AWS managed policies for AWS Shield

An AWS managed policy is a standalone policy that is created and administered by AWS. AWS managed policies are designed to provide permissions for many common use cases so that you can start assigning permissions to users, groups, and roles.

Keep in mind that AWS managed policies might not grant least-privilege permissions for your specific use cases because they're available for all AWS customers to use. We recommend that you reduce permissions further by defining customer managed policies that are specific to your use cases.

You cannot change the permissions defined in AWS managed policies. If AWS updates the permissions defined in an AWS managed policy, the update affects all principal identities (users, groups, and roles) that the policy is attached to. AWS is most likely to update an AWS managed policy when a new AWS service is launched or new API operations become available for existing services.

For more information, see AWS managed policies in the IAM User Guide.

AWS managed policy: AWSShieldDRTAccessPolicy

This section explains how to use AWS managed policies for Shield.

AWS Shield uses this managed policy when you grant permission to the Shield Response Team (SRT) to act on your behalf. This policy gives the SRT limited access to your AWS account, to assist with DDoS attack mitigation during high-severity events. This policy allows the SRT to manage your AWS WAF rules and Shield Advanced protections and to access your AWS WAF logs.

For information about granting permission to the SRT to operate on your behalf, see Granting access for the SRT.

For details about this policy, see AWSShieldDRTAccessPolicy in the IAM console.

AWS managed policy: AWSShieldServiceRolePolicy

Shield Advanced uses this managed policy when you enable automatic application layer DDoS mitigation, to set the permissions it needs to manage resources for your account. This policy allows Shield Advanced to create and apply AWS WAF rules and rule groups in the web ACLs that you've associated with your protected resources, to automatically respond to DDoS attacks.

You can't attach AWSShieldServiceRolePolicy to your IAM entities. Shield attaches this policy to the service-linked role AWSServiceRoleForAWSShield to allow Shield to perform actions on your behalf.

Shield Advanced enables the use of this policy when you enable automatic application layer DDoS mitigation. For more information about the use for this policy, see Automating application layer DDoS mitigation with Shield Advanced .

For information about the service-linked role AWSServiceRoleForAWSShield that uses this policy, see Using service-linked roles for Shield Advanced

For details about this policy, see AWSShieldServiceRolePolicy in the IAM console.

Shield updates to AWS managed policies

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

Policy	Description of change	Date
AWSShieldServiceRolePolicy This policy allows Shield to access and manage AWS resources in order to automatically respond to application layer DDoS attacks on your behalf. Details in IAM console: AWSShieldServiceRolePolicy The service-linked role AWSServiceRoleForAWSShield uses this policy. For information, see Using service-linked roles for Shield Advanced.	Added this policy to provide Shield Advanced with the permissions required for the automatic application layer DDoS mitigation functionality. For information about this feature, see Automating application layer DDoS mitigation with Shield Advanced .	December 1, 2021
Shield started tracking changes	Shield started tracking changes for its AWS managed policies.	March 3, 2021