Creating the task IAM role Amazon ECR permissions ECS Exec permissions Amazon EC2 instances additional configuration External instance additional configuration Amazon EC2 Windows instance additional configuration

Amazon ECS task IAM role

Your Amazon ECS tasks can have an IAM role associated with them. The permissions granted in the IAM role are vended to containers running in the task. This role allows your application code (running in the container) to use other AWS services. The task role is required when your application accesses other AWS services, such as Amazon S3.

Note

These permissions aren't accessed by the Amazon ECS container and Fargate agents. For the IAM permissions that Amazon ECS needs to pull container images and run the task, see Amazon ECS task execution IAM role.

The following are the benefits of using task roles:

Separation of concerns: If you're using the EC2 launch type, task IAM roles allow you to specify IAM permissions for your containers without requiring these permissions to be specified using EC2 instance profiles (for more information, see Using instance profiles in the AWS Identity and Access Management User Guide). Therefore, you can deploy your applications independently and uniformly on ECS container instances without needing to modify IAM permissions associated with EC2 instances.
Auditability: Access and event logging are available through CloudTrail to ensure retrospective auditing. Task credentials have a context of 'taskArn' that is attached to the session, so CloudTrail logs show which task the role credentials were vended for.
Uniform credentials delivery: ECS delivers IAM role credentials to your containers and makes them accessible through a well-defined interface irrespective of the launch type associated with your tasks. On ECS Fargate, EC2 instance profiles are not available for containers in your tasks. Task IAM roles enable you to associate IAM permissions to your containers irrespective of the launch type when you use AWS SDK or AWS CLI in your containers. For more information about how the AWS SDK accesses these credentials, see Container credential provider.

Important

Containers are not a security boundary and the use of task IAM roles does not change this. Each task running on Fargate has its own isolation boundary and does not share the underlying kernel, CPU resources, memory resources, or elastic network interface with another task. For EC2 and External Container Instances on ECS, there is no task isolation (unlike with Fargate) and containers can potentially access credentials for other tasks on the same container instance. They can also access permissions assigned to the ECS container instance role. Follow the recommendations in Roles recommendations to block access to the Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service for containers (For more information, see Use the Instance Metadata Service to access instance metadata in the Amazon EC2 User Guide).

Note that when you specify an IAM role for a task, the AWS CLI or other SDKs in the containers for that task use the AWS credentials provided by the task role exclusively and they do not inherit any IAM permissions from the Amazon EC2 or external instance they are running on.

Creating the task IAM role

When creating an IAM policy for your tasks to use, the policy must include the permissions that you want the containers in your tasks to assume. You can use an existing AWS managed policy, or you can create a custom policy from scratch that meets your specific needs. For more information, see Creating IAM policies in the IAM User Guide.

Important

For Amazon ECS tasks (for all launch types), we recommend that you use the IAM policy and role for your tasks. These credentials allow your task to make AWS API requests without calling sts:AssumeRole to assume the same role that is already associated with the task. If your task requires that a role assumes itself, you must create a trust policy that explicitly allows that role to assume itself. For more information, see Updating a role trust policy in the IAM User Guide.

After the IAM policy is created, you can create an IAM role which includes that policy which you reference in your Amazon ECS task definition. You can create the role using the Elastic Container Service Task use case in the IAM console. Then, you can attach your specific IAM policy to the role that gives the containers in your task the permissions you desire. The procedures below describe how to do this.

If you have multiple task definitions or services that require IAM permissions, you should consider creating a role for each specific task definition or service with the minimum required permissions for the tasks to operate so that you can minimize the access that you provide for each task.

For information about the service endpoint for your Region, see Service endpoints in the Amazon Web Services General Reference Guide.

The IAM task role must have a trust policy that specifies the ecs-tasks.amazonaws.com service. The sts:AssumeRole permission allows your tasks to assume an IAM role that's different from the one that the Amazon EC2 instance uses. This way, your task doesn't inherit the role associated with the Amazon EC2 instance. The following is an example trust policy. Replace the Region identifier and specify the AWS account number that you use when launching tasks.

Important

When creating your task IAM role, it is recommended that you use the aws:SourceAccount or aws:SourceArn condition keys in the trust relationship policy associated with the role to scope the permissions further to prevent the confused deputy security issue. Using the aws:SourceArn condition key to specify a specific cluster is not currently supported, you should use the wildcard to specify all clusters. To learn more about the confused deputy problem and how to protect your AWS account, see The confused deputy problem in the IAM User Guide.

Use the following procedure to create a policy to retrieve objects from Amazon S3 with an example policy. Replace all user input with your own values.

AWS Management Console

To use the JSON policy editor to create a policy

Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the IAM console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/.
In the navigation pane on the left, choose Policies.

If this is your first time choosing Policies, the Welcome to Managed Policies page appears. Choose Get Started.
At the top of the page, choose Create policy.
In the Policy editor section, choose the JSON option.

Enter the following JSON policy document:


{
   "Version":"2012-10-17",
   "Statement":[
      {
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Action":[
            "s3:GetObject"
         ],
         "Resource":[
            "arn:aws:s3:::my-task-secrets-bucket/*"
         ]
      }
   ]
}

Choose Next.

Note
You can switch between the Visual and JSON editor options anytime. However, if you make changes or choose Next in the Visual editor, IAM might restructure your policy to optimize it for the visual editor. For more information, see Policy restructuring in the IAM User Guide.
On the Review and create page, enter a Policy name and a Description (optional) for the policy that you are creating. Review Permissions defined in this policy to see the permissions that are granted by your policy.
Choose Create policy to save your new policy.

AWS CLI

Replace all user input with your own values.

Create a file called s3-policy.json with the following content.

JSON

JSON


{
   "Version":"2012-10-17",
   "Statement":[
      {
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Action":[
            "s3:GetObject"
         ],
         "Resource":[
            "arn:aws:s3:::my-task-secrets-bucket/*"
         ]
      }
   ]
}

Use the following command to create the IAM policy using the JSON policy document file. Replace all user input with your own values.
```
aws iam create-policy \
      --policy-name taskRolePolicy \
      --policy-document file://s3-policy.json
```

Use the following procedure to create the service role.

AWS Management Console

To create the service role for Elastic Container Service (IAM console)

Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the IAM console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/.
In the navigation pane of the IAM console, choose Roles, and then choose Create role.
For Trusted entity type, choose AWS service.
For Service or use case, choose Elastic Container Service, and then choose the Elastic Container Service Task use case.
Choose Next.
For Add permissions, search for and choose the policy you created.
Choose Next.
For Role name, enter a name for your role. For this example, type AmazonECSTaskS3BucketRole to name the role.
Review the role, and then choose Create role.

AWS CLI

Create a file named ecs-tasks-trust-policy.json that contains the trust policy to use for the task IAM role. The file should contain the following. Replace the Region identifier and specify the AWS account number that you use when launching tasks.
JSON
JSON
{ "Version":"2012-10-17", "Statement":[ { "Effect":"Allow", "Action":[ "s3:GetObject" ], "Resource":[ "arn:aws:s3:::my-task-secrets-bucket/*" ] } ] }

Create an IAM role named ecsTaskRole using the trust policy created in the previous step.


aws iam create-role \
      --role-name ecsTaskRole \
      --assume-role-policy-document file://ecs-tasks-trust-policy.json

Retrieve the ARN of the IAM policy you created using the following command. Replace taskRolePolicy with the name of the policy you created.
```
aws iam list-policies --scope Local --query 'Policies[?PolicyName==`taskRolePolicy`].Arn'
```
Attach the IAM policy you created to the ecsTaskRole role. Replace the policy-arn with the ARN of the policy that you created.
```
aws iam attach-role-policy \
      --role-name ecsTaskRole \
      --policy-arn arn:aws:iam:111122223333:aws:policy/taskRolePolicy
```

After you create the role, add additional permissions to the role for the following features.

Feature	Additional permissions
Use ECS Exec	ECS Exec permissions
Use an image from a private Amazon ECR repository	Amazon ECR permissions
Use EC2 instances (Windows and Linux)	Amazon EC2 instances additional configuration
Use external instances	External instance additional configuration
Use Windows EC2 instances	Amazon EC2 Windows instance additional configuration

Amazon ECR permissions

The following permissions are required when your application code needs to interact with Amazon ECR repositories directly. Note that for basic implementation where you only need to pull images from Amazon ECR, these permissions are not required at the task IAM role level. Instead, the Amazon ECS task execution role should have these permissions. For more information about the task execution role, see Amazon ECS task execution IAM role.

If your application code running in the container needs to interact with Amazon ECR APIs directly, you should add the following permissions to a task IAM role and include the task IAM role in your task definition. For more information, see Adding and Removing IAM Policies in the IAM User Guide.

Use the following policy for your task IAM role to add the required Amazon ECR permissions for container applications that need to interact with Amazon ECR directly:

ECS Exec permissions

The ECS Exec feature requires a task IAM role to grant containers the permissions needed for communication between the managed SSM agent (execute-command agent) and the SSM service. You should add the following permissions to a task IAM role and include the task IAM role in your task definition. For more information, see Adding and Removing IAM Policies in the IAM User Guide.

Use the following policy for your task IAM role to add the required SSM permissions.

Amazon EC2 instances additional configuration

We recommend that you limit the permissions in your container instance role to the minimal list of permissions used in the AmazonEC2ContainerServiceforEC2Role managed IAM policy.

Your Amazon EC2 instances require at least version 1.11.0 of the container agent to use task role; however, we recommend using the latest container agent version. For information about checking your agent version and updating to the latest version, see Updating the Amazon ECS container agent. If you use an Amazon ECS-optimized AMI, your instance needs at least 1.11.0-1 of the ecs-init package. If your instances are using the latest Amazon ECS-optimized AMI, then they contain the required versions of the container agent and ecs-init. For more information, see Amazon ECS-optimized Linux AMIs.

If you are not using the Amazon ECS-optimized AMI for your container instances, add the --net=host option to your docker run command that starts the agent and the following agent configuration variables for your desired configuration (for more information, see Amazon ECS container agent configuration):

ECS_ENABLE_TASK_IAM_ROLE=true: Uses IAM roles for tasks for containers with the bridge and default network modes.
ECS_ENABLE_TASK_IAM_ROLE_NETWORK_HOST=true: Uses IAM roles for tasks for containers with the host network mode. This variable is only supported on agent versions 1.12.0 and later.

For an example run command, see Manually updating the Amazon ECS container agent (for non-Amazon ECS-Optimized AMIs). You will also need to set the following networking commands on your container instance so that the containers in your tasks can retrieve their AWS credentials:


sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.all.route_localnet=1
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d 169.254.170.2 --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:51679
sudo iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -d 169.254.170.2 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 51679

You must save these iptables rules on your container instance for them to survive a reboot. You can use the iptables-save and iptables-restore commands to save your iptables rules and restore them at boot. For more information, consult your specific operating system documentation.

To prevent containers run by tasks that use the awsvpc network mode from accessing the credential information supplied to the Amazon EC2 instance profile, while still allowing the permissions that are provided by the task role, set the ECS_AWSVPC_BLOCK_IMDS agent configuration variable to true in the agent configuration file and restart the agent. For more information, see Amazon ECS container agent configuration.

To prevent containers run by tasks that use the bridge network mode from accessing the credential information supplied to the Amazon EC2 instance profile, while still allowing the permissions that are provided by the task role, by running the following iptables command on your Amazon EC2 instances. This command doesn't affect containers in tasks that use the host or awsvpc network modes. For more information, see Network mode.

```
sudo yum install -y iptables-services; sudo iptables --insert DOCKER-USER 1 --in-interface docker+ --destination 169.254.169.254/32 --jump DROP
```
You must save this iptables rule on your Amazon EC2 instance for it to survive a reboot. When using the Amazon ECS-optimized AMI, you can use the following command. For other operating systems, consult the documentation for that operating system.
```
sudo iptables-save | sudo tee /etc/sysconfig/iptables && sudo systemctl enable --now iptables
```

External instance additional configuration

Your external instances require at least version 1.11.0 of the container agent to use task IAM roles; however, we recommend using the latest container agent version. For information about checking your agent version and updating to the latest version, see Updating the Amazon ECS container agent. If you are using an Amazon ECS-optimized AMI, your instance needs at least 1.11.0-1 of the ecs-init package. If your instances are using the latest Amazon ECS-optimized AMI, then they contain the required versions of the container agent and ecs-init. For more information, see Amazon ECS-optimized Linux AMIs.

ECS_ENABLE_TASK_IAM_ROLE=true: Uses IAM roles for tasks for containers with the bridge and default network modes.
ECS_ENABLE_TASK_IAM_ROLE_NETWORK_HOST=true: Uses IAM roles for tasks for containers with the host network mode. This variable is only supported on agent versions 1.12.0 and later.


sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.all.route_localnet=1
sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d 169.254.170.2 --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:51679
sudo iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -d 169.254.170.2 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 51679

Amazon EC2 Windows instance additional configuration

Important

This applies only to Windows containers on EC2 that use task roles.

The task role with Windows features requires additional configuration on EC2.

When you launch your container instances, you must set the -EnableTaskIAMRole option in the container instances user data script. The EnableTaskIAMRole turns on the Task IAM roles feature for the tasks. For example:
```
<powershell>
Import-Module ECSTools
Initialize-ECSAgent -Cluster 'windows' -EnableTaskIAMRole 
</powershell>
```
You must bootstrap your container with the networking commands that are provided in Amazon ECS container bootstrap script.
You must create an IAM role and policy for your tasks. For more information, see Creating the task IAM role.
The IAM roles for the task credential provider use port 80 on the container instance. Therefore, if you configure IAM roles for tasks on your container instance, your containers can't use port 80 for the host port in any port mappings. To expose your containers on port 80, we recommend configuring a service for them that uses load balancing. You can use port 80 on the load balancer. By doing so, traffic can be routed to another host port on your container instances. For more information, see Use load balancing to distribute Amazon ECS service traffic.
If your Windows instance is restarted, you must delete the proxy interface and initialize the Amazon ECS container agent again to bring the credential proxy back up.

Amazon ECS container bootstrap script

Before containers can access the credential proxy on the container instance to get credentials, the container must be bootstrapped with the required networking commands. The following code example script should be run on your containers when they start.

Note

You do not need to run this script when you use awsvpc network mode on Windows.

If you run Windows containers which include Powershell, then use the following script:


# Copyright Amazon.com Inc. or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
#
# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"). You may
# not use this file except in compliance with the License. A copy of the
# License is located at
#
#	http://aws.amazon.com/apache2.0/
#
# or in the "license" file accompanying this file. This file is distributed
# on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either
# express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing
# permissions and limitations under the License.
 
$gateway = (Get-NetRoute | Where { $_.DestinationPrefix -eq '0.0.0.0/0' } | Sort-Object RouteMetric | Select NextHop).NextHop
$ifIndex = (Get-NetAdapter -InterfaceDescription "Hyper-V Virtual Ethernet*" | Sort-Object | Select ifIndex).ifIndex
New-NetRoute -DestinationPrefix 169.254.170.2/32 -InterfaceIndex $ifIndex -NextHop $gateway -PolicyStore ActiveStore # credentials API
New-NetRoute -DestinationPrefix 169.254.169.254/32 -InterfaceIndex $ifIndex -NextHop $gateway -PolicyStore ActiveStore # metadata API

If you run Windows containers that only have the Command shell, then use the following script:


# Copyright Amazon.com Inc. or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
#
# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"). You may
# not use this file except in compliance with the License. A copy of the
# License is located at
#
#	http://aws.amazon.com/apache2.0/
#
# or in the "license" file accompanying this file. This file is distributed
# on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either
# express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing
# permissions and limitations under the License.
 
for /f "tokens=1" %i  in ('netsh interface ipv4 show interfaces ^| findstr /x /r ".*vEthernet.*"') do set interface=%i
for /f "tokens=3" %i  in ('netsh interface ipv4 show addresses %interface% ^| findstr /x /r ".*Default.Gateway.*"') do set gateway=%i
netsh interface ipv4 add route prefix=169.254.170.2/32 interface="%interface%" nexthop="%gateway%" store=active # credentials API
netsh interface ipv4 add route prefix=169.254.169.254/32 interface="%interface%" nexthop="%gateway%" store=active # metadata API

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Document Conventions

Task execution IAM role

Container instance IAM role