Metadata

Id: ansible-aws-iam-policies-attached-to-user

Provider: AWS

Platform: Ansible

Severity: Medium

Category: Access Control

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• Provider Reference

Description

Attaching IAM policies directly to individual IAM users increases the risk of privilege sprawl, makes permissions harder to audit and revoke, and magnifies impact if a user’s credentials are compromised.

For Ansible amazon.aws.iam_policy or iam_policy tasks, the iam_type property must be set to group or role rather than user. Resources missing the iam_type property or with iam_type set to user are flagged. Attach policies to groups or roles to centralize permission management and enable role-based access patterns.

Secure example (attach policy to a role):

- name: Attach policy to role
  amazon.aws.iam_policy:
    name: my-policy
    policy_document: "{{ lookup('file', 'my-policy.json') }}"
    iam_type: role
    iam_name: my-role

Compliant Code Examples

- name: Assign a policy called Admin to the administrators group
  amazon.aws.iam_policy:
    iam_type: group
    iam_name: administrators
    policy_name: Admin
    state: present
    policy_document: admin_policy.json

Non-Compliant Code Examples

- name: Assign a policy called Admin to user
  amazon.aws.iam_policy:
    iam_type: user
    iam_name: administrators
    policy_name: Admin
    state: present
    policy_document: admin_policy.json