Managing access using policies
You 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.
By default, users and roles have no permissions. To grant users permission to perform actions on the resources that they need, an IAM administrator can create IAM policies. The administrator can then add the IAM policies to roles, and users can assume the roles.
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 iam:GetRole action. A user with that policy can get role information from the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS
API.
Identity-based policies
Identity-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 Define custom IAM permissions with customer managed 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 Choose between managed policies and inline policies in the IAM User Guide.
Resource-based policies
Resource-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 types
AWS supports additional, less-common policy types. These policy types can set the maximum permissions granted to you by the more common policy types.
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Permissions boundaries – A permissions boundary is an advanced feature in which you set the maximum permissions that an identity-based policy can grant to an IAM entity (IAM user or role). You can set a permissions boundary for an entity. The resulting permissions are the intersection of an entity's identity-based policies and its permissions boundaries. Resource-based policies that specify the user or role in the
Principalfield are not limited by the permissions boundary. An explicit deny in any of these policies overrides the allow. For more information about permissions boundaries, see Permissions boundaries for IAM entities in the IAM User Guide. -
Service control policies (SCPs) – SCPs are JSON policies that specify the maximum permissions for an organization or organizational unit (OU) in AWS Organizations. AWS Organizations is a service for grouping and centrally managing multiple AWS accounts that your business owns. If you enable all features in an organization, then you can apply service control policies (SCPs) to any or all of your accounts. The SCP limits permissions for entities in member accounts, including each AWS account root user. For more information about Organizations and SCPs, see Service control policies in the AWS Organizations User Guide.
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Resource control policies (RCPs) – RCPs are JSON policies that you can use to set the maximum available permissions for resources in your accounts without updating the IAM policies attached to each resource that you own. The RCP limits permissions for resources in member accounts and can impact the effective permissions for identities, including the AWS account root user, regardless of whether they belong to your organization. For more information about Organizations and RCPs, including a list of AWS services that support RCPs, see Resource control policies (RCPs) in the AWS Organizations User Guide.
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Session policies – Session policies are advanced policies that you pass as a parameter when you programmatically create a temporary session for a role or federated user. The resulting session's permissions are the intersection of the user or role's identity-based policies and the session policies. Permissions can also come from a resource-based policy. An explicit deny in any of these policies overrides the allow. For more information, see Session policies in the IAM User Guide.
Multiple policy types
When 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.
