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AWS Vault

AWS Vault is a tool to securely store and access AWS credentials in a development environment.

AWS Vault stores IAM credentials in your operating system's secure keystore and then generates temporary credentials from those to expose to your shell and applications. It's designed to be complementary to the AWS CLI tools, and is aware of your profiles and configuration in ~/.aws/config.

The supported backends are:

Check out the announcement blog post for more details.

Installing

You can install aws-vault:

  • by downloading the latest release
  • on macOS via Homebrew Cask with brew cask install aws-vault
  • on Linux via Homebrew on Linux with brew install linuxbrew/extra/aws-vault
  • on Windows via choco with choco install aws-vault
  • on Archlinux via the AUR
  • by compiling with go get github.com/99designs/aws-vault

Basic Usage

# Store AWS credentials for the "home" profile
$ aws-vault add home
Enter Access Key Id: ABDCDEFDASDASF
Enter Secret Key: %%%

# Execute a command (using temporary credentials)
$ aws-vault exec home -- aws s3 ls
bucket_1
bucket_2

# open a browser window and login to the AWS Console
$ aws-vault login home

# List credentials
$ aws-vault list
Profile                  Credentials              Sessions
=======                  ===========              ========
home                     home                     -

See the USAGE document for more help and tips.

Security

$ aws-vault exec home -- env | grep AWS
AWS_VAULT=home
AWS_REGION=us-east-1
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=%%%
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=%%%
AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=%%%
AWS_SECURITY_TOKEN=%%%

Notice in the above environment how a session token gets written out. This is because aws-vault uses Amazon's STS service to generate temporary credentials via the GetSessionToken or AssumeRole API calls. These expire in a short period of time, so the risk of leaking credentials is reduced.

The credentials are exposed to the subprocess in one of two ways:

  • Environment variables are written to the sub-process.

  • Local EC2 Instance Metadata server is started. This approach has the advantage that anything that uses Amazon's SDKs will automatically refresh credentials as needed, so session times can be as short as possible. The downside is that only one can run per host and because it binds to 169.254.169.254:80, your sudo password is required.

The default is to use environment variables, but you can opt-in to the local instance metadata server with the --server flag on the exec command.

Assuming Roles

Best-practice is to have a read-only account that you use on a day-to-day basis, and then use IAM roles to assume temporary admin privileges along with an MFA.

First you'll need to setup an MFA token in the AWS Console and create a role with admin access.

Edit your ~/.aws/config to add the role_arn and MFA serial number into a new profile:

[profile read-only]
region=us-east-1

[profile admin]
source_profile = read-only
role_arn = arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/admin-access
mfa_serial = arn:aws:iam::123456789012:mfa/jonsmith

Then when you use the admin profile, aws-vault will look in the read-only profile's keychain for credentials and then use those credentials to assume the admin role. This assumed role is stored as a short duration session in your keychain so you will only have to enter MFA once per session.

macOS Code-signing

The macOS release builds are code-signed to avoid extra prompts in Keychain. You can verify this with:

$ codesign -dvv $(which aws-vault) 2>&1 | grep Authority
Authority=Developer ID Application: 99designs Inc (NRM9HVJ62Z)
Authority=Developer ID Certification Authority
Authority=Apple Root CA

Self-signing your binary

If you are developing or compiling the aws-vault binary yourself, you can generate a self-signed code signing certificate.

Check out Apple's guide on it here, or find it in Keychain Access > Certificate Assistant > Create Certificate > Code Signing Certificate.

You can then sign your binary like this:

make build
codesign -s "Name of my certificate" ./aws-vault

References and Inspiration