the Amazon SNS topic created earlier.
In the AWS Management Console, under Services, select Lambda to go to the Lambda Console.
From the Dashboard, select Create Function. Or, if you were taken directly to the Functions page, select the Create Function button in the upper-right.
On the Create function page:
Choose Author from scratch.
Provide a name for the function. We’re using AWSConfigOpenAccessResponder.
The Lambda function we’ve written is Python 3.6 compatible, so in the Runtime dropdown list, select Python 3.6.
Under Role, select Choose an existing role. Select the role you created in the previous section, and then select Create function.
Figure 10: The “Create function” dialog
We’ll now add a CloudWatch Event based on the rule we created earlier.
In the Add triggers section, select CloudWatch Events. A CloudWatch Events box should appear connected to the left side of the Lambda Function and have a note that states Configuration required.
Figure 11: CloudWatch Events in the “Add triggers” section
From the Rule dropdown box, choose the rule you created earlier, and then select Add.
Scroll up to the Designer section and select the name of your Lambda function.
Delete the default code and paste in the following code:
import boto3
from botocore.exceptions import ClientError
import json
import os
ACL_RD_WARNING = "The S3 bucket ACL allows public read access."
PLCY_RD_WARNING = "The S3 bucket policy allows public read access."
ACL_WRT_WARNING = "The S3 bucket ACL allows public write access."
PLCY_WRT_WARNING = "The S3 bucket policy allows public write access."
RD_COMBO_WARNING = ACL_RD_WARNING + PLCY_RD_WARNING
WRT_COMBO_WARNING = ACL_WRT_WARNING + PLCY_WRT_WARNING
def policyNotifier(bucketName, s3client):
try:
bucketPolicy = s3client.get_bucket_policy(Bucket = bucketName)
# notify that the bucket policy may need to be reviewed due to security concerns
sns = boto3.client('sns')
subject = "Potential compliance violation in " + bucketName + " bucket policy"
message = "Potential bucket policy compliance violation. Please review: " + json.dumps(bucketPolicy['Policy'])
# send SNS message with warning and bucket policy
response = sns.publish(
TopicArn = os.environ['TOPIC_ARN'],
Subject = subject,
Message = message
)
except ClientError as e:
# error caught due to no bucket policy
print("No bucket policy found; no alert sent.")
def lambda_handler(event, context):
# instantiate Amazon S3 client
s3 = boto3.client('s3')
resource = list(event['detail']['requestParameters']['evaluations'])[0]
bucketName = resource['complianceResourceId']
complianceFailure = event['detail']['requestParameters']['evaluations'][0]['annotation']
if(complianceFailure == ACL_RD_WARNING or complianceFailure == PLCY_RD_WARNING):
s3.put_bucket_acl(Bucket = bucketName, ACL = 'private')
elif(complianceFailure == PLCY_RD_WARNING or complianceFailure == PLCY_WRT_WARNING):
policyNotifier(bucketName, s3)
elif(complianceFailure == RD_COMBO_WARNING or complianceFailure == WRT_COMBO_WARNING):
s3.put_bucket_acl(Bucket = bucketName, ACL = 'private')
policyNotifier(bucketName, s3)
return 0 # done
Scroll down to the Environment variables section. This code uses an environment variable to store the Amazon SNS topic ARN.
For the key, enter TOPIC_ARN.
For the value, enter the ARN of the Amazon SNS topic created earlier.
Under Execution role, select Choose an existing role, and then select the role created earlier from the dropdown.
Leave everything else as-is, and then, at the top, select Save.
Step 5: Verify it Works
We now have the Lambda function, an Amazon SNS topic, AWS Config watching our Amazon S3 buckets, and a CloudWatch Rule to trigger the Lambda function if a bucket is found to be non-compliant. Let’s test them to make sure they work.
We have an Amazon S3 bucket, myconfigtestbucket that’s been created in the region monitored by AWS Config, as well as the associated Lambda function. This bucket has no public read or write access set in an ACL or a policy, so it’s compliant.
Figure 12: The “Config Dashboard”
Let’s change the bucket’s ACL to allow public listing of objects:
Figure 13: Screen shot of “Permissions” tab showing Everyone granted list access
After saving, the bucket now has public access. After several minutes, the AWS Config Dashboard notes that there is one non-compliant resource:
Figure 14: The “Config Dashboard” shown with a non-compliant resource
In the Amazon S3 Console, we can see that the bucket no longer has public listing of objects enabled after the invocation of the Lambda function triggered by the CloudWatch Rule created earlier.
Figure 15: The “Permissions” tab showing list access no longer allowed
Notice that the AWS Config Dashboard now shows that there are no longer any non-compliant resources:
Figure 16: The “Config Dashboard” showing zero non-compliant resources
Now, let’s try out the Amazon S3 bucket policy check by configuring a bucket policy that allows list access:
Figure 17: A bucket policy that allows list access
A few minutes after setting this bucket policy on the myconfigtestbucket bucket, AWS Config recognizes the bucket is no longer compliant. Because this is a bucket policy rather than an ACL, we publish a notification to the SNS topic we created earlier that lets us know about the potential policy violation:
Figure 18: Notification about potential policy violation
Knowing that the policy allows open listing of the bucket, we can now modify or delete the policy, after which AWS Config will recognize that the resource is compliant.
Conclusion
In this post, we demonstrated how you can use AWS Config to monitor for Amazon S3 buckets with open read and write access ACLs and policies. We also showed how to use Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon SNS, and Lambda to overwrite a public bucket ACL, or to alert you should a bucket have a suspicious policy. You can use the CloudFormation template to deploy this solution in multiple regions quickly. With this approach, you will be able to easily identify and secure open Amazon S3 bucket ACLs and policies. Once you have deployed this solution to multiple regions you can aggregate the results using an AWS Config aggregator. See this post to learn more.
If you have feedback about this blog post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this blog post, start a new thread on the AWS Config forum or contact AWS Support.
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We launched AWS Support a full decade ago, with Gold and Silver plans focused on Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon SQS. Starting from that initial offering, backed by a small team in Seattle, AWS Support now encompasses thousands of people working from more than 60 locations.
A Quick Look Back Over the years, that offering has matured and evolved in order to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse base of AWS customers. We aim to support you at every step of your cloud adoption journey, from your initial experiments to the time you deploy mission-critical workloads and applications.
We have worked hard to make our support model helpful and proactive. We do our best to provide you with the tools, alerts, and knowledge that will help you to build systems that are secure, robust, and dependable. Here are some of our most recent efforts toward that goal:
Trusted Advisor S3 Bucket Policy Check – AWS Trusted Advisor provides you with five categories of checks and makes recommendations that are designed to improve security and performance. Earlier this year we announced that the S3 Bucket Permissions Check is now free, and available to all AWS users. If you are signed up for the Business or Professional level of AWS Support, you can also monitor this check (and many others) using Amazon CloudWatch Events. You can use this to monitor and secure your buckets without human intervention.
Personal Health Dashboard – This tool provides you with alerts and guidance when AWS is experiencing events that may affect you. You get a personalized view into the performance and availability of the AWS services that underlie your AWS resources. It also generates Amazon CloudWatch Events so that you can initiate automated failover and remediation if necessary.
Well Architected / Cloud Ops Review – We’ve learned a lot about how to architect AWS-powered systems over the years and we want to share everything we know with you! The AWS Well-Architected Framework provide proven, detailed guidance in critical areas including operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. You can read the materials online and you can also sign up for the online training course. If you are signed up for Enterprise support, you can also benefit from our Cloud Ops review.
Infrastructure Event Management – If you are launching a new app, kicking off a big migration, or hosting a large-scale event similar to Prime Day, we are ready with guidance and real-time support. Our Infrastructure Event Management team will help you to assess the readiness of your environment and work with you to identify and mitigate risks ahead of time.
To learn more about how AWS customers have used AWS support to realize all of the benefits that I noted above, watch these videos (and find more on the Customer Testmonials page):
The Amazon retail site makes heavy use of AWS. You can read my post, Prime Day 2017 – Powered by AWS, to learn more about the process of preparing to sustain a record-setting amount of traffic and to accept a like number of orders.
Come and Join Us The AWS Support Team is in continuous hiring mode and we have openings all over the world! Here are a couple of highlights:
Amazon S3 provides comprehensive security and compliance capabilities that meet even the most stringent regulatory requirements. It gives you flexibility in the way you manage data for cost optimization, access control, and compliance. However, because the service is flexible, a user could accidentally configure buckets in a manner that is not secure. For example, let’s say you uploaded files to an Amazon S3 bucket with public read permissions, even though you intended only to share this file with a colleague or a partner. Although this might have accomplished your task to share the file internally, the file is now available to anyone on the internet, even without authentication.
In this blog post, we show you how to prevent your Amazon S3 buckets and objects from allowing public access. We discuss how to secure data in Amazon S3 with a defense-in-depth approach, where multiple security controls are put in place to help prevent data leakage. This approach helps prevent you from allowing public access to confidential information, such as personally identifiable information (PII) or protected health information (PHI).
Preventing your Amazon S3 buckets and objects from allowing public access
Every call to an Amazon S3 service becomes a REST API request. When your request is transformed via a REST call, the permissions are converted into parameters included in the HTTP header or as URL parameters. The Amazon S3 bucket policy allows or denies access to the Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon S3 objects based on policy statements, and then evaluates conditions based on those parameters. To learn more, see Using Bucket Policies and User Policies.
With this in mind, let’s say multiple AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users at Example Corp. have access to an Amazon S3 bucket and the objects in the bucket. Example Corp. wants to share the objects among its IAM users, while at the same time preventing the objects from being made available publicly.
To demonstrate how to do this, we start by creating an Amazon S3 bucket named examplebucket. After creating this bucket, we must apply the following bucket policy. This policy denies any uploaded object (PutObject) with the attribute x-amz-acl having the values public-read, public-read-write, or authenticated-read. This means authenticated users cannot upload objects to the bucket if the objects have public permissions.
“Deny any Amazon S3 request to PutObject or PutObjectAcl in the bucket examplebucket when the request includes one of the following access control lists (ACLs): public-read, public-read-write, or authenticated-read.”
Remember that IAM policies are evaluated not in a first-match-and-exit model. Instead, IAM evaluates first if there is an explicit Deny. If there is not, IAM continues to evaluate if you have an explicit Allow and then you have an implicit Deny.
The above policy creates an explicit Deny. Even when any authenticated user tries to upload (PutObject) an object with public read or write permissions, such as public-read or public-read-write or authenticated-read, the action will be denied. To understand how S3 Access Permissions work, you must understand what Access Control Lists (ACL) and Grants are. You can find the documentation here.
Now let’s continue our bucket policy explanation by examining the next statement.
This statement is very similar to the first statement, except that instead of checking the ACLs, we are checking specific user groups’ grants that represent the following groups:
AuthenticatedUsers group. Represented by http://acs.amazonaws.com/groups/global/AuthenticatedUsers, this group represents all AWS accounts. Access permissions to this group allow any AWS account to access the resource. However, all requests must be signed (authenticated).
AllUsers group. Represented by http://acs.amazonaws.com/groups/global/AllUsers, access permissions to this group allow anyone on the internet access to the resource. The requests can be signed (authenticated) or unsigned (anonymous). Unsigned requests omit the Authentication header in the request.
Now that you know how to deny object uploads with permissions that would make the object public, you just have two statement policies that prevent users from changing the bucket permissions (Denying s3:PutBucketACL from ACL and Denying s3:PutBucketACL from Grants).
Below is how we’re preventing users from changing the bucket permisssions.
As you can see above, the statement is very similar to the Object statements, except that now we use s3:PutBucketAcl instead of s3:PutObjectAcl, the Resource is just the bucket ARN, and the objects have the “/*” in the end of the ARN.
In this section, we showed how to prevent IAM users from accidently uploading Amazon S3 objects with public permissions to buckets. In the next section, we show you how to enforce multiple layers of security controls, such as encryption of data at rest and in transit while serving traffic from Amazon S3.
Securing data on Amazon S3 with defense-in-depth
Let’s say that Example Corp. wants to serve files securely from Amazon S3 to its users with the following requirements:
The data must be encrypted at rest and during transit.
The data must be accessible only by a limited set of public IP addresses.
All requests for data should be handled only by Amazon CloudFront (which is a content delivery network) instead of being directly available from an Amazon S3 URL. If you’re using an Amazon S3 bucket as the origin for a CloudFront distribution, you can grant public permission to read the objects in your bucket. This allows anyone to access your objects either through CloudFront or the Amazon S3 URL. CloudFront doesn’t expose Amazon S3 URLs, but your users still might have access to those URLs if your application serves any objects directly from Amazon S3, or if anyone gives out direct links to specific objects in Amazon S3.
A domain name is required to consume the content. Custom SSL certificate support lets you deliver content over HTTPS by using your own domain name and your own SSL certificate. This gives visitors to your website the security benefits of CloudFront over an SSL connection that uses your own domain name, in addition to lower latency and higher reliability.
To represent defense-in-depth visually, the following diagram contains several Amazon S3 objects (A) in a single Amazon S3 bucket (B). You can encrypt these objects on the server side or the client side. You also can configure the bucket policy such that objects are accessible only through CloudFront, which you can accomplish through an origin access identity (C). You then can configure CloudFront to deliver content only over HTTPS in addition to using your own domain name (D).
Defense-in-depth requirement 1: Data must be encrypted at rest and during transit
Let’s start with the objects themselves. Amazon S3 objects—files in this case—can range from zero bytes to multiple terabytes in size (see service limits for the latest information). Each Amazon S3 bucket includes a collection of objects, and the objects can be uploaded via the Amazon S3 console, AWS CLI, or AWS API.
If you choose to use server-side encryption, Amazon S3 encrypts your objects before saving them on disks in AWS data centers. To encrypt an object at the time of upload, you need to add the x-amz-server-side-encryption header to the request to tell Amazon S3 to encrypt the object using Amazon S3 managed keys (SSE-S3), AWS KMS managed keys (SSE-KMS), or customer-provided keys (SSE-C). There are two possible values for the x-amz-server-side-encryption header: AES256, which tells Amazon S3 to use Amazon S3 managed keys, and aws:kms, which tells Amazon S3 to use AWS KMS managed keys.
The following code example shows a Put request using SSE-S3.
PUT /example-object HTTP/1.1
Host: myBucket.s3.amazonaws.com
Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2016 17:50:00 GMT
Authorization: authorization string
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 11434
x-amz-meta-author: Janet
Expect: 100-continue
x-amz-server-side-encryption: AES256
[11434 bytes of object data]
If you choose to use client-side encryption, you can encrypt data on the client side and upload the encrypted data to Amazon S3. In this case, you manage the encryption process, the encryption keys, and related tools. You encrypt data on the client side by using AWS KMS managed keys or a customer-supplied, client-side master key.
Defense-in-depth requirement 2: Data must be accessible only by a limited set of public IP addresses
At the Amazon S3 bucket level, you can configure permissions through a bucket policy. For example, you can limit access to the objects in a bucket by IP address range or specific IP addresses. Alternatively, you can make the objects accessible only through HTTPS.
The following bucket policy allows access to Amazon S3 objects only through HTTPS (the policy was generated with the AWS Policy Generator). Here the bucket policy explicitly denies ("Effect": "Deny") all read access ("Action": "s3:GetObject") from anybody who browses ("Principal": "*") to Amazon S3 objects within an Amazon S3 bucket if they are not accessed through HTTPS ("aws:SecureTransport": "false").
Defense-in-depth requirement 3: Data must not be publicly accessible directly from an Amazon S3 URL
Next, configure Amazon CloudFront to serve traffic from within the bucket. The use of CloudFront serves several purposes:
CloudFront is a content delivery network that acts as a cache to serve static files quickly to clients.
Depending on the number of requests, the cost of delivery is less than if objects were served directly via Amazon S3.
Objects served through CloudFront can be limited to specific countries.
Access to these Amazon S3 objects is available only through CloudFront. We do this by creating an origin access identity (OAI) for CloudFront and granting access to objects in the respective Amazon S3 bucket only to that OAI. As a result, access to Amazon S3 objects from the internet is possible only through CloudFront; all other means of accessing the objects—such as through an Amazon S3 URL—are denied. CloudFront acts not only as a content distribution network, but also as a host that denies access based on geographic restrictions. You apply these restrictions by updating your CloudFront web distribution and adding a whitelist that contains only a specific country’s name (let’s say Liechtenstein). Alternatively, you could add a blacklist that contains every country except that country. Learn more about how to use CloudFront geographic restriction to whitelist or blacklist a country to restrict or allow users in specific locations from accessing web content in the AWS Support Knowledge Center.
Defense-in-depth requirement 4: A domain name is required to consume the content
To serve content from CloudFront, you must use a domain name in the URLs for objects on your webpages or in your web application. The domain name can be either of the following:
The domain name that CloudFront automatically assigns when you create a distribution, such as d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net
Your own domain name, such as example.com
For example, you might use one of the following URLs to return the file image.jpg:
You use the same URL format whether you store the content in Amazon S3 buckets or at a custom origin, like one of your own web servers.
Instead of using the default domain name that CloudFront assigns for you when you create a distribution, you can add an alternate domain name that’s easier to work with, like example.com. By setting up your own domain name with CloudFront, you can use a URL like this for objects in your distribution: http://example.com/images/image.jpg.
Let’s say that you already have a domain name hosted on Amazon Route 53. You would like to serve traffic from the domain name, request an SSL certificate, and add this to your CloudFront web distribution. The SSL offloading occurs in CloudFront by serving traffic securely from each CloudFront location. You also can configure CloudFront to deliver your content over HTTPS by using your custom domain name and your own SSL certificate. Serving web content through CloudFront reduces response from the origin as requests are redirected to the nearest edge location. This results in faster download times than if the visitor had requested the content from a data center that is located farther away.
Summary
In this post, we demonstrated how you can apply policies to Amazon S3 buckets so that only users with appropriate permissions are allowed to access the buckets. Anonymous users (with public-read/public-read-write permissions) and authenticated users without the appropriate permissions are prevented from accessing the buckets.
We also examined how to secure access to objects in Amazon S3 buckets. The objects in Amazon S3 buckets can be encrypted at rest and during transit. Doing so helps provide end-to-end security from the source (in this case, Amazon S3) to your users.
If you have feedback about this blog post, submit comments in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions about this blog post, start a new thread on the Amazon S3 forum or contact AWS Support.
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