Guardrails Admin Permissions

AWS Permissions for Turbot Guardrails Administrators

Overview

Turbot Guardrails Administrators require fairly extensive access to the Turbot Guardrails Master AWS account. To help conform with the principle of least-privilege, the following AWS IAM policy statement should form a starting place for enterprises to establish their own standards. Turbot Support's expectations are that anyone identified as a "Guardrails Administrator" will be able to fix any aspect of the application except perhaps for networking outside the Guardrails Master VPC or DNS management. (No one wants to wait on a prod outage because of missing permissions.)

A common point of discussion is the creation and management of IAM roles in the Guardrails Master account. Turbot Guardrails Enterprise creates new ECS and Lambda execution roles with each new deployment. An administrator without this capability cannot effectively manage or upgrade the Guardrails application.

AWS Services Used by Guardrails

Service	Purpose
ACM	Manage Certificates for the Guardrails ALBs
API Gateway	Enable event handling when the Guardrails ALB is internal-only.
Application-Autoscaling	Used for scaling ECS containers.
Billing	Monitoring of Guardrails operating costs
CloudFormation	Review events, resources and parameters for deployed products. Also used for minor parameter updates.
CloudWatch	Events, Dashboards, and Logs
EC2	Guardrails uses EC2 instances for ECS. Also used for DB bastion hosts.
ECR	Repository for Guardrails Container Images (read-only since Guardrails doesn't create ECR images, merely consumes them.)
ECS	Used to run various Guardrails containers.
ElastiCache	Instance to cache frequently used or short lived data
IAM	Execution roles for Guardrails
KMS	Encryption Keys for DBs, S3 buckets
Lambda	Used for Guardrails application management and mod controls.
RDS	Postgresql Database for data storage
RDS Performance Insights	Keep track of top queries and overall DB behavior
Route 53	Hosted zone with records for Guardrails Workspaces
S3	Bucket for logging
Service Catalog	Management deployment of TEF, TED and TE.
SNS	Topics used for communication within the Guardrails application.
SQS	Event Queues used to manage task backlogs.
SSM Parameter Store	Used to store configuration information. Used to communicate between the TEF, TED and TE stacks.

Areas of Variation

Guardrails creates and destroys IAM roles with the deployment of TEF, TED and TE. Manipulation of Roles and Role Policies have been included. Blanket denial of read/write permissions on IAM roles prevents Guardrails upgrades from happening.
In addition to TEF/TED/TE deployments, in emergency troubleshooting situations, a Guardrails bastion in the Guardrails VPC may be required to directly access to the Guardrails DB. The ability to spin up and manage an EC2 instances is required.
For Enterprises that use Guardrails Firehose, the ability to create and manage an IAM user is required. This has been included in the below permissions.
When deploying Guardrails, read calls must be made against a central Turbot-owned ECR. Permissions to create, update and write ECR repositories are not required.
Enterprises with restrictions on specific resources in the Guardrails Master account, should adapt the below baseline to their needs.
Billing read-only access is really handy, but not necessary, when questions about costs come up.

IAM Policy

The following permissions are recommended for Guardrails Administrators in the Guardrails Master AWS Account

   {
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "acm:*",
                "apigateway:*",
                "application-autoscaling:*",
                "aws-portal:ViewAccount",
                "aws-portal:ViewBilling",
                "aws-portal:ViewPaymentMethods",
                "aws-portal:ViewUsage",
                "cloudformation:*",
                "cloudwatch:*",
                "ec2:*",
                "ecr:BatchCheckLayerAvailability",
                "ecr:BatchGetImage",
                "ecr:DescribeImages",
                "ecr:DescribeImageScanFindings",
                "ecr:DescribeRegistry",
                "ecr:DescribeRepositories",
                "ecr:GetAuthorizationToken",
                "ecr:GetDownloadUrlForLayer",
                "ecr:GetLifecyclePolicy",
                "ecr:GetLifecyclePolicyPreview",
                "ecr:GetRegistryPolicy",
                "ecr:GetRepositoryPolicy",
                "ecr:ListImages",
                "ecr:ListTagsForResource",
                "ecs:*",
                "elasticache:*",
                "elasticloadbalancing:*",
                "events:*",
                "iam:AttachRolePolicy",
                "iam:AttachUserPolicy",
                "iam:CreateAccessKey",
                "iam:CreatePolicy",
                "iam:CreateRole",
                "iam:CreateUser",
                "iam:DeleteAccessKey",
                "iam:DeletePolicy",
                "iam:DeleteRole",
                "iam:DeleteRolePolicy",
                "iam:DeleteUserPolicy",
                "iam:DetachRolePolicy",
                "iam:GetAccountSummary",
                "iam:GetPolicy",
                "iam:GetPolicyVersion",
                "iam:GetRole",
                "iam:GetRolePolicy",
                "iam:GetServiceLinkedRoleDeletionStatus",
                "iam:GetUser",
                "iam:GetUserPolicy",
                "iam:ListGroups",
                "iam:ListGroupsForUser",
                "iam:ListPolicies",
                "iam:ListPoliciesGrantingServiceAccess",
                "iam:ListPolicyTags",
                "iam:ListPolicyVersions",
                "iam:ListRolePolicies",
                "iam:ListRoles",
                "iam:ListRoleTags",
                "iam:ListUserPolicies",
                "iam:ListUsers",
                "iam:ListUserTags"
                "iam:PassRole",
                "iam:PutRolePolicy",
                "iam:PutUserPolicy",
                "iam:SimulateCustomPolicy",
                "iam:SimulatePrincipalPolicy",
                "iam:TagInstanceProfile",
                "iam:TagMFADevice",
                "iam:TagOpenIDConnectProvider",
                "iam:TagPolicy",
                "iam:TagRole",
                "iam:TagSAMLProvider",
                "iam:TagServerCertificate",
                "iam:TagUser",
                "iam:UntagInstanceProfile",
                "iam:UntagMFADevice",
                "iam:UntagOpenIDConnectProvider",
                "iam:UntagPolicy",
                "iam:UntagRole",
                "iam:UntagSAMLProvider",
                "iam:UntagServerCertificate",
                "iam:UntagUser",
                "iam:UpdateAccessKey",
                "iam:UpdateRole",
                "iam:UpdateUser",
                "kms:*",
                "lambda:*",
                "logs:*",
                "pi:*",
                "rds:*",
                "rds-db:*",
                "route53:*",
                "s3:*",
                "servicecatalog:*",
                "sns:*",
                "sqs:*",
                "ssm:*",
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}