What I want to implement:
I have a Cognito User-Pool and I have some Users and some Groups. I want that certain Users have access to API Gateway functions, some Users can access some functions and others have no access.
What I did:
I created three groups and assigned the Users to each of the groups. I gave each of the groups an IAM role and gave each roled spezific policies. The permission for the group for all users looks like this:
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Sid": "VisualEditor0",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "execute-api:*",
"Resource": "*"
}
]
}
I created Lambda functions and API Gateway Resources through the Serverless framework. I set the authorizer to a Cognito User-Pool authorizer.
(I tried a couple different things like using federated identities but that didnt seem to work as well)
What is my result:
All Users have full access to the API Gateway. The given permissions do not seem to make any difference to the access of each user.
Help:
What did I do wrong?
How can I achieve my goal?
The roles attached to a user pool group
only come into picture when you generate credentials for the user using Cognito Federated Identity
. Adding groups to a user pool
IAM roles and their permissions are tied to the temporary AWS
credentials that Amazon Cognito identity pools provide for
authenticated users. Users in a group are automatically assigned the
IAM role for the group when AWS credentials are provided by Amazon
Cognito Federated Identities using the Choose role from token option.
So basically
- create an
identity pool
attached to your user pool.
- change authorization for API gateway to
IAM
- after login to user pool, user
id_token
to generate the federated identity
- use this identity (
secret key + access key + token
) for authorization with API gateway.
Now your roles should be honored. But mind you - you will be required to generate AWS SigV4 credentials on your own as for some reason this is not provided out of the box. I ended up using aws-sign-web for use in browser.
PS: your role seems to give blanket access to API gateway. you will need to fix that as well. e.g. sample role I used to limit access to one API endpoint
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Action": "execute-api:Invoke",
"Resource": [
"arn:aws:execute-api:us-east-2:<aws account id>:<API id>/*/*/acc/*"
],
"Effect": "Allow"
}
]
}
Sample code to generate federated identity
function getAccessToken(idToken, idenPoolId, userPool) {
let region = idenPoolId.split(":")[0];
let provider = "cognito-idp." + region + ".amazonaws.com/" + userPool;
let login = {};
login[provider] = idToken;
// Add the User's Id Token to the Cognito credentials login map.
let credentials = new AWS.CognitoIdentityCredentials({
IdentityPoolId: idenPoolId,
Logins: login
});
//call refresh method in order to authenticate user and get new temp credentials
credentials.get((error) => {
if (error) {
console.error(error);
//let response = {
// statusCode: 500,
// body: JSON.stringify(error)
//};
return null;
} else {
console.log('Successfully logged!');
console.log('AKI:'+ credentials.accessKeyId);
console.log('AKS:'+ credentials.secretAccessKey);
console.log('token:' + credentials.sessionToken);
let response = JSON.stringify({
'AKI': credentials.accessKeyId,
'AKS': credentials.secretAccessKey,
'token': credentials.sessionToken
});
return response;
}
});
}
I have a much better solution, and you don't need the IAM.
Simply save the pair of {username, serviceName}
in a S3 or DB. So every time, you get the request for a service:
- Check if the user is authorized (from Cognito).
- Check if the user is authorized for the service (S3, MySQL, RDS, etc.).
Why I think it is better
Because adding/removing users from services, you don't need to login as an admin to IAM. And hopefully later on, you can create a dashboard for management.
Work Flow
UserA
sends a request to your securityApi
.
SecurityApi
checks the token is authorized (user is valid or not).
If the UserA
is valid, the securityApi
, sends the username
of the user (can get it from the payload of the token) and the service name
to a DB, to see if the user has access to the user. For example for Mysql (use RDS for this):
SELECT username from ServiceX LIMIT 1 WHERE username = "xyz";
If the second or third steps passed the user is 1. valid user and 2. has the right to use the service. If the user is failed in step 2 or 3, the user is not authorized to use the service.