Today, we’re announcing a new capability in AWS IAM Access Analyzer that helps security teams verify which AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and users have access to their critical AWS resources. This new feature provides comprehensive visibility into access granted from within your Amazon Web Services (AWS) organization, complementing the existing external access analysis.
Security teams in regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, need to verify access to sensitive data stores like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets containing credit card information or healthcare records. Previously, teams had to invest considerable time and resources conducting manual reviews of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies or rely on pattern-matching tools to understand internal access patterns.
The new IAM Access Analyzer internal access findings identify who within your AWS organization has access to your critical AWS resources. It uses automated reasoning to collectively evaluate multiple policies, including service control policies (SCPs), resource control policies (RCPs), and identity-based policies, and generates findings when a user or role has access to your S3 buckets, Amazon DynamoDB tables, or Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) snapshots. The findings are aggregated in a unified dashboard, simplifying access review and management. You can use Amazon EventBridge to automatically notify development teams of new findings to remove unintended access. Internal access findings provide security teams with the visibility to strengthen access controls on their critical resources and help compliance teams demonstrate access control audit requirements.
Let’s try it out
To begin using this new capability, you can enable IAM Access Analyzer to monitor specific resources using the AWS Management Console. Navigate to IAM and select Analyzer settings under the Access reports section of the left-hand navigation menu. From here, select Create analyzer.
From the Create analyzer page, select the option of Resource analysis – Internal access. Under Analyzer details, you can customize your analyzer’s name to whatever you prefer or use the automatically generated name. Next, you need to select your Zone of trust. If your account is the management account for an AWS organization, you can choose to monitor resources across all accounts within your organization or the current account you’re logged in to. If your account is a member account of an AWS organization or a standalone account, then you can monitor resources within your account.
The zone of trust also determines which IAM roles and users are considered in scope for analysis. An organization zone of trust analyzer evaluates all IAM roles and users in the organization for potential access to a resource, whereas an account zone of trust only evaluates the IAM roles and users in that account.
For this first example, we assume our account is the management account and create an analyzer with the organization as the zone of trust.
Next, we need to select the resources we wish to analyze. Selecting Add resources gives us three options. Let’s first examine how we can select resources by identifying the account and resource type for analysis.
You can use Add resources by account dialog to choose resource types through a new interface. Here, we select All supported resource types and select the accounts we wish to monitor. This will create an analyzer that monitors all supported resource types. You can either select accounts through the organization structure (shown in the following screenshot) or paste in account IDs using the Enter AWS account ID option.
You can also choose to use the Define specific resource types dialog, which you can use to pick from a list of supported resource types (as shown in the following screenshot). By creating an analyzer with this configuration, IAM Access Analyzer will continually monitor both existing and new resources of the selected type within the account, checking for internal access.
After you’ve completed your selections, choose Add resources.
Alternatively, you can use the Add resources by resource ARN option.
Or you can use the Add resources by uploading a CSV file option to configure monitoring a list of specific resources at scale.
After you’ve completed the creation of your analyzer, IAM Access Analyzer will analyze policies daily and generate findings that show access granted to IAM roles and users within your organization. The updated IAM Access Analyzer dashboard now provides a resource-centric view. The Active findings section summarizes access into three distinct categories: public access, external access outside of the organization (requires creation of a separate external access analyzer), and access within the organization. The Key resources section highlights the top resources with active findings across the three categories. You can see a list of all analyzed resources by selecting View all active findings or Resource analysis on the left-hand navigation menu.
On the Resource analysis page, you can filter the list of all analyzed resources for further analysis.
When you select a specific resource, any available external access and internal access findings are listed on the Resource details page. Use this feature to evaluate all possible access to your selected resource. For each finding, IAM Access Analyzer provides you with detailed information about allowed IAM actions and their conditions, including the impact of any applicable SCPs and RCPs. This means you can verify that access is appropriately restricted and meets least-privilege requirements.
Pricing and availability
This new IAM Access Analyzer capability is available today in all commercial Regions. Pricing is based on the number of critical AWS resources monitored per month. External access analysis remains available at no additional charge. Pricing for EventBridge applies separately.
To learn more about IAM Access Analyzer and get started with analyzing internal access to your critical resources, visit the IAM Access Analyzer documentation.