Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Identity and Access Management in Amazon Simple Workflow Service

Access to Amazon SWF requires credentials that Amazon can use to authenticate your requests. These credentials must have permissions to access Amazon resources, such as retrieving event data from other Amazon resources.. The following sections provide details on how you can use Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Amazon SWF to help secure your resources by controlling access to them.

Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an Amazon Web Service that helps an administrator securely control access to Amazon resources. IAM administrators control who can be authenticated (signed in) and authorized (have permissions) to use Amazon SWF resources. IAM is an Amazon Web Service that you can use with no additional charge.

Audience

How you use Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) differs, depending on the work that you do in Amazon SWF.

Service user – If you use the Amazon SWF service to do your job, then your administrator provides you with the credentials and permissions that you need. As you use more Amazon SWF features to do your work, you might need additional permissions. Understanding how access is managed can help you request the right permissions from your administrator. If you cannot access a feature in Amazon SWF, see Troubleshooting Amazon Simple Workflow Service identity and access.

Service administrator – If you're in charge of Amazon SWF resources at your company, you probably have full access to Amazon SWF. It's your job to determine which Amazon SWF features and resources your service users should access. You must then submit requests to your IAM administrator to change the permissions of your service users. Review the information on this page to understand the basic concepts of IAM. To learn more about how your company can use IAM with Amazon SWF, see How Amazon Simple Workflow Service works with IAM.

IAM administrator – If you're an IAM administrator, you might want to learn details about how you can write policies to manage access to Amazon SWF. To view example Amazon SWF identity-based policies that you can use in IAM, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Simple Workflow Service.

Authenticating with identities

Authentication is how you sign in to Amazon using your identity credentials. You must be authenticated (signed in to Amazon) as the Amazon Web Services account root user, as an IAM user, or by assuming an IAM role.

If you access Amazon programmatically, Amazon provides a software development kit (SDK) and a command line interface (CLI) to cryptographically sign your requests by using your credentials. If you don't use Amazon tools, you must sign requests yourself. For more information about using the recommended method to sign requests yourself, see Signing Amazon API requests in the IAM User Guide.

Regardless of the authentication method that you use, you might be required to provide additional security information. For example, Amazon recommends that you use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to increase the security of your account. To learn more, see Using multi-factor authentication (MFA) in Amazon in the IAM User Guide.

Amazon Web Services account root user

When you create an Amazon Web Services account, you begin with one sign-in identity that has complete access to all Amazon Web Services and resources in the account. This identity is called the Amazon Web Services account root user and is accessed by signing in with the email address and password that you used to create the account. We strongly recommend that you don't use the root user for your everyday tasks. Safeguard your root user credentials and use them to perform the tasks that only the root user can perform. For the complete list of tasks that require you to sign in as the root user, see Tasks that require root user credentials in the IAM User Guide.

Federated identity

As a best practice, require human users, including users that require administrator access, to use federation with an identity provider to access Amazon Web Services by using temporary credentials.

A federated identity is a user from your enterprise user directory, a web identity provider, the Amazon Directory Service, or any user that accesses Amazon Web Services by using credentials provided through an identity source. When federated identities access Amazon Web Services accounts, they assume roles, and the roles provide temporary credentials.

IAM users and groups

An IAM user is an identity within your Amazon Web Services account that has specific permissions for a single person or application. Where possible, we recommend relying on temporary credentials instead of creating IAM users who have long-term credentials such as passwords and access keys. However, if you have specific use cases that require long-term credentials with IAM users, we recommend that you rotate access keys. For more information, see Rotate access keys regularly for use cases that require long-term credentials in the IAM User Guide.

An IAM group is an identity that specifies a collection of IAM users. You can't sign in as a group. You can use groups to specify permissions for multiple users at a time. Groups make permissions easier to manage for large sets of users. For example, you could have a group named IAMAdmins and give that group permissions to administer IAM resources.

Users are different from roles. A user is uniquely associated with one person or application, but a role is intended to be assumable by anyone who needs it. Users have permanent long-term credentials, but roles provide temporary credentials. To learn more, see When to create an IAM user (instead of a role) in the IAM User Guide.

IAM roles

An IAM role is an identity within your Amazon Web Services account that has specific permissions. It is similar to an IAM user, but is not associated with a specific person. You can temporarily assume an IAM role in the Amazon Web Services Management Console by switching roles. You can assume a role by calling an Amazon CLI or Amazon API operation or by using a custom URL. For more information about methods for using roles, see Using IAM roles in the IAM User Guide.

IAM roles with temporary credentials are useful in the following situations:

To learn whether to use IAM roles or IAM users, see When to create an IAM role (instead of a user) in the IAM User Guide.

Managing access using policies

You control access in Amazon by creating policies and attaching them to Amazon identities or resources. A policy is an object in Amazon that, when associated with an identity or resource, defines their permissions. Amazon evaluates these policies when a principal (user, root user, or role session) makes a request. Permissions in the policies determine whether the request is allowed or denied. Most policies are stored in Amazon as JSON documents. For more information about the structure and contents of JSON policy documents, see Overview of JSON policies in the IAM User Guide.

Administrators can use Amazon JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

By default, users and roles have no permissions. To grant users permission to perform actions on the resources that they need, an IAM administrator can create IAM policies. The administrator can then add the IAM policies to roles, and users can assume the roles.

IAM policies define permissions for an action regardless of the method that you use to perform the operation. For example, suppose that you have a policy that allows the iam:GetRole action. A user with that policy can get role information from the Amazon Web Services Management Console, the Amazon CLI, or the Amazon API.

Identity-based policies

Identity-based policies are JSON permissions policy documents that you can attach to an identity, such as an IAM user, group of users, or role. These policies control what actions users and roles can perform, on which resources, and under what conditions. To learn how to create an identity-based policy, see Creating IAM policies in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policies can be further categorized as inline policies or managed policies. Inline policies are embedded directly into a single user, group, or role. Managed policies are standalone policies that you can attach to multiple users, groups, and roles in your Amazon Web Services account. Managed policies include Amazon managed policies and customer managed policies. To learn how to choose between a managed policy or an inline policy, see Choosing between managed policies and inline policies in the IAM User Guide.

Resource-based policies

Resource-based policies are JSON policy documents that you attach to a resource. Examples of resource-based policies are IAM role trust policies and Amazon S3 bucket policies. In services that support resource-based policies, service administrators can use them to control access to a specific resource. For the resource where the policy is attached, the policy defines what actions a specified principal can perform on that resource and under what conditions. You must specify a principal in a resource-based policy. Principals can include accounts, users, roles, federated users, or Amazon Web Services.

Resource-based policies are inline policies that are located in that service. You can't use Amazon managed policies from IAM in a resource-based policy.

Access control lists (ACLs)

Access control lists (ACLs) control which principals (account members, users, or roles) have permissions to access a resource. ACLs are similar to resource-based policies, although they do not use the JSON policy document format.

Amazon S3, Amazon WAF, and Amazon VPC are examples of services that support ACLs. To learn more about ACLs, see Access control list (ACL) overview in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide.

Other policy types

Amazon supports additional, less-common policy types. These policy types can set the maximum permissions granted to you by the more common policy types.

Multiple policy types

When multiple types of policies apply to a request, the resulting permissions are more complicated to understand. To learn how Amazon determines whether to allow a request when multiple policy types are involved, see Policy evaluation logic in the IAM User Guide.

Access Control

You can have valid credentials to authenticate your requests, but unless you have permissions you cannot create or access Amazon SWF resources. For example, you must have permissions to invoke Amazon Lambda, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) targets associated with your Amazon SWF rules.

The following sections describe how to manage permissions for Amazon SWF. We recommend that you read the overview first.

Policy actions for Amazon SWF

Administrators can use Amazon JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Action element of a JSON policy describes the actions that you can use to allow or deny access in a policy. Policy actions usually have the same name as the associated Amazon API operation. There are some exceptions, such as permission-only actions that don't have a matching API operation. There are also some operations that require multiple actions in a policy. These additional actions are called dependent actions.

Include actions in a policy to grant permissions to perform the associated operation.

To see a list of Amazon SWF actions, see Resources Defined by Amazon Simple Workflow Service in the Service Authorization Reference.

Policy actions in Amazon SWF use the following prefix before the action:

swf

To specify multiple actions in a single statement, separate them with commas.

"Action": [
      "swf:action1",
      "swf:action2"
         ]

To view examples of Amazon SWF identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Simple Workflow Service.

Policy resources for Amazon SWF

Administrators can use Amazon JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Resource JSON policy element specifies the object or objects to which the action applies. Statements must include either a Resource or a NotResource element. As a best practice, specify a resource using its Amazon Resource Name (ARN). You can do this for actions that support a specific resource type, known as resource-level permissions.

For actions that don't support resource-level permissions, such as listing operations, use a wildcard (*) to indicate that the statement applies to all resources.

"Resource": "*"

To see a list of Amazon SWF resource types and their ARNs, see Actions Defined by Amazon Simple Workflow Service in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn with which actions you can specify the ARN of each resource, see Resources Defined by Amazon Simple Workflow Service.

To view examples of Amazon SWF identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Simple Workflow Service.

Policy condition keys for Amazon SWF

Administrators can use Amazon JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Condition element (or Condition block) lets you specify conditions in which a statement is in effect. The Condition element is optional. You can create conditional expressions that use condition operators, such as equals or less than, to match the condition in the policy with values in the request.

If you specify multiple Condition elements in a statement, or multiple keys in a single Condition element, Amazon evaluates them using a logical AND operation. If you specify multiple values for a single condition key, Amazon evaluates the condition using a logical OR operation. All of the conditions must be met before the statement's permissions are granted.

You can also use placeholder variables when you specify conditions. For example, you can grant an IAM user permission to access a resource only if it is tagged with their IAM user name. For more information, see IAM policy elements: variables and tags in the IAM User Guide.

Amazon supports global condition keys and service-specific condition keys. To see all Amazon global condition keys, see Amazon global condition context keys in the IAM User Guide.

To see a list of Amazon SWF condition keys, see Condition Keys for Amazon Simple Workflow Service in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn with which actions and resources you can use a condition key, see Resources Defined by Amazon Simple Workflow Service.

To view examples of Amazon SWF identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Simple Workflow Service.

ACLs in Amazon SWF

Access control lists (ACLs) control which principals (account members, users, or roles) have permissions to access a resource. ACLs are similar to resource-based policies, although they do not use the JSON policy document format.

ABAC with Amazon SWF

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on attributes. In Amazon, these attributes are called tags. You can attach tags to IAM entities (users or roles) and to many Amazon resources. Tagging entities and resources is the first step of ABAC. Then you design ABAC policies to allow operations when the principal's tag matches the tag on the resource that they are trying to access.

ABAC is helpful in environments that are growing rapidly and helps with situations where policy management becomes cumbersome.

To control access based on tags, you provide tag information in the condition element of a policy using the aws:ResourceTag/key-name, aws:RequestTag/key-name, or aws:TagKeys condition keys.

If a service supports all three condition keys for every resource type, then the value is Yes for the service. If a service supports all three condition keys for only some resource types, then the value is Partial.

For more information about ABAC, see What is ABAC? in the IAM User Guide. To view a tutorial with steps for setting up ABAC, see Use attribute-based access control (ABAC) in the IAM User Guide.

Using temporary credentials with Amazon SWF

Some Amazon Web Services don't work when you sign in using temporary credentials. For additional information, including which Amazon Web Services work with temporary credentials, see Amazon Web Services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

You are using temporary credentials if you sign in to the Amazon Web Services Management Console using any method except a user name and password. For example, when you access Amazon using your company's single sign-on (SSO) link, that process automatically creates temporary credentials. You also automatically create temporary credentials when you sign in to the console as a user and then switch roles. For more information about switching roles, see Switching to a role (console) in the IAM User Guide.

You can manually create temporary credentials using the Amazon CLI or Amazon API. You can then use those temporary credentials to access Amazon. Amazon recommends that you dynamically generate temporary credentials instead of using long-term access keys. For more information, see Temporary security credentials in IAM.

Cross-service principal permissions for Amazon SWF

When you use an IAM user or role to perform actions in Amazon, you are considered a principal. When you use some services, you might perform an action that then initiates another action in a different service. FAS uses the permissions of the principal calling an Amazon Web Service, combined with the requesting Amazon Web Service to make requests to downstream services. FAS requests are only made when a service receives a request that requires interactions with other Amazon Web Services or resources to complete. In this case, you must have permissions to perform both actions. For policy details when making FAS requests, see Forward access sessions.

Service roles for Amazon SWF

A service role is an IAM role that a service assumes to perform actions on your behalf. An IAM administrator can create, modify, and delete a service role from within IAM. For more information, see Creating a role to delegate permissions to an Amazon Web Service in the IAM User Guide.

Service-linked roles for Amazon SWF

A service-linked role is a type of service role that is linked to an Amazon Web Service. The service can assume the role to perform an action on your behalf. Service-linked roles appear in your Amazon Web Services account and are owned by the service. An IAM administrator can view, but not edit the permissions for service-linked roles.

For details about creating or managing service-linked roles, see Amazon services that work with IAM. Find a service in the table that includes a Yes in the Service-linked role column. Choose the Yes link to view the service-linked role documentation for that service.

Identity-based policies for Amazon SWF

Identity-based policies are JSON permissions policy documents that you can attach to an identity, such as an IAM user, group of users, or role. These policies control what actions users and roles can perform, on which resources, and under what conditions. To learn how to create an identity-based policy, see Creating IAM policies in the IAM User Guide.

With IAM identity-based policies, you can specify allowed or denied actions and resources as well as the conditions under which actions are allowed or denied. You can't specify the principal in an identity-based policy because it applies to the user or role to which it is attached. To learn about all of the elements that you can use in a JSON policy, see IAM JSON policy elements reference in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policy examples for Amazon SWF

To view examples of Amazon SWF identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Simple Workflow Service.

Resource-based policies within Amazon SWF

Resource-based policies are JSON policy documents that you attach to a resource. Examples of resource-based policies are IAM role trust policies and Amazon S3 bucket policies. In services that support resource-based policies, service administrators can use them to control access to a specific resource. For the resource where the policy is attached, the policy defines what actions a specified principal can perform on that resource and under what conditions. You must specify a principal in a resource-based policy. Principals can include accounts, users, roles, federated users, or Amazon Web Services.

To enable cross-account access, you can specify an entire account or IAM entities in another account as the principal in a resource-based policy. Adding a cross-account principal to a resource-based policy is only half of establishing the trust relationship. When the principal and the resource are in different Amazon Web Services accounts, an IAM administrator in the trusted account must also grant the principal entity (user or role) permission to access the resource. They grant permission by attaching an identity-based policy to the entity. However, if a resource-based policy grants access to a principal in the same account, no additional identity-based policy is required. For more information, see How IAM roles differ from resource-based policies in the IAM User Guide.