Managing LF-Tags for metadata access control - Amazon Lake Formation
Life cycle of a LF-TagComparison of Lake Formation tag-based access control to IAM attribute-based access control
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Managing LF-Tags for metadata access control

To use the Lake Formation tag-based access control (LF-TBAC) method to secure Data Catalog resources (databases, tables, and columns), you create LF-Tags, assign them to resources, and grant LF-Tag permissions to principals.

Before you can assign LF-Tags to Data Catalog resources or grant permissions to principals, you need to define LF-Tags. Only a data lake administrator or a principal with LF-Tag creator permissions can create LF-Tags.

LF-Tag creators

LF-Tag creator is a non-admin principal who has permissions to create and manage LF-Tags. Data lake administrators can add LF-Tag creators using the Lake Formation console or CLI. LF-Tag creators have implicit Lake Formation permissions to update, and delete LF-Tags, to assign LF-Tags to resources, and to grant LF-Tag permissions and LF-Tag value permissions to other principals.

With LF-Tag creator roles, data lake administrators can delegate tag management tasks such as creating and updating tag keys and values to non-admin principals. Data lake administrators can also grant LF-Tag creators grantable Create LF-Tag permissions. Then, the LF-Tag creator can grant the permission to create LF-Tags to other principals.

You can grant two types of permissions on LF-Tags:

  • LF-Tag permissions - Create LF-Tag, Alter, and Drop. These permissions are required to create, update, and delete LF-Tags.

    Data lake administrators and LF-Tag creators implicitly have these permissions on the LF-Tags they create and can grant these permissions explicitly to principals to manage tags in the data lake.

  • LF-Tag key-value pair permissions - Assign, Describe, and Grant with LF-Tag expressions. These permissions are required to assign LF-Tags to Data Catalog databases, tables, and columns, and to grant permissions on the resources to principals using Lake Formation tag-based access control. LF-Tag creators implicitly receive these permissions when creating LF-Tags.

After receiving the Create LF-Tag permission and successfully creating LF-Tags, the LF-Tag creator can assign LF-Tags to resources and grant LF-Tag permissions (Create LF-Tag, Alter, Drop, and ) to other non-administrative princiapals to manage tags in the data lake. You can manage LF-Tags by using the Lake Formation console, the API, or the Amazon Command Line Interface (Amazon CLI).

Note

Data lake administrators have implicit Lake Formation permissions to create, update, and delete LF-Tags, to assign LF-Tags to resources, and to grant LF-Tag permissions to principals.

For best practices and considerations, see Lake Formation tag-based access control best practices and considerations

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Life cycle of a LF-Tag

  1. The LF-Tag creator Michael creates a LF-Tag module=Customers.

  2. Michael grants Associate on the LF-Tag to the data engineer Eduardo. Granting Associate implicitly grants Describe.

  3. Michael grants Super on the table Custs to Eduardo with the grant option, so that Eduardo can assign LF-Tags to the table. For more information, see Assigning LF-Tags to Data Catalog resources.

  4. Eduardo assigns the LF-Tag module=customers to the table Custs.

  5. Michael makes the following grant to data engineer Sandra (in pseudo-code).

    GRANT (SELECT, INSERT ON TABLES) ON TAGS module=customers TO Sandra WITH GRANT OPTION

  6. Sandra makes the following grant to data analyst Maria.

    GRANT (SELECT ON TABLES) ON TAGS module=customers TO Maria

    Maria can now run queries on the Custs table.

See also

Comparison of Lake Formation tag-based access control to IAM attribute-based access control

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 resources, including IAM entities (users or roles) and to Amazon resources. You can create a single ABAC policy or small set of policies for your IAM principals. These ABAC policies can be designed to allow operations when the principal's tag matches the resource tag. ABAC is helpful in environments that are growing rapidly and helps with situations where policy management becomes cumbersome.

Cloud security and governance teams use IAM to define access policies and security permissions for all resources including Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon EC2 instances and any resources you can reference with an ARN. The IAM policies define broad (coarse-grained) permissions to your data lake resources, for example, to allow or deny access at Amazon S3 bucket or prefix level or database level. For more information about IAM ABAC, see What is ABAC for Amazon? in the IAM User Guide.

For example, you can create three roles with the project-access tag key. Set the tag value of the first role to Dev, the second to Marketing, and the third to Support. Assign tags with the appropriate value to resources. You can then use a single policy that allows access when the role and the resource are tagged with the same value for project-access.

Data governance teams use Lake Formation to define fine-grained permissions to specific data lake resources. LF-Tags are assigned to Data Catalog resources (databases, tables, and columns) and are granted to principals. A principal with LF-Tags that match the LF-Tags of a resource can access that resource. Lake Formation permissions are secondary to IAM permissions. For example, if IAM permissions don't allow a user access to a data lake, Lake Formation doesn't grant access to any resource within that data lake to that user, even if the principal and resource have matching LF-Tags.

Lake Formation tag-based access control (LF-TBAC) works with IAM ABAC to provide additional levels of permissions for your Lake Formation data and resources.

  • Lake Formation TBAC permissions scale with innovation. It's no longer necessary for an administrator to update existing policies to allow access to new resources. For example, assume that you use an IAM ABAC strategy with the project-access tag to provide access to specific databases within Lake Formation. Using LF-TBAC, the LF-Tag Project=SuperApp is assigned to specific tables or columns, and the same LF-Tag is granted to a developer for that project. Through IAM, the developer can access the database, and LF-TBAC permissions grant the developer further access to specific tables or columns within tables. If a new table is added to the project, the Lake Formation administrator only needs to assign the tag to the new table for the developer to be given access to the table.

  • Lake Formation TBAC requires fewer IAM policies. Because you use IAM policies to grant high level access to Lake Formation resources and Lake Formation TBAC for managing more precise data access, you create fewer IAM policies.

  • Using Lake Formation TBAC, teams can change and grow quickly. This is because permissions for new resources are automatically granted based on attributes. For example, if a new developer joins the project, it's easy to grant this developer access by associating the IAM role to the user and then assigning the required LF-Tags to the user. You don't have to change the IAM policy to support a new project or to create new LF-Tags.

  • Finer-grained permissions are possible using Lake Formation TBAC. IAM policies grant access to the top-level resources, such as Data Catalog databases or tables. Using Lake Formation TBAC, you can grant access to specific tables or columns that contain specific data values.

Note

IAM tags are not the same as LF-Tags. These tags are not interchangeable. LF-Tags are used to grant Lake Formation permissions and IAM tags are used to define IAM policies.