AWS - Policy types

February 19, 2022

Identity-based policies

  • Attach managed and inline policies to IAM identities (users, groups to which users belong, or rules).
  • Grant permissions to an identity

Resource-based policy

  • Attach inline policies to resources g. S3 bucket policy, IAM trust policy
  • Grant permissions to the principal specified.
  • Principals can be in the same account as the resource or in other accounts

Permissions boundary

  • Defines the maximum permissions that the identity-based policies can grant to an identity
  • Does not grant permissions.
  • Do not define the maximum permissions that a resource-based policy can grant to an entity

Organizations SCPs

  • Define maximum permissions for account members of an organisation or organisation unit.
  • Limit permissions that identity-based policies or resource-based policies can grant to entities with the account
  • Does not grant permissions

Session policies

  • Advanced policies that you pass as a parameter when you programatically create a tempory session for a role/federated user.
  • Permissions are the intersection of the identity-based policy of the entity used to create the session and the session policies
  • Permissions can also come from a resource-based policy
  • A resource-based policy can specify the ARN of the session as the principal. In this case the permissions from the resource-based policy are added after the session is created. The resource-based policy is not limited by the session policy. The resulting session has all the permissions of the resource-based policy plus the intersection of the identity-based policy and the session policy.
  • A permissions boundary can set the max. permissions for a user/role that is used to create a session. In this case, the resulting session permission is the intersection of the session policy, the resource-based policy and the identity-based policy. However, a permissions boundary does not limit permissions granted by a resource-based policy that specifies the ARN of the resulting session.

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