How Amazon Inspector Classic works with IAM

Before you use IAM to manage access to Amazon Inspector, learn what IAM features are available to use with Amazon Inspector.

IAM features you can use with Amazon Inspector Classic
IAM feature	Amazon Inspector support
Identity-based policies	Yes
Resource-based policies	No
Policy actions	Yes
Policy resources	Yes
Policy condition keys (service-specific)	Yes
ACLs	No
ABAC (tags in policies)	Partial
Temporary credentials	Yes
Principal permissions	Yes
Service roles	No
Service-linked roles	Yes

To get a high-level view of how Amazon Inspector and other AWS services work with most IAM features, see AWS services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policies for Amazon Inspector

Supports identity-based policies

Yes

Identity-based policies are JSON permissions policy documents that you can attach to an identity, such as an IAM user, group of users, or role. These policies control what actions users and roles can perform, on which resources, and under what conditions. To learn how to create an identity-based policy, see Creating IAM policies in the IAM User Guide.

With IAM identity-based policies, you can specify allowed or denied actions and resources as well as the conditions under which actions are allowed or denied. You can't specify the principal in an identity-based policy because it applies to the user or role to which it is attached. To learn about all of the elements that you can use in a JSON policy, see IAM JSON policy elements reference in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Inspector

To view examples of Amazon Inspector identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Inspector Classic.

Resource-based policies within Amazon Inspector

Supports resource-based policies

No

Resource-based policies are JSON policy documents that you attach to a resource. Examples of resource-based policies are IAM role trust policies and Amazon S3 bucket policies. In services that support resource-based policies, service administrators can use them to control access to a specific resource. For the resource where the policy is attached, the policy defines what actions a specified principal can perform on that resource and under what conditions. You must specify a principal in a resource-based policy. Principals can include accounts, users, roles, federated users, or AWS services.

To enable cross-account access, you can specify an entire account or IAM entities in another account as the principal in a resource-based policy. Adding a cross-account principal to a resource-based policy is only half of establishing the trust relationship. When the principal and the resource are in different AWS accounts, an IAM administrator in the trusted account must also grant the principal entity (user or role) permission to access the resource. They grant permission by attaching an identity-based policy to the entity. However, if a resource-based policy grants access to a principal in the same account, no additional identity-based policy is required. For more information, see How IAM roles differ from resource-based policies in the IAM User Guide.

Policy actions for Amazon Inspector

Supports policy actions

Yes

Administrators can use AWS JSON policies to specify who has access to what. That is, which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

The Action element of a JSON policy describes the actions that you can use to allow or deny access in a policy. Policy actions usually have the same name as the associated AWS API operation. There are some exceptions, such as permission-only actions that don't have a matching API operation. There are also some operations that require multiple actions in a policy. These additional actions are called dependent actions.

Include actions in a policy to grant permissions to perform the associated operation.

To see a list of Amazon Inspector actions, see Actions defined by Amazon Inspector Classic in the Service Authorization Reference.

Policy actions in Amazon Inspector use the following prefix before the action:

inspector

To specify multiple actions in a single statement, separate them with commas.

"Action": [
      "inspector:action1",
      "inspector:action2"
         ]

The following permissions policy grants a user permission to run all the operations that begin with Describe and List. These operations show information about an Amazon Inspector resource, such as an assessment target or finding. The wildcard character (*) in the Resource element indicates that the operations are allowed for all Amazon Inspector resources that are owned by the account:

{
   "Version":"2012-10-17",
   "Statement":[
      {
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Action": [
            "inspector:Describe*",
            "inspector:List*"
            ],
         "Resource":"*"
      }
   ]
}