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AppDefects
Community Champion

Preventing Leaky AWS S3 Buckets

There are at least eight different ways an AWS S3 bucket can inadvertently become open to the public and become the next headline in the New York Times:

 

  1. Bucket ACLs: This is an XML document that defines the first layer of access. By default, only the account owner has access, but this can be opened up to other AWS accounts or the public.
  2. Bucket Policies: These are super-flexible JSON policies that allow you to set things such as IP-based and other conditional permissions on a bucket. While this should be the primary way for managing public access, ACLs are the first tab and about three clicks to make something public. It’s this flexibility that leads to mistakes such as opening up to a wider range of IP addresses than intended or using a negative to block access to some IPs but inadvertently granting access to everyone else
  3. IAM Policies: These are the normal IAM permissions you use to control access throughout your AWS account. You can’t make a bucket public with them, since they only govern AWS users, but you can open up access to the bucket by authorizing another AWS service access, and then that service exposes the content.
  4. Object ACLs: These are the primary object-level controls. It’s just like a bucket ACL and uses XML to allow access from other accounts or the public. Objects do not necessarily inherit bucket ACLs. You can totally make an object public even if the bucket is private.
  5. Explicit IAM or Bucket Policy Statements: IAM policies and bucket policies can have explicit statements referencing the object, which will override the object ACL (if you own the object), since they are evaluated first.
  6. Pre-Signed URLs: These object-level policies must be created using code (not the console) and provide temporary access for anyone with the URL. It’s used, for example, to share files for a few minutes or an hour for someone using your app to download a media file.
  7. CloudFront Origin Access Identity: CloudFront is the AWS content delivery network and can serve as the front end to S3. You can create something called a CloudFront origin access identity to write an IAM policy that allows CloudFront to access the S3 content. If the CloudFront allows public access, it can access the S3 content and that won’t show in a bucket policy or ACL.
  8. Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) Policies: CORS is required if you use S3 in a website and don’t want the browser to break due to same site security settings. CORS in S3 won’t override an ACL or bucket policy but could mask public access in limited situations where the data is exposed in the web code through the authorized site.

What’s the best way to find public buckets? It’s relatively easy:

 

  1. Log into the console, click on S3 and look for the Public tag.
  2. Check CloudFront to see if you use any origin access identities.
  3. Check any CORS policies, if you use them.
  4. The bad news … there is no easy way to find public objects. Even finding them programmatically can be difficult if you have a large number.
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