Key management - Amazon Simple Queue Service
Configuring Amazon KMS permissionsUnderstanding the data key reuse periodEstimating Amazon KMS costsAmazon KMS errors
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Key management

Amazon SQS integrates with the Amazon Key Management Service (KMS) to manage KMS keys for server-side encryption (SSE). See Encryption at rest for SSE information and key management definitions. Amazon SQS uses KMS keys to validate and secure the data keys that encrypt and decrypt the messages. The following sections provide information about working with KMS keys and data keys in the Amazon SQS service.

Configuring Amazon KMS permissions

Every KMS key must have a key policy. Note that you cannot modify the key policy of an Amazon managed KMS key for Amazon SQS. The policy for this KMS key includes permissions for all principals in the account (that are authorized to use Amazon SQS) to use encrypted queues.

For a customer managed KMS key, you must configure the key policy to add permissions for each queue producer and consumer. To do this, you name the producer and consumer as users in the KMS key policy. For more information about Amazon KMS permissions, see Amazon KMS resources and operations or Amazon KMS API permissions reference in the Amazon Key Management Service Developer Guide.

Alternatively, you can specify the required permissions in an IAM policy assigned to the principals that produce and consume encrypted messages. For more information, see Using IAM Policies with Amazon KMS in the Amazon Key Management Service Developer Guide.

Note

While you can configure global permissions to send to and receive from Amazon SQS, Amazon KMS requires explicitly naming the full ARN of KMS keys in specific regions in the Resource section of an IAM policy.

Configure KMS permissions for Amazon services

Several Amazon services act as event sources that can send events to Amazon SQS queues. To allow these event sources to work with encrypted queues, you must create a customer managed KMS key and add permissions in the key policy for the service to use the required Amazon KMS API methods. Perform the following steps to configure the permissions.

  1. Create a customer managed KMS key. For more information, see Creating Keys in the Amazon Key Management Service Developer Guide.

  2. To allow the Amazon service event source to use the kms:GenerateDataKey and kms:Decrypt API methods, add the following statement to the KMS key policy.

    {
   "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [{
         "Effect": "Allow",
         "Principal": {
            "Service": "service.amazonaws.com"
         },
         "Action": [
            "kms:GenerateDataKey",
            "kms:Decrypt"
         ],
         "Resource": "*"
       }]
}

    Replace "service" in the above example with the Service name of the event source. Event sources include the following services.

    Event source Service name
    Amazon CloudWatch Events events.amazonaws.com
    Amazon S3 event notifications s3.amazonaws.com
    Amazon SNS topic subscriptions sns.amazonaws.com

  3. Configure an existing SSE queue using the ARN of your KMS key.

  4. Provide the ARN of the encrypted queue to the event source.

Configure KMS permissions for producers

When the data key reuse period expires, the producer's next call to SendMessage or SendMessageBatch also triggers calls to kms:GenerateDataKey and kms:Decrypt. The call to kms:Decrypt is to verify the integrity of the new data key before using it. Therefore, the producer must have the kms:GenerateDataKey and kms:Decrypt permissions for the KMS key.

Add the following statement to the IAM policy of the producer. Remember to use the correct ARN values for the key resource and the queue resource.

{
   "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [{
         "Effect": "Allow",
         "Action": [
            "kms:GenerateDataKey",
            "kms:Decrypt"
         ],
         "Resource":  "arn:aws-cn:kms:us-east-2:123456789012:key/1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab"
         }, {
         "Effect": "Allow",
         "Action": [
            "sqs:SendMessage" 
         ],
         "Resource": "arn:aws-cn:sqs:*:123456789012:MyQueue"
      }]
}

Configure KMS permissions for consumers

When the data key reuse period expires, the consumer's next call to ReceiveMessage also triggers a call to kms:Decrypt, to verify the integrity of the new data key before using it. Therefore, the consumer must have the kms:Decrypt permission for any KMS key that is used to encrypt the messages in the specified queue. If the queue acts as a dead-letter queue, the consumer must also have the kms:Decrypt permission for any KMS key that is used to encrypt the messages in the source queue. Add the following statement to the IAM policy of the consumer. Remember to use the correct ARN values for the key resource and the queue resource.

{
   "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [{
         "Effect": "Allow",
         "Action": [
            "kms:Decrypt"
         ],
         "Resource": "arn:aws-cn:kms:us-east-2:123456789012:key/1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab"
         }, {
         "Effect": "Allow",
         "Action": [
            "sqs:ReceiveMessage"
         ],
         "Resource": "arn:aws-cn:sqs:*:123456789012:MyQueue"
      }]
}

Configure KMS permissions with confused deputy protection

When the principal in a key policy statement is an Amazon service principal, you can use the aws:SourceArn or aws:SourceAccount global condition keys to protect against the confused deputy scenario. To use these condition keys, set the value to the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the resource that is being encrypted. If you don't know the ARN of the resource, use aws:SourceAccount instead.

In this KMS key policy, a specific resource from service that is owned by account 111122223333 is allowed to call KMS for Decrypt and GenerateDataKey actions, which occur during SSE usage of Amazon SQS.

{
	"Version": "2012-10-17",
	"Statement": [{
		"Effect": "Allow",
		"Principal": {
            "Service": "<replaceable>service</replaceable>.amazonaws.com"
		},
		"Action": [
			"kms:GenerateDataKey",
			"kms:Decrypt"
		],
		"Resource": "*",
		"Condition": {
			"ArnEquals": {
				"aws:SourceArn": [
					"arn:aws:service::111122223333:resource"
				]
			}
		}
	}]
}

When using SSE enabled Amazon SQS queues, the following services support aws:SourceArn:

  • Amazon SNS

  • Amazon S3

  • CloudWatch Events

  • Amazon Lambda

  • CodeBuild

  • Amazon Connect Customer Profiles

  • Amazon Auto Scaling

  • Amazon Chime

Understanding the data key reuse period

The data key reuse period defines the maximum duration for Amazon SQS to reuse the same data key. When the data key reuse period ends, Amazon SQS generates a new data key. Note the following guidelines about the reuse period.

  • A shorter reuse period provides better security but results in more calls to Amazon KMS, which might incur charges beyond the Free Tier.

  • Although the data key is cached separately for encryption and for decryption, the reuse period applies to both copies of the data key.

  • When the data key reuse period ends, the next call to SendMessage or SendMessageBatch typically triggers a call to the Amazon KMS GenerateDataKey method to get a new data key. Also, the next calls to SendMessage and ReceiveMessage will each trigger a call to Amazon KMS Decrypt to verify the integrity of the data key before using it.

  • Principals (Amazon Web Services accounts or users) don't share data keys (messages sent by unique principals always get unique data keys). Thus, the volume of calls to Amazon KMS is a multiple of the number of unique principals in use during the data key reuse period:

Estimating Amazon KMS costs

To predict costs and better understand your Amazon bill, you might want to know how often Amazon SQS uses your KMS key.

Note

Although the following formula can give you a very good idea of expected costs, actual costs might be higher because of the distributed nature of Amazon SQS.

To calculate the number of API requests (R) per queue, use the following formula:

R = (B / D) * (2 * P + C)

B is the billing period (in seconds).

D is the data key reuse period (in seconds).

P is the number of producing principals that send to the Amazon SQS queue.

C is the number of consuming principals that receive from the Amazon SQS queue.

Important

In general, producing principals incur double the cost of consuming principals. For more information, see Understanding the data key reuse period.

If the producer and consumer have different users, the cost increases.

The following are example calculations. For exact pricing information, see Amazon Key Management Service Pricing.

Example 1: Calculating the number of Amazon KMS API calls for 2 principals and 1 queue

This example assumes the following:

  • The billing period is January 1-31 (2,678,400 seconds).

  • The data key reuse period is set to 5 minutes (300 seconds).

  • There is 1 queue.

  • There is 1 producing principal and 1 consuming principal.

(2,678,400 / 300) * (2 * 1 + 1) = 26,784

Example 2: Calculating the number of Amazon KMS API calls for multiple producers and consumers and 2 queues

This example assumes the following:

  • The billing period is February 1-28 (2,419,200 seconds).

  • The data key reuse period is set to 24 hours (86,400 seconds).

  • There are 2 queues.

  • The first queue has 3 producing principals and 1 consuming principal.

  • The second queue has 5 producing principals and 2 consuming principals.

(2,419,200 / 86,400 * (2 * 3 + 1)) + (2,419,200 / 86,400 * (2 * 5 + 2)) = 532

Amazon KMS errors

When you work with Amazon SQS and Amazon KMS, you might encounter errors. The following references describe the errors and possible troubleshooting solutions.