Underlying data access control

When an integrated AWS service requests access to data in an Amazon S3 location that is access-controlled by AWS Lake Formation, Lake Formation supplies temporary credentials to access the data.

To enable Lake Formation to control access to underlying data at an Amazon S3 location, you register that location with Lake Formation.

After you register an Amazon S3 location, you can start granting the following Lake Formation permissions:

Lake Formation data location permissions control the ability to create Data Catalog resources that point to particular Amazon S3 locations. Data location permissions provide an extra layer of security to locations within the data lake. When you grant the CREATE_TABLE or ALTER permission to a principal, you also grant data location permissions to limit the locations for which the principal can create or alter metadata tables.

Amazon S3 locations are buckets or prefixes under a bucket, but not individual Amazon S3 objects.

You can grant data location permissions to a principal by using the Lake Formation console, the API, or the AWS CLI. The general form of a grant is as follows:

grant DATA_LOCATION_ACCESS to principal on S3 location [with grant option]

If you include with grant option, the grantee can grant the permissions to other principals.

Recall that Lake Formation permissions always work in combination with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions for fine-grained access control. For read/write permissions on underlying Amazon S3 data, IAM permissions are granted as follows:

When you register a location, you specify an IAM role that grants read/write permissions on that location. Lake Formation assumes that role when supplying temporary credentials to integrated AWS services. A typical role might have the following policy attached, where the registered location is the bucket awsexamplebucket.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:DeleteObject"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::awsexamplebucket/*"
            ]
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:ListBucket"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::awsexamplebucket"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Lake Formation provides a service-linked role that you can use during registration to automatically create policies like this. For more information, see Using service-linked roles for Lake Formation.

Therefore, registering an Amazon S3 location grants the required IAM s3: permissions on that location, where the permissions are specified by the role used to register the location.

For read/write access to underlying data, in addition to Lake Formation permissions, principals also need the following IAM permission:

lakeformation:GetDataAccess

With this permission, Lake Formation grants the request for temporary credentials to access the data.

This permission is included in the suggested policies in the Lake Formation personas and IAM permissions reference.

To summarize, to enable Lake Formation principals to read and write underlying data with access controlled by Lake Formation permissions:

More on data location permissions

Data location permissions govern the outcome of create and update operations on Data Catalog databases and tables. The rules are as follows:

Consider the scenario shown in the following diagram.

In this diagram:

The following are the results when user datalake_user tries to create a catalog table in a particular database at a particular location.

For more information, see the following: