Best Cloud IAM Open Source Tools in 2024
At AWS Re:Invent 2021 in the keynote address, AWS CTO Werner Vogels, invested a significant chunk of time in zooming in on the Identity and Access Management (IAM) of what he called the Everywhere Cloud. He emphasized that while often being underestimated or overlooked - IAM, remains a critical aspect of our overall security posture.
As the complexity of cloud infrastructure grows, so does the challenge of ensuring that access rights are aligned with the principle of least privilege, while at the same time enabling a measure of autonomy that supports today’s pace of engineering. In our journey, building Entitle, we discovered some pretty great open source tools that have risen to the occasion, offering a number of methods designed to refine, audit, and enforce IAM policies across major cloud platforms, including our very own open source Beam.
In this post, we'll explore and show some appreciation for some best of breed OSS tools for better IAM management: Aaia, AirIAM, Policy Sentry, Beam, Iamlive, and GCP Permissions Cloud
Some are individual contributor supported and others created by some of the largest corporations in the industry, like Salesforce. Each of these tools offers much-needed security capabilities to help organizations tighten their IAM postures, from auditing and generating least privilege policies to transitioning to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for more scalable security configurations.
Exceptional Cloud IAM OSS Tools
Let's dive into how these tools work and the value they bring to the table in the ever-evolving landscape of cloud security.
Aaia - AWS IAM Auditor
Much of our cloud operations work eventually focuses on configurations, in which our identity and access management play a big role. Aaia (AWS IAM Auditor) is a tool designed for auditing the IAM configurations in AWS environments, in order to identify misconfigurations and security risks related to IAM policies.
Examples of IAM policy misconfigurations include overly permissive policies that grant more access than necessary, unused credentials or roles that increase the attack surface, and the absence of multi-factor authentication for sensitive operations. These vulnerabilities can lead to unauthorized access, data breaches, and compromised cloud environments. Ensuring policies are tightly scoped and regularly audited for unnecessary permissions is crucial for mitigating these risks.
How It Works
Aaia audits AWS IAM configurations by scanning the policies attached to IAM roles, users, and groups within an AWS account. It checks for overly permissive policies, unused roles or permissions, and adherence to best practices in IAM configurations. From an IAM perspective, Aaia provides significant value in enhancing the security posture of AWS environments. It aids in detecting and mitigating potential IAM-related vulnerabilities by ensuring that IAM policies are configured according to best security practices.
AirIAM and Policy Sentry - Least Privilege Policy Automation:
The principle of least privilege access is a security concept where individuals or systems are granted the minimum levels of access — or permissions — needed to perform their tasks, which has proven an effective way to mitigate risk in organization. This is because this approach minimizes the potential attack surface by limiting access rights for users, accounts, and computing processes to only those resources absolutely required to carry out authorized activities. Implementing least privilege can significantly reduce the risk of malicious access or the impact of accidental misconfigurations in an organization's network and systems.
This is where Policy Sentry and AirIAM come in. Policy Sentry, developed by Salesforce, is a tool for generating least privilege IAM policies, while AirIAM is designed to migrate AWS IAM policies to a least privilege model. These together can help level up your security by both generating the least privilege policy, and then automating it by transitioning from manually managed IAM policies to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform.
How They Work:
Policy Sentry and AirIAM can be used in tandem to optimize your least privilege policies and automation. Policy Sentry begins with specifying necessary actions, while AirIAM helps in transitioning existing IAM policies towards least privilege using Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Policy Sentry utilizes a database of IAM actions, resources, and condition keys to generate IAM policies. Users specify the desired access level and resources, and Policy Sentry crafts policies that meet these requirements without exceeding them. AirIAM scans existing AWS IAM configurations and generates Terraform code representing the current state. It then suggests optimizations to move towards a least privilege access model, reducing the attack surface.
Together, they can streamline the process of auditing, optimizing, and maintaining IAM policies, ensuring both security and compliance with best practices in cloud environments. This synergy allows organizations to benefit from detailed policy creation and efficient policy management, enhancing overall cloud security posture.
Iamlive - IAM policy generation from AWS, Azure, GcP
With GitOps gaining widespread popularity for enforcing governance and policy against git repositories–our code bases and git are not the only place that require enforcement of policies. This is where a tool like Iamlive comes in to generate IAM policies based on AWS service requests made through the AWS CLI or SDKs. It's a tool for understanding and creating the necessary IAM permissions for applications, based on predefined policies already in the system and verifying CLI and other AWS clickops system requests, adding a layer of governance verified against existing policy.
How It Works:
Iamlive intercepts AWS API calls and generates an IAM policy that encompasses all the actions made during the session. It can run in a lpolicies ocal environment or as a proxy, capturing the API requests to AWS services. Iamlive is valuable for developers and security professionals by simplifying the process of creating IAM that exactly match the permissions required by an application, thereby adhering to the principle of least privilege. While there are more popular guardrails in place in other parts of our stacks and pipelines, our cloud operations require similar protections to ensure alignment with in-house defined security practices.
GCP Permissions Cloud - A crowdsourced Google Cloud IAM permissions reference.
While many of the tools referenced until here have been largely AWS-centric or multi-cloud, let's not forget that there are other popular clouds including Google Cloud - that require similar capabilities.
To this end, we owe many thanks to Ian Mckay (iann0036) an individual contributor who built Iamlive and GCP Permissions Cloud, which aims to improve the understanding and management of IAM permissions within Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
How It Works:
This tool provides insights into GCP IAM permissions, helping users identify and manage permissions across GCP services. It offers features such as permissions auditing, recommendations for least privilege, and visualization of permissions. For GCP environments, it offers a means to better understand and control IAM permissions, enhancing security by ensuring that permissions are granted according to the principle of least privilege.
Why You Should Care
As noted earlier, identity and access management is the only service that touches each and every component of your cloud stack. That is why leveling up your access management is a critical piece to keeping your cloud operations secure and well governed.
Each of these tools brings unique value to IAM management by focusing on least privilege, policy & governance, security, and efficiency through automation. They cater to specific needs within AWS and GCP environments, making IAM auditing, policy generation, and migration to IaC easier and more secure across common clouds.
By adopting these open-source solutions, organizations can enhance their security postures, ensure compliance with best practices, and streamline the management of IAM policies.
Whether you're looking to audit your current IAM configurations, migrate to a least privilege model, or simply understand and manage your permissions more effectively, these tools offer a pathway to achieving your goals. The strength of open-source software lies in its collaborative nature, allowing for continuous improvement and adaptation to meet the evolving challenges of cloud security. Embrace these tools within your IAM strategy, and take a significant step toward a more secure and efficient cloud environment.
Bonus: Beam - AWS SSM made easy
Not the best (yet) but we love it anyway! In modern engineering, it has become a common and recommended practice for teams to access resources through secured environments such as virtual private clouds (VPC). This, however, is challenging when it comes to accessing secure resources, particularly when they are required on demand for managing incidents and other just in time access.
Beam is a newly launched OSS tool that is gaining traction & adoption, designed to simplify secure connections to AWS resources via AWS SSM Session Manager. It facilitates easy access to services like SSM, EKS, and RDS, enhancing the management and connectivity to cloud resources.
How It Works:
By streamlining the setup process for secure connections, Beam allows users to quickly configure and access AWS services. It integrates SSO, permits seamless account and permissions management, and simplifies infrastructure access, providing a user-friendly interface for complex AWS SSM functionalities. The value of the Beam OSS project lies in significantly enhancing the security and efficiency of accessing AWS resources. By simplifying the use of AWS SSM Session Manager for secure connections, Beam aids in minimizing potential misconfigurations and streamlines the management of cloud services access. It provides a user-friendly solution to leverage AWS services like SSM, EKS, and RDS securely, facilitating better access management and operational workflows for developers and system administrators. This contributes to a more secure and efficient cloud infrastructure management approach.
