Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on attributes. In AWS, these attributes are called tags. ABAC allows you the same fine grained access control model like "Role Based Access Control-RBAC", in addition to that you can easily scale your permissions to any number of resources, identities. Read More

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Our customer has a team of unicorns. They are working on two projects projectRed & projectBlue. The company has decided to reduce permissions overhead and not write complex policies. The objective is teams should have access to resources from their own projects and nothing else.

• projectRed- Will have the following tags.

  • teamName=teamUnicorn
  • projectName=projectRed

• projectBlue Will have the following tags.

  • teamName=teamUnicorn
  • projectName=projectBlue

1. Prerequisites

   This demo, instructions, scripts and cloudformation template is designed to be run in us-east-1. With few modifications you can try it out in other regions as well(Not covered here).

   • AWS CLI pre-configured - Get help here
   • Optional AWS CDK Installed & Configured - Get help here

2. Environment Setup

   In this repo, I have included a cloudformation template that provisions the resources to setup a fully automatic policy remedation engine.

   • IAM Group: teamUnicorn
     • Allows assume role privileges only when member of teamUnicorn
   • IAM User: redRosy member of projectRed part of teamUnicorn
   • EC2 Instances
     • projectRed Web Server
     • projectBlue Web Server
   • IAM Roles:
     • teamUnicornProjectRedRole - With condition matching for team and project tags
     • teamUnicornProjectBlueRole - With condition matching for team and project tags

   Note: Sample commands to test the solution can be found in the output section of the cloudformation template

3. Deployment

You have couple of options to set this up in your account, You can use AWS CDK or use the cloudformation template generated by CDK. All the necessary steps are baked into the templates, you can launch it and try it out.

1. Method 1: Using AWS CDK

   If you have AWS CDK installed you can close this repository and deploy the stack with,

   # If you DONT have cdk installed
   npm install -g aws-cdk
   
   git clone https://github.com/miztiik/attribute-based-access-control-ec2.git
   cd attribute-based-access-control-ec2
   source .env/bin/activate
   pip install -r requirements.txt

   The very first time you deploy an AWS CDK app into an environment (account/region), you’ll need to install a bootstrap stack, Otherwise just go aheadand deploy using cdk deploy

   cdk bootstrap
   cdk deploy

2. Method 2: Using AWS CloudFormation

   Look for the cloudformation template here: cdk.out directory, From the CLI,

   aws cloudformation deploy \
       --template-file ./cdk.out/ABAC-EC2.template.json \
       --stack-name "MiztiikAutomationStack" \
       --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM

3. Testing the solution

   In the Outputs section of the cloudformation template we have,

   • IAM User redRosy credentials, login url and assume role arn(link)
   • projectRed WebServer Ip

   This is what, we are going to do now,

   1. Login to AWS Console as redRosy user.
   2. Switch Role using the url from the cloudformation
   3. Access EC2 Service
   4. Try to STOP projectBlue web server - Observe Results
   5. Try to STOP projectRed web server - Observe Results
   6. Try to LAUNCH new web server with tags,
      • teamName=teamUnicorn
      • projectName=projectRed
   7. Try to LAUNCH instane with any other tags
   8. Try to edit tags of other(non projectRed) instances

   User redRosy should be able to manage resources owned by his team projectRed only and nothing more. Now that we have confirmed the solution is working, you can extend the solution as required.

4. Next Steps: Do Try This

   • Add Break Glass Policy
   • Add teamUnicorn Admin Role and Privileges
   • Extend to EBS/AMIs etc

5. Additional Comments

   Attribute based Access Control is one of the many tools to implement security. Do consider

   • Who has permissions to change IAM Policy permissions?
   • Are you auditing those privileges automatically?
   • If all else fails, do you have mechanisms that will automatically respond to events?

6. CleanUp

   If you want to destroy all the resources created by the stack, Execute the below command to delete the stack, or you can delete the stack from console as well

   # Delete the CF Stack
   aws cloudformation delete-stack \
       --stack-name "MiztiikAutomationStack" \
       --region "${AWS_REGION}"

   This is not an exhaustive list, please carry out other necessary steps as maybe applicable to your needs.

Buy me a coffee ☕ through Paypal, or You can reach out to get more details through here.

1. IAM policy tags to restrict Access

2. Working Backwards: Tags for your AWS resources

3. Example Policies EC2

4. Specifying Conditions in a S3 Policy

5. AWS Services That Work with IAM

6. AWS Security Blog

We accept contributions from the community. To submit changes:

1. Fork this repository.
2. Create a new feature branch.
3. Make your changes.
4. Submit a pull request with an explanation of your changes or additions.

We will review and work with you to release the code.

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