Policy best practices for Amazon EMR

Identity-based policies are very powerful. They determine whether someone can create, access, or delete Amazon EMR resources in your account. These actions can incur costs for your AWS account. When you create or edit identity-based policies, follow these guidelines and recommendations:

• Get Started Using AWS Managed Policies – To start using Amazon EMR quickly, use AWS managed policies to give your employees the permissions they need. These policies are already available in your account and are maintained and updated by AWS. For more information, see Get started using permissions with AWS managed policies in the IAM User Guide and Amazon EMR managed policies.

• Grant Least Privilege – When you create custom policies, grant only the permissions required to perform a task. Start with a minimum set of permissions and grant additional permissions as necessary. Doing so is more secure than starting with permissions that are too lenient and then trying to tighten them later. For more information, see Grant least privilege in the IAM User Guide.

• Enable MFA for Sensitive Operations – For extra security, require a users to use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to access sensitive resources or API operations. For more information, see Using multi-factor authentication (MFA) in AWS in the IAM User Guide.

• Use Policy Conditions for Extra Security – To the extent that it's practical, define the conditions under which your identity-based policies allow access to a resource. For example, you can write conditions to specify a range of allowable IP addresses that a request must come from. You can also write conditions to allow requests only within a specified date or time range, or to require the use of SSL or MFA. For more information, see IAM JSON policy elements: Condition in the IAM User Guide.