AWS managed policies for Amazon Cognito

To add permissions to users, groups, and roles, it is easier to use AWS managed policies than to write policies yourself. It takes time and expertise to create IAM customer managed policies that provide your team with only the permissions they need. To get started quickly, you can use our AWS managed policies. These policies cover common use cases and are available in your AWS account. For more information about AWS managed policies, see AWS managed policies in the IAM User Guide.

AWS services maintain and update AWS managed policies. You can't change the permissions in AWS managed policies. Services occasionally add additional permissions to an AWS managed policy to support new features. This type of update affects all identities (users, groups, and roles) where the policy is attached. Services are most likely to update an AWS managed policy when a new feature is launched or when new operations become available. Services do not remove permissions from an AWS managed policy, so policy updates won't break your existing permissions.

Additionally, AWS supports managed policies for job functions that span multiple services. For example, the ReadOnlyAccess AWS managed policy provides read-only access to all AWS services and resources. When a service launches a new feature, AWS adds read-only permissions for new operations and resources. For a list and descriptions of job function policies, see AWS managed policies for job functions in the IAM User Guide.

AWS managed IAM policies that grant access to Amazon Cognito

• AmazonCognitoPowerUser - Permissions for accessing and managing all aspects of your identity pools and user pools. To view the permissions for this policy, see AmazonCognitoPowerUser.

• AmazonCognitoReadOnly - Permissions for read-only access to your identity pools and user pools. To view the permissions for this policy, see AmazonCognitoReadOnly.

• AmazonCognitoDeveloperAuthenticatedIdentities - Permissions for your authentication system to integrate with Amazon Cognito. To view the permissions for this policy, see AmazonCognitoDeveloperAuthenticatedIdentities.

These policies are maintained by the Amazon Cognito team, so even as new APIs are added, your users continue to have the same level of access.

Note

When you create a new identity pool, you can automatically create new roles for authenticated and guest user access. The administrator who creates your identity pool with new IAM roles must also have IAM permissions to create roles.

Identity pools with unauthenticated guest access apply an additional AWS managed policy as a session policy to unauthenticated users. This AWS managed policy has no intended administrative use. Instead, it limits the scope of permissions that you can apply to guest users in the identity pools enhanced authentication flow. For more information, see IAM roles.

AWS managed IAM policies that Amazon Cognito grants to guest users

• AmazonCognitoUnAuthedIdentitiesSessionPolicy - In combination with an inline session policy, limits the permissions that IAM administrators can grant to identity pool guest users. Amazon Cognito automatically applies this policy to guest sessions. For more information, see The AWS managed session policy for guests.

Amazon Cognito updates to AWS managed policies

View details about updates to AWS managed policies for Amazon Cognito since this service began tracking these changes. For automatic alerts about changes to this page, subscribe to the RSS feed on the Amazon Cognito Document history page.

Change	Description	Date
AmazonCognitoPowerUser–Change	Amazon Cognito added new actions to permit the use of the AWS End User Messaging SMS API operation DescribeAccountAttributes for Amazon Cognito user pools administrative power users.	February 27, 2025
AmazonCognitoUnAuthedIdentitiesSessionPolicy–Change	Amazon Cognito added new actions to permit the use of AWS Key Management Service for unauthenticated (guest) users in identity pools.	October 30, 2024
AmazonCognitoUnAuthedIdentitiesSessionPolicy–Change	Amazon Cognito added new actions to permit the use of Amazon Location Service for unauthenticated (guest) users in identity pools.	August 9, 2024
AmazonCognitoUnAuthedIdentitiesSessionPolicy–New policy	Added an AWS managed policy for privilege scope-down of guest users in identity pools.	July 14, 2023
AmazonCognitoPowerUser and AmazonCognitoReadOnly–Change	Added new permissions to allow power users to view and manage associations of AWS WAF web ACLs to Amazon Cognito user pools. Added new permissions to allow read-only users to view associations of AWS WAF web ACLs to Amazon Cognito user pools.	July 19, 2022
AmazonCognitoPowerUser–Change	Added a new permission to allow Amazon Cognito to call Amazon Simple Email Service PutIdentityPolicy and ListConfigurationSets operations. This change allows Amazon Cognito user pools to update Amazon SES sending authorization policies and to apply Amazon SES configuration sets when you configure email sending in your user pool.	November 17, 2021
AmazonCognitoPowerUser–Change	Added a new permission to allow Amazon Cognito to call Amazon Simple Notification Service's GetSMSSandboxAccountStatus operation. This change allows Amazon Cognito user pools to decide if you need to graduate out of the Amazon Simple Notification Service sandbox in order to send messages to all end users through user pools.	June 1, 2021
Amazon Cognito started tracking changes	Amazon Cognito started tracking changes for its AWS managed policies.	March 1, 2021