Access control - AWS Backup
Resources and operationsResource ownershipSpecifying policy elements: actions, effects, and principalsSpecifying conditions in a policyAPI Permissions ReferenceCopy tags permissionsAccess policies

Access control

You can have valid credentials to authenticate your requests, but unless you have the appropriate permissions, you can't access AWS Backup resources such as backup vaults. You also can't back up AWS resources such as Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes.

Every AWS resource is owned by an AWS account, and permissions to create or access a resource are governed by permissions policies. An account administrator can attach permissions policies to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) identities (that is, users, groups, and roles). And some services also support attaching permissions policies to resources.

Note

An account administrator (or administrator user) is a user with administrator permissions. For more information, see IAM Best Practices in the IAM User Guide.

When granting permissions, you decide who is getting the permissions, the resources they get permissions for, and the specific actions that you want to allow on those resources.

The following sections cover how access policies work and how you use them to protect your backups.

Resources and operations

A resource is an object that exists within a service. AWS Backup resources include backup plans, backup vaults, and backups. Backup is a general term that refers to the various types of backup resources that exist in AWS. For example, Amazon EBS snapshots, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) snapshots, and Amazon DynamoDB backups are all types of backup resources.

In AWS Backup, backups are also referred to as recovery points. When using AWS Backup, you also work with the resources from other AWS services that you are trying to protect, such as Amazon EBS volumes or DynamoDB tables. These resources have unique Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) associated with them. ARNs uniquely identify AWS resources. You must have an ARN when you need to specify a resource unambiguously across all of AWS, such as in IAM policies or API calls.

The following table lists resources, subresources, ARN format, and an example unique ID.

AWS Backup resource ARNs
Resource type ARN format Example unique ID
Backup plan arn:aws:backup:region:account-id:backup-plan:*
Backup vault arn:aws:backup:region:account-id:backup-vault:*
Recovery point for Amazon EBS arn:aws:ec2:region::snapshot/* snapshot/snap-05f426fd8kdjb4224
Recovery point for Amazon EC2 images arn:aws:ec2:region::image/ami-* image/ami-1a2b3e4f5e6f7g890
Recovery point for Amazon RDS arn:aws:rds:region:account-id:snapshot:awsbackup:* awsbackup:job-be59cf2a-2343-4402-bd8b-226993d23453
Recovery point for Aurora arn:aws:rds:region:account-id:cluster-snapshot:awsbackup:* awsbackup:job-be59cf2a-2343-4402-bd8b-226993d23453
Recovery point for Storage Gateway arn:aws:ec2:region::snapshot/* snapshot/snap-0d40e49137e31d9e0
Recovery point for DynamoDB without Advanced DynamoDB backup arn:aws:dynamodb:region:account-id:table/*/backup/* table/MyDynamoDBTable/backup/01547087347000-c8b6kdk3
Recovery point for DynamoDB with Advanced DynamoDB backup enabled arn:aws:backup:region:account-id:recovery-point:* 12a34a56-7bb8-901c-cd23-4567d8e9ef01
Recovery point for Amazon EFS arn:aws:backup:region:account-id:recovery-point:* d99699e7-e183-477e-bfcd-ccb1c6e5455e
Recovery point for Amazon FSx arn:aws:fsx:region:account-id:backup/backup-* backup/backup-1a20e49137e31d9e0
Recovery point for virtual machine arn:aws:backup:region:account-id:recovery-point:* 1801234a-5b6b-7dc8-8032-836f7ffc623b
Recovery point for Amazon S3 continuous backup arn:aws:backup:region:account-id:recovery-point:* my-bucket-5ec207d0
Recovery point for S3 periodic backup arn:aws:backup:region:account-id:recovery-point:* my-bucket-20211231900000-5ec207d0
Recovery point for Amazon DocumentDB arn:aws:rds:region:account-id:cluster-snapshot:awsbackup:* awsbackup:job-ab12cd3e-4567-8901-fg1h-234567i89012
Recovery point for Neptune arn:aws:rds:region:account-id:cluster-snapshot:awsbackup:* awsbackup:job-ab12cd3e-4567-8901-fg1h-234567i89012
Recovery point for Amazon Redshift arn:aws:redshift:region:account-id:snapshot:resource/awsbackup:* awsbackup:job-ab12cd3e-4567-8901-fg1h-234567i89012
Recovery point for Amazon Timestream arn:aws:backup:region:account-id:recovery-point:* recovery-point:1a2b3cde-f405-6789-012g-3456hi789012_beta
Recovery point for AWS CloudFormation template arn:aws:backup:region:account-id:recovery-point:* recovery-point:1a2b3cde-f405-6789-012g-3456hi789012
Recovery point for SAP HANA database on Amazon EC2 instance arn:aws:backup:region:account-id:recovery-point:* recovery-point:1a2b3cde-f405-6789-012g-3456hi789012

Resources that support full AWS Backup management all have recovery points in the format arn:aws:backup:region:account-id::recovery-point:*. making it easier for you to apply permissions policies to protect those recovery points. To see which resources support full AWS Backup management, see that section of the Feature availability by resource table.

AWS Backup provides a set of operations to work with AWS Backup resources. For a list of available operations, see AWS Backup Actions.

Resource ownership

The AWS account owns the resources that are created in the account, regardless of who created the resources. Specifically, the resource owner is the AWS account of the principal entity (that is, the AWS account root user, an IAM user, or an IAM role) that authenticates the resource creation request. The following examples illustrate how this works:

  • If you use the AWS account root user credentials of your AWS account to create a backup vault, your AWS account is the owner of the vault.

  • If you create an IAM user in your AWS account and grant permissions to create a backup vault to that user, the user can create a backup vault. However, your AWS account, to which the user belongs, owns the backup vault resource.

  • If you create an IAM role in your AWS account with permissions to create a backup vault, anyone who can assume the role can create a vault. Your AWS account, to which the role belongs, owns the backup vault resource.

Specifying policy elements: actions, effects, and principals

For each AWS Backup resource (see Resources and operations), the service defines a set of API operations (see Actions). To grant permissions for these API operations, AWS Backup defines a set of actions that you can specify in a policy. Performing an API operation can require permissions for more than one action.

The following are the most basic policy elements:

  • Resource – In a policy, you use an Amazon Resource Name (ARN) to identify the resource to which the policy applies. For more information, see Resources and operations.

  • Action – You use action keywords to identify resource operations that you want to allow or deny.

  • Effect – You specify the effect when the user requests the specific action—this can be either allow or deny. If you don't explicitly grant access to (allow) a resource, access is implicitly denied. You can also explicitly deny access to a resource, which you might do to make sure that a user cannot access it, even if a different policy grants access.

  • Principal – In identity-based policies (IAM policies), the user that the policy is attached to is the implicit principal. For resource-based policies, you specify the user, account, service, or other entity that you want to receive permissions (applies to resource-based policies only).

To learn more about IAM policy syntax and descriptions, see IAM JSON Policy Reference in the IAM User Guide.

For a table showing all of the AWS Backup API actions, see API permissions: actions, resources, and conditions reference.

Specifying conditions in a policy

When you grant permissions, you can use the IAM policy language to specify the conditions when a policy should take effect. For example, you might want a policy to be applied only after a specific date. For more information about specifying conditions in a policy language, see Condition in the IAM User Guide.

To express conditions, you use predefined condition keys. There are no condition keys specific to AWS Backup. However, there are AWS-wide condition keys that you can use as appropriate. For a complete list of AWS-wide keys, see AWS Global Condition Context Keys in the IAM User Guide.

Note

AWS Backup does not support tag or context key conditions in access policies for any of its actions.

API permissions: actions, resources, and conditions reference

When you are setting up Access control and writing a permissions policy that you can attach to an IAM identity (identity-based policies), you can use the following table as a reference. The table lists each AWS Backup API operation, the corresponding actions for which you can grant permissions to perform the action, and the AWS resource for which you can grant the permissions. You specify the actions in the policy's Action field, and you specify the resource value in the policy's Resource field. If Resource field is blank, you can use the wildcard (*) to include all resources.

You can use AWS-wide condition keys in your AWS Backup policies to express conditions. For a complete list of AWS-wide keys, see Available Keys in the IAM User Guide.

Use the scroll bars to see the rest of the table.

1 Uses the existing vault access policy.

2 See AWS Backup resource ARNs for resource-specific recovery point ARNs.

3 StartRestoreJob must have the key-value pair in the metadata for the resource. To get the metadata of the resource, call the GetRecoveryPointRestoreMetadata API.

For more information, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for AWS Backup in the Service Authorization Reference.

Copy tags permissions

When AWS Backup performs a backup or copy job, it attempts to copy the tags from your source resource (or recovery point in the case of copy) to your recovery point.

Note

AWS Backup does not natively copy tags during restore jobs. For an event-driven architecture that will copy tags during restore jobs, see How to retain resource tags in AWS Backup restore jobs.

During a backup or copy job, AWS Backup aggregates the tags you specify in your backup plan (or copy plan, or on-demand backup) with the tags from your source resource. However, AWS enforces a limit of 50 tags per resource, which AWS Backup cannot exceed. When a backup or copy job aggregates tags from the plan and the source resource, it might discover more than 50 total tags, it will be unable to complete the job, and will fail the job. This is consistent with AWS-wide tagging best practices. To learn more, see Tag limits in the AWS General Reference Guide.

  • Your resource has more than 50 tags after aggregating your backup job tags with your source resource tags. AWS supports up to 50 tags per resource. For more information, see Tag limits.

  • The IAM role you provide to AWS Backup lacks permissions to read the source tags or set the destination tags. For more information and sample IAM role policies, see Managed Policies.

You can use your backup plan to create tags that contradict your source resource tags. When the two conflict, the tags from your backup plan take precedence. Use this technique if you prefer not to copy a tag value from your source resource. Specify the same tag key, but different or empty value, using your backup plan.

Permissions Required to assign tags to backups
Resource type Required permission
Amazon EFS file system

elasticfilesystem:DescribeTags
Amazon FSx file system

fsx:ListTagsForResource
Amazon RDS database and Amazon Aurora cluster

rds:AddTagsToResource

rds:ListTagsForResource
Storage Gateway volume

storagegateway:ListTagsForResource
Amazon EC2 instance and Amazon EBS volume

EC2:CreateTags

EC2:DescribeTags

DynamoDB does not support assigning tags to backups unless you first enable Advanced DynamoDB backup.

When an Amazon EC2 backup creates an Image Recovery Point and a set of snapshots, AWS Backup copies tags to the resulting AMI. AWS Backup also copies the tags from the volumes associated with the Amazon EC2 instance to the resulting snapshots.

Access policies

A permissions policy describes who has access to what. Policies attached to an IAM identity are referred to as identity-based policies (IAM policies). Policies attached to a resource are referred to as resource-based policies. AWS Backup supports both identity-based policies and resource-based policies.

Note

This section discusses using IAM in the context of AWS Backup. It doesn't provide detailed information about the IAM service. For complete IAM documentation, see What Is IAM? in the IAM User Guide. For information about IAM policy syntax and descriptions, see IAM JSON Policy Reference in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policies (IAM policies)

Identity-based policies are policies that you can attach to IAM identities, such as users or roles. For example, you can define a policy that allows a user to view and back up AWS resources, but prevents them from restoring backups.

For more information about users, groups, roles, and permissions, see Identities (Users, Groups, and Roles) in the IAM User Guide.

For information about how to use IAM policies to control access to backups, see Managed policies for AWS Backup.

Resource-based policies

AWS Backup supports resource-based access policies for backup vaults. This enables you to define an access policy that can control which users have what kind of access to any of the backups organized in a backup vault. Resource-based access policies for backup vaults provide an easy way to control access to your backups.

Backup vault access policies control user access when you use AWS Backup APIs. Some backup types, such as Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) snapshots, can also be accessed using those services' APIs. You can create separate access policies in IAM that control access to those APIs in order to fully control access to backups.

To learn how to create an access policy for backup vaults, see Set access policies on backup vaults.