Multi-tenancy security recommendations - Amazon Cognito
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Multi-tenancy security recommendations

To help make your application more secure, we recommend the following:

  • Validate tenancy in your app with Amazon Verified Permissions. Build policies that examine user pool, app client, group, or custom-attribute entitlement before you permit a user's request in your application. Amazon created Verified Permissions identity sources with Amazon Cognito user pools in mind. Verified Permissions has additional guidance for multi-tenancy management.

  • Use only a verified email address to authorize user access to a tenant based on domain match. Do not trust email addresses and phone numbers unless your app verifies them, or the external IdP gives a proof of verification. For more details on setting these permissions, see Attribute Permissions and Scopes.

  • Use immutable, or read-only, custom attributes for the user profile attributes that identify tenants. You can only set the value of immutable attributes when you create a user or a user signs up in your user pool. Also, give app clients read-only access to the attributes.

  • Use 1:1 mapping between a tenant's external IdP and application client to prevent unauthorized cross-tenant access. A user who has been authenticated by an external IdP, and who has a valid Amazon Cognito session cookie, can access other tenant apps that trust the same IdP.

  • When you implement tenant-matching and authorization logic in your application, restrict users so that they can't modify the criteria that authorize user access to the tenants. Also, if an external IdP is being used for federation, restrict tenant identity provider administrators so that they can't modify user access.