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Comparison to related tools

Policy Revocation Tools

Repokid

RepoKid is a popular tool that was developed by Netflix, and is one of the more mature and battle-tested AWS IAM open source projects. It leverages AWS Access Advisor, which informs you how many AWS services your IAM Principal has access to, and how many of those services it has used in the last X amount of days or months. If you haven't used a service within the last 30 days, it "repos" your policy, and strips it of the privileges it doesn't use. It has some advanced features to allow for whitelisting roles and overall is a great tool.

One shortcoming is that AWS IAM Access Advisor only provides details at the service level (ex: S3-wide, or EC2-wide) and not down to the IAM Action level, so the revised policy is not very granular. However, RepoKid plays a unique role in the IAM ecosystem right now in that there are not any open source tools that provide similar functionality. For that reason, it is best to view RepoKid and Policy Sentry as complimentary.

Travis McPeak summarized the potential dynamic between Policy Sentry and RepoKid very well on Clint Gliber's blog:

AWS Tools

AWS Console - Visual Policy Editor

This policy generator is great in general and you should use it if you're getting used to writing IAM policies.

It's very similar to policy_sentry - you are able to bulk select according to access levels.

However, there are a number of downsides:

  • Missing access level type: It does not specifically flag "Permissions management" access level
  • No override capabilities for inaccurate Access Levels: Note how the ssm:PutParameter action is listed as "Tagging". This is inaccurate; it should be "Write". policy_sentry allows you to override inaccurate access levels, whereas the Visual Policy Editor has had inaccurate Access levels for the last several years without any fixes.

  • Not automated: Policy Sentry is, by design, meant for automated policy generation, whereas the Visual Policy Editor is meant to be manual.

  • Console Access: It also requires access to the AWS Console.
  • Extensibility: It's open source and Pull Requests are welcome! With policy_sentry, we get more control.

On the positive side, it does walk you through creating policies with IAM Condition keys. However, we believe that policy_sentry's approach, where we always have policies restricted to the least amount of resources - provides a greater benefit to the end user. Furthermore, we plan on supporting condition keys at some point in the future.

AWS Policy Generator (static website)

AWS Policy Generator is a great tool; it supports IAM policies, as well as multiple types of resource-based policies (SQS Queue policy, S3 bucket policy, SNS Topic Policy, and VPC Endpoint Policy).

Loose ARN formatting: The regex expressions that it uses per-service does not require that actual valid resource ARNs are met - just that they meet the Regex requirement, which is uniform per-service. It just isn't as accurate or up to date as the actual IAM policy generation through the AWS Console

Missing actions: To determine the list of actions, it relies on a file titled policies.js, which contains a list of IAM Actions. However, this file is not as well maintained as the Actions, Resources, and Condition Keys tables. For example, it does not have these actions:

a4b:describe*
appstream:get*
cloudformation:preview*
codestar:verify*
ds:check*
health:get*
health:list*
kinesisanalytics:get*
lightsail:list*
mobilehub:validate*
resource-groups:describe*

Log-based Policy Generators

CloudTracker

Policy Sentry is somewhat similar to CloudTracker. CloudTracker queries CloudTrail logs using Amazon Athena and attempts to "guess" the matching between CloudTrail actions and IAM actions, then generates a policy. Given that there is not a 1-to-1 mapping between the names of Actions listed in CloudTrail log entries and the names AWS IAM Actions, the results are not always accurate. It is a good place to start, but the generated policies all contain Resources: "*", so it is up to the user to restrict those IAM actions to only the necessary resources.

Trailscraper

Trailscraper does automated policy generation from CloudTrail logs, but there are some major limitations:

  1. The generated policies have Resources set to *, not to a specific resource ARN
  2. It downloads all of the CloudTrail logs. This takes a while.
    • Cloudtracker (https://github.com/duo-labs/cloudtracker) uses Amazon Athena, which is more efficient. In the future, I'd like to see a combined approach between all three of these tools to generate IAM policies based on Cloudtrail logs. 3. It is accurate to the point where there is a 1-to-1 mapping with the IAM actions vs CloudTrail logs. As I mentioned in other comments, since not every IAM Action is logged in CloudTrail and not every CloudTrail action matches IAM Actions, the results are not always accurate.

Monitoring AWS API Calls

iamlive

iamlive is a tool that monitors AWS API calls and generates an IAM policy based on those.

iamlive can either use the AWS SDK's Client Side Monitoring (CSM) feature or an embedded proxy to track which AWS API calls are made. In CSM mode, it can only capture IAM Actions, but in proxy mode, it can also capture Resource ARNs.

iamlive shares similar limitations to other tools in that it relies on an unofficial mapping from SDK calls to IAM Actions, and so can have inaccuracies.

Currently, iamlive is mainly intended to be used in a separate terminal window from a currently running application. That being said, it could potentially be used as a sidecar alongside deployed applications.

actionhero

Action Hero is a sidecar style utility to monitor the AWS API calls that your application makes and log out the corresponding IAM Actions.

Action Hero is limited in that it makes exclusive use of CSM, and as such, cannot capture parameters or Resource ARNs. It also does not generate full policies; it only logs out IAM Actions. Due to these limitations, Action Hero is not a complete tool, but can be a great addition to other tools as it can accurately capture all required actions.

Currently, Action Hero is best suited for developing policies side-by-side with your application. This approach is different from the Log-based tools that generate policies for existing deployed applications. That being said, as a sidecar, Action Hero could be deployed alongside applications to monitor AWS API calls in production.

Other Infrastructure as Code Tools

aws-iam-generator

aws-iam-generator still requires you to write the actual policy templates from scratch, and then they allow you to re-use those policy templates.

Consider the JSON under this area of their README.

It's essentially a method for managing their policies as code - but it doesn't make those policies restricted to certain resources, unless you configure it that way. Using policy_sentry --write-policy, you have to supply a file with resource ARNs, and it will write the policy for you, rather than supplying a policy file, and hoping the ARNs fit that use case.

Terraform

The rationale described above also generally applies to Terraform, in that it still requires you to write the actual policy templates from scratch, and then you can re-use those policy templates. However, you still need to make those policies secure by default.