Control access to Amazon S3 from Athena

You can grant access to Amazon S3 locations using identity-based policies, bucket resource policies, access point policies, or any combination of the above. When actors interact with Athena, their permissions pass through Athena to determine what Athena can access. This means that users must have permission to access Amazon S3 buckets in order to query them with Athena.

Whenever you use IAM policies, make sure that you follow IAM best practices. For more information, see Security best practices in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Note that requests to Amazon S3 come from a private IPv4 address for Athena, not the source IP specified in aws:SourceIp. For this reason, you cannot use the aws:SourceIp condition to deny access to Amazon S3 actions in a given IAM policy. You also cannot restrict or allow access to Amazon S3 resources based on the aws:SourceVpc or aws:SourceVpce condition keys.

Use identity-based policies to control access to Amazon S3 buckets

Identity-based policies are attached to an IAM user, group, or role. These policies let you specify what that identity can do (its permissions). You can use identity-based policies to control access to your Amazon S3 buckets.

The following identity-based policy allows Read and Write access to objects in a specific Amazon S3 bucket. To use this policy, replace the italicized placeholder text with your own values.

{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement":
    [
        {
            "Sid": "ListObjectsInBucket",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": ["s3:ListBucket"],
            "Resource":
                ["arn:aws:s3:::amzn-s3-demo-bucket"]
        }, 
        {
            "Sid": "AllObjectActions",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "s3:*Object",
            "Resource":
                ["arn:aws:s3:::amzn-s3-demo-bucket/*"]
        }
    ]
}

Use bucket resource policies to control access to Amazon S3 buckets

You can use Amazon S3 bucket policies to secure access to objects in your buckets so that only users with the appropriate permissions can access them. For guidance on creating your Amazon S3 policy, see Adding a bucket policy by using the Amazon S3 console in the Amazon S3 User Guide.

The following example permissions policy limits a user to reading objects that have the environment: production tag key and value. The example policy uses the s3:ExistingObjectTag condition key to specify the tag key and value.

{
    "Version":"2012-10-17",
    "Statement":
    [
        {
            "Principal":{"AWS":"arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/JohnDoe"
        },
            "Effect":"Allow",
            "Action": [ "s3:GetObject", "s3:GetObjectVersion" ],
            "Resource":"arn:aws:s3:::amzn-s3-demo-bucket/*",
            "Condition":
                {
                    "StringEquals":{"s3:ExistingObjectTag/environment":"production"
                } 
    ]
}

For more bucket policy examples, see Examples of Amazon S3 bucket policies in the Amazon S3 User Guide.

Use Amazon S3 access points for more precise control over bucket access

If you have a shared dataset in an Amazon S3 bucket, maintaining a single bucket policy that manages access for hundreds of use cases can be challenging.

Amazon S3 bucket access points, policies, and aliases can help solve this issue. A bucket can have multiple access points, each with a policy that controls access to the bucket in a different way.

For each access point that you create, Amazon S3 generates an alias that represents the access point. Because the alias is in Amazon S3 bucket name format, you can use the alias in the LOCATION clause of your CREATE TABLE statements in Athena. Athena's access to the bucket is then controlled by the policy for the access point that the alias represents.

For more information, see Specify a table location in Amazon S3 and Using access points in the Amazon S3 User Guide.

Use CalledVia context keys to allow only calls from Athena to another service

For added security, you can use the aws:CalledVia global condition context key. The aws:CalledVia condition key contains a list of services that you allow to call another service. For example, you can allow InvokeFunction calls to AWS Lambda only if the calls come from Athena by specifying the Athena service principal name athena.amazonaws.com for the aws:CalledVia context key. For more information, see Use CalledVia context keys for Athena.

Additional resources

For detailed information and examples about how to grant Amazon S3 access, see the following resources: