Identity Access Management & S3 Flashcards
What is a principal in IAM ?
A principal can be a user, role, federated user, aws account or a service within or external to the organisation but not a group
What is the relationship between principals and resources ?
Principals perform actions on resources
Is IAM a global or a regional service ?
Global - designed to be a one stop shop for all IAM related activity so to stop a proliferation of differing regional IAM solutions
What is an IAM User?
These are your day to day users
What is a root user ?
Privileged User
What are IAM groups ?
A collection of users with common permissions
What are roles ?
The ability to give temp access credentials to either a service or a user
What is a principal-based policy in IAM ?
Access is limited to a group of principals and attached to the principals
What is a resource based policy ?
Attached to the resource and restricts access to the listed principals ?
What is the difference between a resource based policy and an principal based policy ?
What is the principal of least privilege ?
It is the minimum amount of access a principal (subject) needs to access a resource (object) to do their job
Why do microservices offer a better security model over monolithic applications ?
Microservices are modular and can have specific credentials to access modular parts of the whole solution. If compromised the attacker would have a smaller attack plane than with a monolithic application
In IAM policies what does PARC-E represent ?
P - principal the who or what is allowed access
A - action what the statement applies to
R - Resources that the statement is applicable for
C - Conditions
E - Effect whether the statement is to allow or deny
What is a principal based policy in IAM ?
Principal based policies are applied to a user, group or role. The resource being accessed can be within the same account or a different account
What in IAM is the default deny rule ?
By default the principal is denied access unless it is explicitly given
What is a resource based policy ?
It is attached to a resource and list the principals that have access or not to the resource.
I want to specify a group as a principal in a trust policy on a role is this possible ?
No a group is not an IAM principal
A user who had previously access to you root credentials for your account has left what should you do to protect the root account. (Clue there are five items) ?
- Logon as root.
- Change Passwords.
- Delete and re-install MFA.
- Delete any programmatic access - Root should not have programmatic access.
- Review any IAM accounts that user has access to.
What are the three types of policies in IAM ?
- Customer Managed
- AWS Managed
- Inline
Can AWS Managed policies change ?
Yes but these changes are carefully controlled.
Why might you use a customer managed policy ?
You may not want to risk AWS changing a AWS managed policy and having that affect your accounts