New – Use AWS IAM Access Analyzer in AWS Organizations

Last year at AWS re:Invent 2019, we released AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer that helps you understand who can access resources by analyzing permissions granted using policies for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets, IAM roles, AWS Key Management Service (KMS) keys, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues.

AWS IAM Access Analyzer uses automated reasoning, a form of mathematical logic and inference, to determine all possible access paths allowed by a resource policy. We call these analytical results provable security, a higher level of assurance for security in the cloud.

Today I am pleased to announce that you can create an analyzer in the AWS Organizations master account or a delegated member account with the entire organization as the zone of trust. Now for each analyzer, you can create a zone of trust to be either a particular account or an entire organization, and set the logical bounds for the analyzer to base findings upon. This helps you quickly identify when resources in your organization can be accessed from outside of your AWS Organization.

AWS IAM Access Analyzer for AWS Organizations – Getting started
You can enable IAM Access Analyzer, in your organization with one click in the IAM Console. Once enabled, IAM Access Analyzer analyzes policies and reports a list of findings for resources that grant public or cross-account access from outside your AWS Organizations in the IAM console and through APIs.

When you create an analyzer on your organization, it recognizes your organization as a zone of trust, meaning all accounts within the organization are trusted to have access to AWS resources. Access analyzer will generate a report that identifies access to your resources from outside of the organization.

For example, if you create an analyzer for your organization then it provides active findings for resource such as S3 buckets in your organization that are accessible publicly or from outside the organization.

When policies change, IAM Access Analyzer automatically triggers a new analysis and reports new findings based on the policy changes. You can also trigger a re-evaluation manually. You can download the details of findings into a report to support compliance audits.

Analyzers are specific to the region in which they are created. You need to create a unique analyzer for each region where you want to enable IAM Access Analyzer.

You can create multiple analyzers for your entire organization in your organization’s master account. Additionally, you can also choose a member account in your organization as a delegated administrator for IAM Access Analyzer. When you choose a member account as the delegated administrator, the member account has a permission to create analyzers within the organization. Additionally individual accounts can create analyzers to identify resources accessible from outside those accounts.

IAM Access Analyzer sends an event to Amazon EventBridge for each generated finding, for a change to the status of an existing finding, and when a finding is deleted. You can monitor IAM Access Analyzer findings with EventBridge. Also, all IAM Access Analyzer actions are logged by AWS CloudTrail and AWS Security Hub. Using the information collected by CloudTrail, you can determine the request that was made to Access Analyzer, the IP address from which the request was made, who made the request, when it was made, and additional details.

Now available!
This integration is available in all AWS Regions where IAM Access Analyzer is available. There is no extra cost for creating an analyzer with organization as the zone of trust. You can learn more through these talks of Dive Deep into IAM Access Analyzer and Automated Reasoning on AWS at AWS re:Invent 2019. Take a look at the feature page and the documentation to learn more.

Please send us feedback either in the AWS forum for IAM or through your usual AWS support contacts.

– Channy;