The Quest for Least Privilege

One of the most common tasks for anyone working in AWS IAM is to scope IAM Policies to include only the necessary privileges required to complete a task. This is commonly referred to as following the Principle of Least Privilege. In this room, we will take a broadly scoped rule and whittle down access to allow the policy to do three things:

1. Audit all EC2 Settings
2. Launch machines in the Singapore Region
3. Access a specific corporate S3 bucket.

We’ll start with the default AdministratorAccess policy:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "*",
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}