Controlling Access to EKS Clusters Cluster Access Recommendations Identities and Credentials for EKS pods Identities and Credentials for EKS pods Recommendations Tools and Resources

Identity and Access Management

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an AWS service that performs two essential functions: Authentication and Authorization. Authentication involves the verification of a identity whereas authorization governs the actions that can be performed by AWS resources. Within AWS, a resource can be another AWS service, e.g. EC2, or an AWS principal such as an IAM User or Role. The rules governing the actions that a resource is allowed to perform are expressed as IAM policies.

Controlling Access to EKS Clusters

The Kubernetes project supports a variety of different strategies to authenticate requests to the kube-apiserver service, e.g. Bearer Tokens, X.509 certificates, OIDC, etc. EKS currently has native support for webhook token authentication, service account tokens, and as of February 21, 2021, OIDC authentication.

The webhook authentication strategy calls a webhook that verifies bearer tokens. On EKS, these bearer tokens are generated by the AWS CLI or the aws-iam-authenticator client when you run kubectl commands. As you execute commands, the token is passed to the kube-apiserver which forwards it to the authentication webhook. If the request is well-formed, the webhook calls a pre-signed URL embedded in the token’s body. This URL validates the request’s signature and returns information about the user, e.g. the user’s account, Arn, and UserId to the kube-apiserver.

To manually generate a authentication token, type the following command in a terminal window:


aws eks get-token --cluster-name <cluster_name>

You can also get a token programmatically. Below is an example written in Go:


package main

import (
  "fmt"
  "log"
  "sigs.k8s.io/aws-iam-authenticator/pkg/token"
)

func main()  {
  g, _ := token.NewGenerator(false, false)
  tk, err := g.Get("<cluster_name>")
  if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
  }
  fmt.Println(tk)
}

The output should resemble this:


{
  "kind": "ExecCredential",
  "apiVersion": "client.authentication.k8s.io/v1alpha1",
  "spec": {},
  "status": {
    "expirationTimestamp": "2020-02-19T16:08:27Z",
    "token": "k8s-aws-v1.aHR0cHM6Ly9zdHMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS8_QWN0aW9uPUdldENhbGxlcklkZW50aXR5JlZlcnNpb249MjAxMS0wNi0xNSZYLUFtei1BbGdvcml0aG09QVdTNC1ITUFDLVNIQTI1NiZYLUFtei1DcmVkZW50aWFsPUFLSUFKTkdSSUxLTlNSQzJXNVFBJTJGMjAyMDAyMTklMkZ1cy1lYXN0LTElMkZzdHMlMkZhd3M0X3JlcXVlc3QmWC1BbXotRGF0ZT0yMDIwMDIxOVQxNTU0MjdaJlgtQW16LUV4cGlyZXM9NjAmWC1BbXotU2lnbmVkSGVhZGVycz1ob3N0JTNCeC1rOHMtYXdzLWlkJlgtQW16LVNpZ25hdHVyZT0yMjBmOGYzNTg1ZTMyMGRkYjVlNjgzYTVjOWE0MDUzMDFhZDc2NTQ2ZjI0ZjI4MTExZmRhZDA5Y2Y2NDhhMzkz"
  }
}

Each token starts with k8s-aws-v1. followed by a base64 encoded string. The string, when decoded, should resemble to something similar to this:


https://sts.amazonaws.com/?Action=GetCallerIdentity&Version=2011-06-15&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=XXXXJPFRILKNSRC2W5QA%2F20200219%2Fus-xxxx-1%2Fsts%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20200219T155427Z&X-Amz-Expires=60&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host%3Bx-k8s-aws-id&X-Amz-Signature=XXXf8f3285e320ddb5e683a5c9a405301ad76546f24f28111fdad09cf648a393

The token consists of a pre-signed URL that includes an Amazon credential and signature. For additional details see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/STS/latest/APIReference/API_GetCallerIdentity.html.

The token has a time to live (TTL) of 15 minutes after which a new token will need to be generated. This is handled automatically when you use a client like kubectl, however, if you’re using the Kubernetes dashboard, you will need to generate a new token and re-authenticate each time the token expires.

Once the user’s identity has been authenticated by the AWS IAM service, the kube-apiserver reads the aws-auth ConfigMap in the kube-system Namespace to determine the RBAC group to associate with the user. The aws-auth ConfigMap is used to create a static mapping between IAM principals, i.e. IAM Users and Roles, and Kubernetes RBAC groups. RBAC groups can be referenced in Kubernetes RoleBindings or ClusterRoleBindings. They are similar to IAM Roles in that they define a set of actions (verbs) that can be performed against a collection of Kubernetes resources (objects).

Cluster Access Manager

Cluster Access Manager, now the preferred way to manage access of AWS IAM principals to Amazon EKS clusters, is a functionality of the AWS API and is an opt-in feature for EKS v1.23 and later clusters (new or existing). It simplifies identity mapping between AWS IAM and Kubernetes RBACs, eliminating the need to switch between AWS and Kubernetes APIs or editing the aws-auth ConfigMap for access management, reducing operational overhead, and helping address misconfigurations. The tool also enables cluster administrators to revoke or refine cluster-admin permissions automatically granted to the AWS IAM principal used to create the cluster.

This API relies on two concepts:

Access Entries: A cluster identity directly linked to an AWS IAM principal (user or role) allowed to authenticate to an Amazon EKS cluster.
Access Policies: Are Amazon EKS specific policies that provides the authorization for an Access Entry to perform actions in the Amazon EKS cluster.

At launch Amazon EKS supports only predefined and AWS managed policies. Access policies are not IAM entities and are defined and managed by Amazon EKS.

Cluster Access Manager allows the combination of upstream RBAC with Access Policies supporting allow and pass (but not deny) on Kubernetes AuthZ decisions regarding API server requests. A deny decision will happen when both, the upstream RBAC and Amazon EKS authorizers can’t determine the outcome of a request evaluation.

With this feature, Amazon EKS supports three modes of authentication:

CONFIG_MAP to continue using aws-auth configMap exclusively.
API_AND_CONFIG_MAP to source authenticated IAM principals from both EKS Access Entry APIs and the aws-auth configMap, prioritizing the Access Entries. Ideal to migrate existing aws-auth permissions to Access Entries.
API to exclusively rely on EKS Access Entry APIs. This is the new recommended approach.

To get started, cluster administrators can create or update Amazon EKS clusters, setting the preferred authentication to API_AND_CONFIG_MAP or API method and define Access Entries to grant access the desired AWS IAM principals.


$ aws eks create-cluster \
    --name <CLUSTER_NAME> \
    --role-arn <CLUSTER_ROLE_ARN> \
    --resources-vpc-config subnetIds=<value>,endpointPublicAccess=true,endpointPrivateAccess=true \
    --logging '{"clusterLogging":[{"types":["api","audit","authenticator","controllerManager","scheduler"],"enabled":true}]}' \
    --access-config authenticationMode=API_AND_CONFIG_MAP,bootstrapClusterCreatorAdminPermissions=false

The above command is an example to create an Amazon EKS cluster already without the admin permissions of the cluster creator.

It is possible to update Amazon EKS clusters configuration to enable API authenticationMode using the update-cluster-config command, to do that on existing clusters using CONFIG_MAP you will have to first update to API_AND_CONFIG_MAP and then to API. These operations cannot be reverted, meaning that’s not possible to switch from API to API_AND_CONFIG_MAP or CONFIG_MAP, and also from API_AND_CONFIG_MAP to CONFIG_MAP.


$ aws eks update-cluster-config \
    --name <CLUSTER_NAME> \
    --access-config authenticationMode=API

The API support commands to add and revoke access to the cluster, as well as validate the existing Access Policies and Access Entries for the specified cluster. The default policies are created to match Kubernetes RBACs as follows.

EKS Access Policy	Kubernetes RBAC
AmazonEKSClusterAdminPolicy	cluster-admin
AmazonEKSAdminPolicy	admin
AmazonEKSEditPolicy	edit
AmazonEKSViewPolicy	view


$ aws eks list-access-policies
{
    "accessPolicies": [
        {
            "name": "AmazonEKSAdminPolicy",
            "arn": "arn:aws:eks::aws:cluster-access-policy/AmazonEKSAdminPolicy"
        },
        {
            "name": "AmazonEKSClusterAdminPolicy",
            "arn": "arn:aws:eks::aws:cluster-access-policy/AmazonEKSClusterAdminPolicy"
        },
        {
            "name": "AmazonEKSEditPolicy",
            "arn": "arn:aws:eks::aws:cluster-access-policy/AmazonEKSEditPolicy"
        },
        {
            "name": "AmazonEKSViewPolicy",
            "arn": "arn:aws:eks::aws:cluster-access-policy/AmazonEKSViewPolicy"
        }
    ]
}

$ aws eks list-access-entries --cluster-name <CLUSTER_NAME>

{
    "accessEntries": []
}

No Access Entries are available when the cluster is created without the cluster creator admin permission, which is the only entry created by default.

The `aws-auth` ConfigMap (deprecated)

One way Kubernetes integration with AWS authentication can be done is via the aws-auth ConfigMap, which resides in the kube-system Namespace. It is responsible for mapping the AWS IAM Identities (Users, Groups, and Roles) authentication, to Kubernetes role-based access control (RBAC) authorization. The aws-auth ConfigMap is automatically created in your Amazon EKS cluster during its provisioning phase. It was initially created to allow nodes to join your cluster, but as mentioned you can also use this ConfigMap to add RBACs access to IAM principals.

To check your cluster’s aws-auth ConfigMap, you can use the following command.


kubectl -n kube-system get configmap aws-auth -o yaml

This is a sample of a default configuration of the aws-auth ConfigMap.


apiVersion: v1
data:
  mapRoles: |
    - groups:
      - system:bootstrappers
      - system:nodes
      - system:node-proxier
      rolearn: arn:aws:iam::<AWS_ACCOUNT_ID>:role/kube-system-<SELF_GENERATED_UUID>
      username: system:node:{{SessionName}}
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: "2023-10-22T18:19:30Z"
  name: aws-auth
  namespace: kube-system

The main session of this ConfigMap, is under data in the mapRoles block, which is basically composed by 3 parameters.

groups: The Kubernetes group/groups to map the IAM Role to. This can be a default group, or a custom group specified in a clusterrolebinding or rolebinding. In the above example we have just system groups declared.
rolearn: The ARN of the AWS IAM Role be mapped to the Kubernetes group/groups add, using the following format arn:<PARTITION>:iam::<AWS_ACCOUNT_ID>:role/role-name.
username: The username within Kubernetes to map to the AWS IAM role. This can be any custom name.

It is also possible to map permissions for AWS IAM Users, defining a new configuration block for mapUsers, under data in the aws-auth ConfigMap, replacing the rolearn parameter for userarn, however as a Best Practice it’s always recommended to user mapRoles instead.

To manage permissions, you can edit the aws-auth ConfigMap adding or removing access to your Amazon EKS cluster. Although it’s possible to edit the aws-auth ConfigMap manually, it’s recommended using tools like eksctl, since this is a very senstitive configuration, and an inaccurate configuration can lock you outside your Amazon EKS Cluster. Check the subsection Use tools to make changes to the aws-auth ConfigMap below for more details.

Cluster Access Recommendations

Make the EKS Cluster Endpoint private

By default when you provision an EKS cluster, the API cluster endpoint is set to public, i.e. it can be accessed from the Internet. Despite being accessible from the Internet, the endpoint is still considered secure because it requires all API requests to be authenticated by IAM and then authorized by Kubernetes RBAC. That said, if your corporate security policy mandates that you restrict access to the API from the Internet or prevents you from routing traffic outside the cluster VPC, you can:

Configure the EKS cluster endpoint to be private. See Modifying Cluster Endpoint Access for further information on this topic.
Leave the cluster endpoint public and specify which CIDR blocks can communicate with the cluster endpoint. The blocks are effectively a whitelisted set of public IP addresses that are allowed to access the cluster endpoint.
Configure public access with a set of whitelisted CIDR blocks and set private endpoint access to enabled. This will allow public access from a specific range of public IPs while forcing all network traffic between the kubelets (workers) and the Kubernetes API through the cross-account ENIs that get provisioned into the cluster VPC when the control plane is provisioned.

Don’t use a service account token for authentication

A service account token is a long-lived, static credential. If it is compromised, lost, or stolen, an attacker may be able to perform all the actions associated with that token until the service account is deleted. At times, you may need to grant an exception for applications that have to consume the Kubernetes API from outside the cluster, e.g. a CI/CD pipeline application. If such applications run on AWS infrastructure, like EC2 instances, consider using an instance profile and mapping that to a Kubernetes RBAC role.

Employ least privileged access to AWS Resources

An IAM User does not need to be assigned privileges to AWS resources to access the Kubernetes API. If you need to grant an IAM user access to an EKS cluster, create an entry in the aws-auth ConfigMap for that user that maps to a specific Kubernetes RBAC group.

Remove the cluster-admin permissions from the cluster creator principal

By default Amazon EKS clusters are created with a permanent cluster-admin permission bound to the cluster creator principal. With the Cluster Access Manager API, it’s possible to create clusters without this permission setting the --access-config bootstrapClusterCreatorAdminPermissions to false, when using API_AND_CONFIG_MAP or API authentication mode. Revoke this access considered a best practice to avoid any unwanted changes to the cluster configuration. The process to revoke this access, follows the same process to revoke any other access to the cluster.

The API gives you flexibility to only disassociate an IAM principal from an Access Policy, in this case the AmazonEKSClusterAdminPolicy.


$ aws eks list-associated-access-policies \
    --cluster-name <CLUSTER_NAME> \
    --principal-arn <IAM_PRINCIPAL_ARN>

$ aws eks disassociate-access-policy --cluster-name <CLUSTER_NAME> \
    --principal-arn <IAM_PRINCIPAL_ARN. \
    --policy-arn arn:aws:eks::aws:cluster-access-policy/AmazonEKSClusterAdminPolicy

Or completely removing the Access Entry associated with the cluster-admin permission.


$ aws eks list-access-entries --cluster-name <CLUSTER_NAME>

{
    "accessEntries": []
}

$ aws eks delete-access-entry --cluster-name <CLUSTER_NAME> \
  --principal-arn <IAM_PRINCIPAL_ARN>

This access can be granted again if needed during an incident, emergency or break glass scenario where the cluster is otherwise inaccessible.

If the cluster still configured with the CONFIG_MAP authentication method, all additional users should be granted access to the cluster through the aws-auth ConfigMap, and after aws-auth ConfigMap is configured, the role assigned to the entity that created the cluster, can be deleted and only recreated in case of an incident, emergency or break glass scenario, or where the aws-auth ConfigMap is corrupted and the cluster is otherwise inaccessible. This can be particularly useful in production clusters.

Use IAM Roles when multiple users need identical access to the cluster

Rather than creating an entry for each individual IAM User, allow those users to assume an IAM Role and map that role to a Kubernetes RBAC group. This will be easier to maintain, especially as the number of users that require access grows.

Important

When accessing the EKS cluster with the IAM entity mapped by aws-auth ConfigMap, the username described is recorded in the user field of the Kubernetes audit log. If you’re using an IAM role, the actual users who assume that role aren’t recorded and can’t be audited.

If still using the aws-auth configMap as the authentication method, when assigning K8s RBAC permissions to an IAM role, you should include \{{SessionName}} in your username. That way, the audit log will record the session name so you can track who the actual user assume this role along with the CloudTrail log.


- rolearn: arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXXXX:role/testRole
  username: testRole:{{SessionName}}
  groups:
    - system:masters

Employ least privileged access when creating RoleBindings and ClusterRoleBindings

Like the earlier point about granting access to AWS Resources, RoleBindings and ClusterRoleBindings should only include the set of permissions necessary to perform a specific function. Avoid using ["*"] in your Roles and ClusterRoles unless it’s absolutely necessary. If you’re unsure what permissions to assign, consider using a tool like audit2rbac to automatically generate Roles and binding based on the observed API calls in the Kubernetes Audit Log.

Create cluster using an automated process

As seen in earlier steps, when creating an Amazon EKS cluster, if not using the using API_AND_CONFIG_MAP or API authentication mode, and not opting out to delegate cluster-admin permissions to the cluster creator, the IAM entity user or role, such as a federated user that creates the cluster, is automatically granted system:masters permissions in the cluster’s RBAC configuration. Even being a best practice to remove this permission, as described here if using the CONFIG_MAP authentication method, relying on aws-auth ConfigMap, this access cannot be revoked. Therefore it is a good idea to create the cluster with an infrastructure automation pipeline tied to dedicated IAM role, with no permissions to be assumed by other users or entities and regularly audit this role’s permissions, policies, and who has access to trigger the pipeline. Also, this role should not be used to perform routine actions on the cluster, and be exclusively used to cluster level actions triggered by the pipeline, via SCM code changes for example.

Create the cluster with a dedicated IAM role

When you create an Amazon EKS cluster, the IAM entity user or role, such as a federated user that creates the cluster, is automatically granted system:masters permissions in the cluster’s RBAC configuration. This access cannot be removed and is not managed through the aws-auth ConfigMap. Therefore it is a good idea to create the cluster with a dedicated IAM role and regularly audit who can assume this role. This role should not be used to perform routine actions on the cluster, and instead additional users should be granted access to the cluster through the aws-auth ConfigMap for this purpose. After the aws-auth ConfigMap is configured, the role should be secured and only used in temporary elevated privilege mode / break glass for scenarios where the cluster is otherwise inaccessible. This can be particularly useful in clusters which do not have direct user access configured.

Regularly audit access to the cluster

Who requires access is likely to change over time. Plan to periodically audit the aws-auth ConfigMap to see who has been granted access and the rights they’ve been assigned. You can also use open source tooling like kubectl-who-can, or rbac-lookup to examine the roles bound to a particular service account, user, or group. We’ll explore this topic further when we get to the section on auditing. Additional ideas can be found in this article from NCC Group.

If relying on `aws-auth` configMap use tools to make changes

An improperly formatted aws-auth ConfigMap may cause you to lose access to the cluster. If you need to make changes to the ConfigMap, use a tool.

eksctl The eksctl CLI includes a command for adding identity mappings to the aws-auth ConfigMap.

View CLI Help:


$ eksctl create iamidentitymapping --help
...

Check the identities mapped to your Amazon EKS Cluster.


$ eksctl get iamidentitymapping --cluster $CLUSTER_NAME --region $AWS_REGION
ARN                                                                   USERNAME                        GROUPS                                                  ACCOUNT
arn:aws:iam::788355785855:role/kube-system-<SELF_GENERATED_UUID>      system:node:{{SessionName}}     system:bootstrappers,system:nodes,system:node-proxier

Make an IAM Role a Cluster Admin:


$ eksctl create iamidentitymapping --cluster  <CLUSTER_NAME> --region=<region> --arn arn:aws:iam::123456:role/testing --group system:masters --username admin
...

For more information, review eksctl docs

aws-auth by keikoproj

aws-auth by keikoproj includes both a cli and a go library.

Download and view help CLI help:


$ go get github.com/keikoproj/aws-auth
...
$ aws-auth help
...

Alternatively, install aws-auth with the krew plugin manager for kubectl.


$ kubectl krew install aws-auth
...
$ kubectl aws-auth
...

Review the aws-auth docs on GitHub for more information, including the go library.

AWS IAM Authenticator CLI

The aws-iam-authenticator project includes a CLI for updating the ConfigMap.

Download a release on GitHub.

Add cluster permissions to an IAM Role:


$ ./aws-iam-authenticator add role --rolearn arn:aws:iam::185309785115:role/lil-dev-role-cluster --username lil-dev-user --groups system:masters --kubeconfig ~/.kube/config
...

Alternative Approaches to Authentication and Access Management

While IAM is the preferred way to authenticate users who need access to an EKS cluster, it is possible to use an OIDC identity provider such as GitHub using an authentication proxy and Kubernetes impersonation. Posts for two such solutions have been published on the AWS Open Source blog:

Important

EKS natively supports OIDC authentication without using a proxy. For further information, please read the launch blog, Introducing OIDC identity provider authentication for Amazon EKS. For an example showing how to configure EKS with Dex, a popular open source OIDC provider with connectors for a variety of different authention methods, see Using Dex & dex-k8s-authenticator to authenticate to Amazon EKS. As described in the blogs, the username/group of users authenticated by an OIDC provider will appear in the Kubernetes audit log.

You can also use AWS SSO to federate AWS with an external identity provider, e.g. Azure AD. If you decide to use this, the AWS CLI v2.0 includes an option to create a named profile that makes it easy to associate an SSO session with your current CLI session and assume an IAM role. Know that you must assume a role prior to running kubectl as the IAM role is used to determine the user’s Kubernetes RBAC group.

Identities and Credentials for EKS pods

Certain applications that run within a Kubernetes cluster need permission to call the Kubernetes API to function properly. For example, the AWS Load Balancer Controller needs to be able to list a Service’s Endpoints. The controller also needs to be able to invoke AWS APIs to provision and configure an ALB. In this section we will explore the best practices for assigning rights and privileges to Pods.

Kubernetes Service Accounts

A service account is a special type of object that allows you to assign a Kubernetes RBAC role to a pod. A default service account is created automatically for each Namespace within a cluster. When you deploy a pod into a Namespace without referencing a specific service account, the default service account for that Namespace will automatically get assigned to the Pod and the Secret, i.e. the service account (JWT) token for that service account, will get mounted to the pod as a volume at /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount. Decoding the service account token in that directory will reveal the following metadata:


{
  "iss": "kubernetes/serviceaccount",
  "kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/namespace": "default",
  "kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/secret.name": "default-token-5pv4z",
  "kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/service-account.name": "default",
  "kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/service-account.uid": "3b36ddb5-438c-11ea-9438-063a49b60fba",
  "sub": "system:serviceaccount:default:default"
}

The default service account has the following permissions to the Kubernetes API.


apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
  annotations:
    rbac.authorization.kubernetes.io/autoupdate: "true"
  creationTimestamp: "2020-01-30T18:13:25Z"
  labels:
    kubernetes.io/bootstrapping: rbac-defaults
  name: system:discovery
  resourceVersion: "43"
  selfLink: /apis/rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1/clusterroles/system%3Adiscovery
  uid: 350d2ab8-438c-11ea-9438-063a49b60fba
rules:
- nonResourceURLs:
  - /api
  - /api/*
  - /apis
  - /apis/*
  - /healthz
  - /openapi
  - /openapi/*
  - /version
  - /version/
  verbs:
  - get

This role authorizes unauthenticated and authenticated users to read API information and is deemed safe to be publicly accessible.

When an application running within a Pod calls the Kubernetes APIs, the Pod needs to be assigned a service account that explicitly grants it permission to call those APIs. Similar to guidelines for user access, the Role or ClusterRole bound to a service account should be restricted to the API resources and methods that the application needs to function and nothing else. To use a non-default service account simply set the spec.serviceAccountName field of a Pod to the name of the service account you wish to use. For additional information about creating service accounts, see https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/access-authn-authz/rbac/#service-account-permissions.

Note

Prior to Kubernetes 1.24, Kubernetes would automatically create a secret for each a service account. This secret was mounted to the pod at /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount and would be used by the pod to authenticate to the Kubernetes API server. In Kubernetes 1.24, a service account token is dynamically generated when the pod runs and is only valid for an hour by default. A secret for the service account will not be created. If you have an application that runs outside the cluster that needs to authenticate to the Kubernetes API, e.g. Jenkins, you will need to create a secret of type kubernetes.io/service-account-token along with an annotation that references the service account such as metadata.annotations.kubernetes.io/service-account.name: <SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME>. Secrets created in this way do not expire.

IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA)

IRSA is a feature that allows you to assign an IAM role to a Kubernetes service account. It works by leveraging a Kubernetes feature known as Service Account Token Volume Projection. When Pods are configured with a Service Account that references an IAM Role, the Kubernetes API server will call the public OIDC discovery endpoint for the cluster on startup. The endpoint cryptographically signs the OIDC token issued by Kubernetes and the resulting token mounted as a volume. This signed token allows the Pod to call the AWS APIs associated IAM role. When an AWS API is invoked, the AWS SDKs calls sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity. After validating the token’s signature, IAM exchanges the Kubernetes issued token for a temporary AWS role credential.

When using IRSA, it is important to reuse AWS SDK sessions to avoid unneeded calls to AWS STS.

Decoding the (JWT) token for IRSA will produce output similar to the example you see below:


{
  "aud": [
    "sts.amazonaws.com"
  ],
  "exp": 1582306514,
  "iat": 1582220114,
  "iss": "https://oidc.eks.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/id/D43CF17C27A865933144EA99A26FB128",
  "kubernetes.io": {
    "namespace": "default",
    "pod": {
      "name": "alpine-57b5664646-rf966",
      "uid": "5a20f883-5407-11ea-a85c-0e62b7a4a436"
    },
    "serviceaccount": {
      "name": "s3-read-only",
      "uid": "a720ba5c-5406-11ea-9438-063a49b60fba"
    }
  },
  "nbf": 1582220114,
  "sub": "system:serviceaccount:default:s3-read-only"
}

This particular token grants the Pod view-only privileges to S3 by assuming an IAM role. When the application attempts to read from S3, the token is exchanged for a temporary set of IAM credentials that resembles this:


{
    "AssumedRoleUser": {
        "AssumedRoleId": "AROA36C6WWEJULFUYMPB6:abc",
        "Arn": "arn:aws:sts::123456789012:assumed-role/eksctl-winterfell-addon-iamserviceaccount-de-Role1-1D61LT75JH3MB/abc"
    },
    "Audience": "sts.amazonaws.com",
    "Provider": "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:oidc-provider/oidc.eks.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/id/D43CF17C27A865933144EA99A26FB128",
    "SubjectFromWebIdentityToken": "system:serviceaccount:default:s3-read-only",
    "Credentials": {
        "SecretAccessKey": "wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY",
        "SessionToken": "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",
        "Expiration": "2020-02-20T18:49:50Z",
        "AccessKeyId": "ASIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE"
    }
}

A mutating webhook that runs as part of the EKS control plane injects the AWS Role ARN and the path to a web identity token file into the Pod as environment variables. These values can also be supplied manually.


AWS_ROLE_ARN=arn:aws:iam::AWS_ACCOUNT_ID:role/IAM_ROLE_NAME
AWS_WEB_IDENTITY_TOKEN_FILE=/var/run/secrets/eks.amazonaws.com/serviceaccount/token

The kubelet will automatically rotate the projected token when it is older than 80% of its total TTL, or after 24 hours. The AWS SDKs are responsible for reloading the token when it rotates. For further information about IRSA, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/iam-roles-for-service-accounts-technical-overview.html.

EKS Pod Identities

EKS Pod Identities is a feature launched at re:Invent 2023 that allows you to assign an IAM role to a kubernetes service account, without the need to configure an Open Id Connect (OIDC) identity provider(IDP) for each cluster in your AWS account. To use EKS Pod Identity, you must deploy an agent which runs as a DaemonSet pod on every eligible worker node. This agent is made available to you as an EKS Add-on and is a pre-requisite to use EKS Pod Identity feature. Your applications must use a supported version of the AWS SDK to use this feature.

When EKS Pod Identities are configured for a Pod, EKS will mount and refresh a pod identity token at /var/run/secrets/pods.eks.amazonaws.com/serviceaccount/eks-pod-identity-token. This token will be used by the AWS SDK to communicate with the EKS Pod Identity Agent, which uses the pod identity token and the agent’s IAM role to create temporary credentials for your pods by calling the AssumeRoleForPodIdentity API. The pod identity token delivered to your pods is a JWT issued from your EKS cluster and cryptographically signed, with appropriate JWT claims for use with EKS Pod Identities.

To learn more about EKS Pod Identities, please see this blog.

You do not have to make any modifications to your application code to use EKS Pod Identities. Supported AWS SDK versions will automatically discover credentials made available with EKS Pod Identities by using the credential provider chain. Like IRSA, EKS pod identities sets variables within your pods to direct them how to find AWS credentials.

Working with IAM roles for EKS Pod Identities

EKS Pod Identities can only directly assume an IAM role that belongs to the same AWS account as the EKS cluster. To access an IAM role in another AWS account, you must assume that role by configuring a profile in your SDK configuration, or in your application’s code.
When EKS Pod Identities are being configured for Service Accounts, the person or process configuring the Pod Identity Association must have the iam:PassRole entitlement for that role.
Each Service Account may only have one IAM role associated with it through EKS Pod Identities, however you can associate the same IAM role with multiple service accounts.
IAM roles used with EKS Pod Identities must allow the pods.eks.amazonaws.com Service Principal to assume them, and set session tags. The following is an example role trust policy which allows EKS Pod Identities to use an IAM role:


{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "Service": "pods.eks.amazonaws.com"
      },
      "Action": [
        "sts:AssumeRole",
        "sts:TagSession"
      ],
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "aws:SourceOrgId": "${aws:ResourceOrgId}"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

AWS recommends using condition keys like aws:SourceOrgId to help protect against the cross-service confused deputy problem. In the above example role trust policy, the ResourceOrgId is a variable equal to the AWS Organizations Organization ID of the AWS Organization that the AWS account belongs to. EKS will pass in a value for aws:SourceOrgId equal to that when assuming a role with EKS Pod Identities.

ABAC and EKS Pod Identities

When EKS Pod Identities assumes an IAM role, it sets the following session tags:

EKS Pod Identities Session Tag	Value
kubernetes-namespace	The namespace the pod associated with EKS Pod Identities runs in.
kubernetes-service-account	The name of the kubernetes service account associated with EKS Pod Identities
eks-cluster-arn	The ARN of the EKS cluster, e.g. `arn:${Partition}:eks:${Region}:${Account}:cluster/${ClusterName}`. The cluster ARN is unique, but if a cluster is deleted and recreated in the same region with the same name, within the same AWS account, it will have the same ARN.
eks-cluster-name	The name of the EKS cluster. Please note that EKS cluster names can be same within your AWS account, and EKS clusters in other AWS accounts.
kubernetes-pod-name	The name of the pod in EKS.
kubernetes-pod-uid	The UID of the pod in EKS.

These session tags allow you to use Attribute Based Access Control(ABAC) to grant access to your AWS resources to only specific kubernetes service accounts. When doing so, it is very important to understand that kubernetes service accounts are only unique within a namespace, and kubernetes namespaces are only unique within an EKS cluster. These session tags can be accessed in AWS policies by using the aws:PrincipalTag/<tag-key> global condition key, such as aws:PrincipalTag/eks-cluster-arn

For example, if you wanted to grant access to only a specific service account to access an AWS resource in your account with an IAM or resource policy, you would need to check eks-cluster-arn and kubernetes-namespace tags as well as the kubernetes-service-account to ensure that only that service accounts from the intended cluster have access to that resource as other clusters could have identical kubernetes-service-accounts and kubernetes-namespaces.

This example S3 Bucket policy only grants access to objects in the S3 bucket it’s attached to, only if kubernetes-service-account, kubernetes-namespace, eks-cluster-arn all meet their expected values, where the EKS cluster is hosted in the AWS account 111122223333.


{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::111122223333:root"
            },
            "Action": "s3:*",
            "Resource":            [
                "arn:aws:s3:::ExampleBucket/*"
            ],
            "Condition": {
                "StringEquals": {
                    "aws:PrincipalTag/kubernetes-service-account": "s3objectservice",
                    "aws:PrincipalTag/eks-cluster-arn": "arn:aws:eks:us-west-2:111122223333:cluster/ProductionCluster",
                    "aws:PrincipalTag/kubernetes-namespace": "s3datanamespace"
                }
            }
        }
    ]
}

EKS Pod Identities compared to IRSA

Both EKS Pod Identities and IRSA are preferred ways to deliver temporary AWS credentials to your EKS pods. Unless you have specific usecases for IRSA, we recommend you use EKS Pod Identities when using EKS. This table helps compare the two features.

#	EKS Pod Identities	IRSA
Requires permission to create an OIDC IDP in your AWS accounts?	No	Yes
Requires unique IDP setup per cluster	No	Yes
Sets relevant session tags for use with ABAC	Yes	No
Requires an iam:PassRole Check?	Yes	No
Uses AWS STS Quota from your AWS account?	No	Yes
Can access other AWS accounts	Indirectly with role chaining	Directly with sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity
Compatible with AWS SDKs	Yes	Yes
Requires Pod Identity Agent Daemonset on nodes?	Yes	No

Identities and Credentials for EKS pods Recommendations

Update the aws-node daemonset to use IRSA

At present, the aws-node daemonset is configured to use a role assigned to the EC2 instances to assign IPs to pods. This role includes several AWS managed policies, e.g. AmazonEKS_CNI_Policy and EC2ContainerRegistryReadOnly that effectively allow all pods running on a node to attach/detach ENIs, assign/unassign IP addresses, or pull images from ECR. Since this presents a risk to your cluster, it is recommended that you update the aws-node daemonset to use IRSA. A script for doing this can be found in the repository for this guide.

The aws-node daemonset supports EKS Pod Identities in versions v1.15.5 and later.

Restrict access to the instance profile assigned to the worker node

When you use IRSA or EKS Pod Identities, it updates the credential chain of the pod to use IRSA or EKS Pod Identities first, however, the pod can still inherit the rights of the instance profile assigned to the worker node. For pods that do not need these permissions, you can block access to the instance metadata to help ensure that your applications only have the permissions they require, and not their nodes.

Warning

Blocking access to instance metadata will prevent pods that do not use IRSA or EKS Pod Identities from inheriting the role assigned to the worker node.

You can block access to instance metadata by requiring the instance to use IMDSv2 only and updating the hop count to 1 as in the example below. You can also include these settings in the node group’s launch template. Do not disable instance metadata as this will prevent components like the node termination handler and other things that rely on instance metadata from working properly.


$ aws ec2 modify-instance-metadata-options --instance-id <value> --http-tokens required --http-put-response-hop-limit 1
...

If you are using Terraform to create launch templates for use with Managed Node Groups, add the metadata block to configure the hop count as seen in this code snippet:

tf hl_lines="7" resource "aws_launch_template" "foo" { name = "foo" … metadata_options { http_endpoint = "enabled" http_tokens = "required" http_put_response_hop_limit = 1 instance_metadata_tags = "enabled" } …

You can also block a pod’s access to EC2 metadata by manipulating iptables on the node. For further information about this method, see Limiting access to the instance metadata service.

If you have an application that is using an older version of the AWS SDK that doesn’t support IRSA or EKS Pod Identities, you should update the SDK version.

Scope the IAM Role trust policy for IRSA Roles to the service account name, namespace, and cluster

The trust policy can be scoped to a Namespace or a specific service account within a Namespace. When using IRSA it’s best to make the role trust policy as explicit as possible by including the service account name. This will effectively prevent other Pods within the same Namespace from assuming the role. The CLI eksctl will do this automatically when you use it to create service accounts/IAM roles. See https://eksctl.io/usage/iamserviceaccounts/ for further information.

When working with IAM directly, this is adding condition into the role’s trust policy that uses conditions to ensure the :sub claim are the namespace and service account you expect. As an example, before we had an IRSA token with a sub claim of "system:serviceaccount:default:s3-read-only" . This is the default namespace and the service account is s3-read-only. You would use a condition like the following to ensure that only your service account in a given namespace from your cluster can assume that role:


  "Condition": {
      "StringEquals": {
          "oidc.eks.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/id/D43CF17C27A865933144EA99A26FB128:aud": "sts.amazonaws.com",
          "oidc.eks.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/id/D43CF17C27A865933144EA99A26FB128:sub": "system:serviceaccount:default:s3-read-only"
      }
  }

Use one IAM role per application

With both IRSA and EKS Pod Identity, it is a best practice to give each application its own IAM role. This gives you improved isolation as you can modify one application without impacting another, and allows you to apply the principal of least privilege by only granting an application the permissions it needs.

When using ABAC with EKS Pod Identity, you may use a common IAM role across multiple service accounts and rely on their session attributes for access control. This is especially useful when operating at scale, as ABAC allows you to operate with fewer IAM roles.

When your application needs access to IMDS, use IMDSv2 and increase the hop limit on EC2 instances to 2

IMDSv2 requires you use a PUT request to get a session token. The initial PUT request has to include a TTL for the session token. Newer versions of the AWS SDKs will handle this and the renewal of said token automatically. It’s also important to be aware that the default hop limit on EC2 instances is intentionally set to 1 to prevent IP forwarding. As a consequence, Pods that request a session token that are run on EC2 instances may eventually time out and fallback to using the IMDSv1 data flow. EKS adds support IMDSv2 by enabling both v1 and v2 and changing the hop limit to 2 on nodes provisioned by eksctl or with the official CloudFormation templates.

Disable auto-mounting of service account tokens

If your application doesn’t need to call the Kubernetes API set the automountServiceAccountToken attribute to false in the PodSpec for your application or patch the default service account in each namespace so that it’s no longer mounted to pods automatically. For example:


kubectl patch serviceaccount default -p $'automountServiceAccountToken: false'

Use dedicated service accounts for each application

Each application should have its own dedicated service account. This applies to service accounts for the Kubernetes API as well as IRSA and EKS Pod Identity.

Important

If you employ a blue/green approach to cluster upgrades instead of performing an in-place cluster upgrade when using IRSA, you will need to update the trust policy of each of the IRSA IAM roles with the OIDC endpoint of the new cluster. A blue/green cluster upgrade is where you create a cluster running a newer version of Kubernetes alongside the old cluster and use a load balancer or a service mesh to seamlessly shift traffic from services running on the old cluster to the new cluster. When using blue/green cluster upgrades with EKS Pod Identity, you would create pod identity associations between the IAM roles and service accounts in the new cluster. And update the IAM role trust policy if you have a sourceArn condition.

Run the application as a non-root user

Containers run as root by default. While this allows them to read the web identity token file, running a container as root is not considered a best practice. As an alternative, consider adding the spec.securityContext.runAsUser attribute to the PodSpec. The value of runAsUser is arbitrary value.

In the following example, all processes within the Pod will run under the user ID specified in the runAsUser field.


apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: security-context-demo
spec:
  securityContext:
    runAsUser: 1000
    runAsGroup: 3000
  containers:
  - name: sec-ctx-demo
    image: busybox
    command: [ "sh", "-c", "sleep 1h" ]

When you run a container as a non-root user, it prevents the container from reading the IRSA service account token because the token is assigned 0600 [root] permissions by default. If you update the securityContext for your container to include fsgroup=65534 [Nobody] it will allow the container to read the token.


spec:
  securityContext:
    fsGroup: 65534

In Kubernetes 1.19 and above, this change is no longer required and applications can read the IRSA service account token without adding them to the Nobody group.

Grant least privileged access to applications

Action Hero is a utility that you can run alongside your application to identify the AWS API calls and corresponding IAM permissions your application needs to function properly. It is similar to IAM Access Advisor in that it helps you gradually limit the scope of IAM roles assigned to applications. Consult the documentation on granting least privileged access to AWS resources for further information.

Consider setting a permissions boundary on IAM roles used with IRSA and Pod Identities. You can use the permissions boundary to ensure that the roles used by IRSA or Pod Identities can not exceed a maximum level of permissions. For an example guide on getting started with permissions boundaries with an example permissions boundary policy, please see this github repo.

Review and revoke unnecessary anonymous access to your EKS cluster

Ideally anonymous access should be disabled for all API actions. Anonymous access is granted by creating a RoleBinding or ClusterRoleBinding for the Kubernetes built-in user system:anonymous. You can use the rbac-lookup tool to identify permissions that system:anonymous user has on your cluster:


./rbac-lookup | grep -P 'system:(anonymous)|(unauthenticated)'
system:anonymous               cluster-wide        ClusterRole/system:discovery
system:unauthenticated         cluster-wide        ClusterRole/system:discovery
system:unauthenticated         cluster-wide        ClusterRole/system:public-info-viewer

Any role or ClusterRole other than system:public-info-viewer should not be bound to system:anonymous user or system:unauthenticated group.

There may be some legitimate reasons to enable anonymous access on specific APIs. If this is the case for your cluster ensure that only those specific APIs are accessible by anonymous user and exposing those APIs without authentication doesn’t make your cluster vulnerable.

Prior to Kubernetes/EKS Version 1.14, system:unauthenticated group was associated to system:discovery and system:basic-user ClusterRoles by default. Note that even if you have updated your cluster to version 1.14 or higher, these permissions may still be enabled on your cluster, since cluster updates do not revoke these permissions. To check which ClusterRoles have "system:unauthenticated" except system:public-info-viewer you can run the following command (requires jq util):


kubectl get ClusterRoleBinding -o json | jq -r '.items[] | select(.subjects[]?.name =="system:unauthenticated") | select(.metadata.name != "system:public-info-viewer") | .metadata.name'

And "system:unauthenticated" can be removed from all the roles except "system:public-info-viewer" using:


kubectl get ClusterRoleBinding -o json | jq -r '.items[] | select(.subjects[]?.name =="system:unauthenticated") | select(.metadata.name != "system:public-info-viewer") | del(.subjects[] | select(.name =="system:unauthenticated"))' | kubectl apply -f -

Alternatively, you can check and remove it manually by kubectl describe and kubectl edit. To check if system:unauthenticated group has system:discovery permissions on your cluster run the following command:


kubectl describe clusterrolebindings system:discovery

Name:         system:discovery
Labels:       kubernetes.io/bootstrapping=rbac-defaults
Annotations:  rbac.authorization.kubernetes.io/autoupdate: true
Role:
  Kind:  ClusterRole
  Name:  system:discovery
Subjects:
  Kind   Name                    Namespace
  ----   ----                    ---------
  Group  system:authenticated
  Group  system:unauthenticated

To check if system:unauthenticated group has system:basic-user permission on your cluster run the following command:


kubectl describe clusterrolebindings system:basic-user

Name:         system:basic-user
Labels:       kubernetes.io/bootstrapping=rbac-defaults
Annotations:  rbac.authorization.kubernetes.io/autoupdate: true
Role:
  Kind:  ClusterRole
  Name:  system:basic-user
Subjects:
  Kind   Name                    Namespace
  ----   ----                    ---------
  Group  system:authenticated
  Group  system:unauthenticated

If system:unauthenticated group is bound to system:discovery and/or system:basic-user ClusterRoles on your cluster, you should disassociate these roles from system:unauthenticated group. Edit system:discovery ClusterRoleBinding using the following command:


kubectl edit clusterrolebindings system:discovery

The above command will open the current definition of system:discovery ClusterRoleBinding in an editor as shown below:


# Please edit the object below. Lines beginning with a '#' will be ignored,
# and an empty file will abort the edit. If an error occurs while saving this file will be
# reopened with the relevant failures.
#
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  annotations:
    rbac.authorization.kubernetes.io/autoupdate: "true"
  creationTimestamp: "2021-06-17T20:50:49Z"
  labels:
    kubernetes.io/bootstrapping: rbac-defaults
  name: system:discovery
  resourceVersion: "24502985"
  selfLink: /apis/rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1/clusterrolebindings/system%3Adiscovery
  uid: b7936268-5043-431a-a0e1-171a423abeb6
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: system:discovery
subjects:
- apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: Group
  name: system:authenticated
- apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: Group
  name: system:unauthenticated

Delete the entry for system:unauthenticated group from the "subjects" section in the above editor screen.

Repeat the same steps for system:basic-user ClusterRoleBinding.

Reuse AWS SDK sessions with IRSA

When you use IRSA, applications written using the AWS SDK use the token delivered to your pods to call sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity to generate temporary AWS credentials. This is different from other AWS compute services, where the compute service delivers temporary AWS credentials directly to the AWS compute resource, such as a lambda function. This means that every time an AWS SDK session is initialized, a call to AWS STS for AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity is made. If your application scales rapidly and initializes many AWS SDK sessions, you may experience throttling from AWS STS as your code will be making many calls for AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity.

To avoid this scenario, we recommend reusing AWS SDK sessions within your application so that unnecessary calls to AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity are not made.

In the following example code, a session is created using the boto3 python SDK, and that same session is used to create clients and interact with both Amazon S3 and Amazon SQS. AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity is only called once, and the AWS SDK will refresh the credentials of my_session when they expire automatically.


import boto3

= Create your own session

my_session = boto3.session.Session()

= Now we can create low-level clients from our session

sqs = my_session.client('`sqs`') s3 = my_session.client('`s3`')

s3response = s3.list_buckets() sqsresponse = sqs.list_queues()

#print the response from the S3 and SQS APIs print("`s3 response:`")
print(s3response) print("`—`") print("`sqs response:`")
print(sqsresponse) ```

If you’re migrating an application from another AWS compute service, such as EC2, to EKS with IRSA, this is a particularly important detail. On other compute services initializing an AWS SDK session does not call AWS STS unless you instruct it to.

Alternative approaches

While IRSA and EKS Pod Identities are the preferred ways to assign an AWS identity to a pod, they require that you include recent version of the AWS SDKs in your application. For a complete listing of the SDKs that currently support IRSA, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/iam-roles-for-service-accounts-minimum-sdk.html, for EKS Pod Identities, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/pod-id-minimum-sdk.html. If you have an application that you can’t immediately update with a compatible SDK, there are several community-built solutions available for assigning IAM roles to Kubernetes pods, including kube2iam and kiam. Although AWS doesn’t endorse, condone, nor support the use of these solutions, they are frequently used by the community at large to achieve similar results as IRSA and EKS Pod Identities.

If you need to use one of these non-aws provided solutions, please exercise due diligence and ensure you understand security implications of doing so.

Tools and Resources

Amazon EKS Security Immersion Workshop - Identity and Access Management
Terraform EKS Blueprints Pattern - Fully Private Amazon EKS Cluster
Terraform EKS Blueprints Pattern - IAM Identity Center Single Sign-On for Amazon EKS Cluster
Terraform EKS Blueprints Pattern - Okta Single Sign-On for Amazon EKS Cluster
audit2rbac
rbac.dev A list of additional resources, including blogs and tools, for Kubernetes RBAC
Action Hero
kube2iam
kiam

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Document Conventions

Security

Pod Security

Identity and Access Management

Controlling Access to EKS Clusters

Cluster Access Manager

The aws-auth ConfigMap (deprecated)

Cluster Access Recommendations

Make the EKS Cluster Endpoint private

Don’t use a service account token for authentication

Employ least privileged access to AWS Resources

Remove the cluster-admin permissions from the cluster creator principal

Use IAM Roles when multiple users need identical access to the cluster

Important

Employ least privileged access when creating RoleBindings and ClusterRoleBindings

Create cluster using an automated process

Create the cluster with a dedicated IAM role

Regularly audit access to the cluster

If relying on aws-auth configMap use tools to make changes

Alternative Approaches to Authentication and Access Management

Important

Identities and Credentials for EKS pods

Kubernetes Service Accounts

Note

IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA)

EKS Pod Identities

Working with IAM roles for EKS Pod Identities

ABAC and EKS Pod Identities

EKS Pod Identities compared to IRSA

Identities and Credentials for EKS pods Recommendations

Update the aws-node daemonset to use IRSA

Restrict access to the instance profile assigned to the worker node

Warning

Scope the IAM Role trust policy for IRSA Roles to the service account name, namespace, and cluster

Use one IAM role per application

When your application needs access to IMDS, use IMDSv2 and increase the hop limit on EC2 instances to 2

Disable auto-mounting of service account tokens

Use dedicated service accounts for each application

Important

Run the application as a non-root user

Grant least privileged access to applications

Review and revoke unnecessary anonymous access to your EKS cluster

Reuse AWS SDK sessions with IRSA

Alternative approaches

Tools and Resources

The `aws-auth` ConfigMap (deprecated)

If relying on `aws-auth` configMap use tools to make changes