Cross Account AWS CodePipeline for IAM Policy Tester

This repository accompanies the IAM Policy Tester Pipeline blogpost. It contains an example of a secure, cross-account, continous delivery CodePipeline. This pipeline demonstrates the unit testing of an IAM policy to validate permissions in different AWS Accounts.

The same resource, with the same IAM policy attached may not be able authorised for certain actions in an account. External policies, such as SCP's can limit the actions of a resource, despite the IAM policy associated with a resource.

Such conflicts can occur when crossing the boundry from development accounts to production-like accounts that contain further restrictions. This pipeline demonstrates how this problem can be detected using iam policy simulator to validate if an IAM policy and action is permitted within an account.

Running the example

1. Clone this repository

Clone the AWS Policy Tester Pipeline repository. From your terminal application, execute the following command:

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/iam-policy-tester-pipeline

This creates a directory named iam-policy-tester-pipeline in your current directory.

2. Create AWS CodeCommit repository in Development Account

Follow the instructions here to create a CodeCommit repository in the Development Account. Name your repository as sample-lambda. Alternatively, from your terminal application, execute the following command.

aws codecommit create-repository --repository-name sample-lambda --repository-description "Sample Lambda Function"

Note the cloneUrlHttp URL in the response from above CLI.

You may refer here on further details, in order to setup AWS Cli , if required.

3. Add a new remote

From your terminal application, within the sample-lambda directory, execute the following command:

git init && git remote add AWSCodeCommit HTTP_CLONE_URL_FROM_STEP_2

Follow the instructions here for local git setup required to push code to CodeCommit repository.

4. Replace the Policy Source ARN

You need to specify the user, group, or role whose policies you want to include in the simulation. To do this, within the sample-lambda directory, modify the value in scripts/source.txt file.

5. Push the code AWS CodeCommit

From your terminal application, execute the following commands:

git add *
git commit -am "Initialise the SampleLambda repository"
git push AWSCodeCommit master

6. Run the script to generate the Cross Account Pipeline

From your terminal application, back in the iam-policy-tester-pipeline directory, execute the following command:

chmod +x single-click-cross-account-pipeline.sh && ./single-click-cross-account-pipeline.sh

This last step deploys the entire pipeline. It expects to receive the account numbers to which it will deploy the reference architecture. It creates Amazon S3 buckets for the build artifacts and encryption keys for secure cross-account communication, and sets up CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy in the account structure described above. After this step, each update in the sample-lambda repository triggers an execution of the pipeline. You can manually release a change in the pipeline after deploying it to ensure it is working.

License

This sample code is made available under the Apache 2.0 License. See the LICENSE file.