Identity and access management in Amazon S3

By default, all Amazon S3 resources—buckets, objects, and related subresources (for example, lifecycle configuration and website configuration)—are private. Only the resource owner, the Amazon Web Services account that created it, can access the resource. The resource owner can optionally grant access permissions to others by writing an access policy.

Amazon S3 offers access policy options broadly categorized as resource-based policies and user policies. Access policies that you attach to your resources (buckets and objects) are referred to as resource-based policies. For example, bucket policies and access point policies are resource-based policies. You can also attach access policies to users in your account. These are called user policies. You can choose to use resource-based policies, user policies, or some combination of these to manage permissions to your Amazon S3 resources. You can also use access control lists (ACLs) to grant basic read and write permissions to other Amazon Web Services accounts.

S3 Object Ownership is an Amazon S3 bucket-level setting that you can use to both control ownership of the objects that are uploaded to your bucket and to disable or enable ACLs. By default, Object Ownership is set to the bucket owner enforced setting, and all ACLs are disabled. When ACLs are disabled, the bucket owner owns all the objects in the bucket and manages access to them exclusively by using access-management policies.

A majority of modern use cases in Amazon S3 no longer require the use of ACLs. We recommend that you keep ACLs disabled, except in unusual circumstances where you need to control access for each object individually. With ACLs disabled, you can use policies to control access to all objects in your bucket, regardless of who uploaded the objects to your bucket. For more information, see Controlling ownership of objects and disabling ACLs for your bucket.

Troubleshooting Access Denied (403 Forbidden) errors

For more information about common causes of Access Denied (403 Forbidden) errors in Amazon S3, see Troubleshoot Access Denied (403 Forbidden) errors in Amazon S3.

Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon S3

For a complete list of IAM permissions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon S3, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon S3 in the Service Authorization Reference.

More information

For more information about managing access to your Amazon S3 objects and buckets, see the topics below.