Logging Macie API calls with AWS CloudTrail - Amazon Macie
Macie management events in CloudTrailExamples of Macie events in CloudTrail

Logging Macie API calls with AWS CloudTrail

Amazon Macie integrates with AWS CloudTrail, which is a service that provides a record of actions taken by a user, a role, or an AWS service. CloudTrail captures all API calls for Macie as management events. The calls captured include calls from the Amazon Macie console and programmatic calls to Amazon Macie API operations. By using the information collected by CloudTrail, you can determine the request that was made to Macie, the IP address from which the request was made, when it was made, and additional details.

Every event or log entry contains information about who generated the request. The identity information helps you determine the following:

  • Whether the request was made with root user or user credentials.

  • Whether the request was made on behalf of an AWS IAM Identity Center user.

  • Whether the request was made with temporary security credentials for a role or federated user.

  • Whether the request was made by another AWS service.

CloudTrail is active in your AWS account when you create the account and you automatically have access to the CloudTrail Event history. The CloudTrail Event history provides a viewable, searchable, downloadable, and immutable record of the past 90 days of recorded management events in an AWS Region. For more information, see Working with CloudTrail Event history in the AWS CloudTrail User Guide. There are no CloudTrail charges for viewing the Event history.

For an ongoing record of events in your AWS account past 90 days, create a trail or a CloudTrail Lake event data store.

CloudTrail trails

A trail enables CloudTrail to deliver log files to an Amazon S3 bucket. All trails created using the AWS Management Console are multi-Region. You can create a single-Region or a multi-Region trail by using the AWS CLI. Creating a multi-Region trail is recommended because you capture activity in all AWS Regions in your account. If you create a single-Region trail, you can view only the events logged in the trail's AWS Region. For more information about trails, see Creating a trail for your AWS account and Creating a trail for an organization in the AWS CloudTrail User Guide.

You can deliver one copy of your ongoing management events to your Amazon S3 bucket at no charge from CloudTrail by creating a trail, however, there are Amazon S3 storage charges. For more information about CloudTrail pricing, see AWS CloudTrail Pricing. For information about Amazon S3 pricing, see Amazon S3 Pricing.

CloudTrail Lake event data stores

CloudTrail Lake lets you run SQL-based queries on your events. CloudTrail Lake converts existing events in row-based JSON format to Apache ORC format. ORC is a columnar storage format that is optimized for fast retrieval of data. Events are aggregated into event data stores, which are immutable collections of events based on criteria that you select by applying advanced event selectors. The selectors that you apply to an event data store control which events persist and are available for you to query. For more information about CloudTrail Lake, see Working with AWS CloudTrail Lake in the AWS CloudTrail User Guide.

CloudTrail Lake event data stores and queries incur costs. When you create an event data store, you choose the pricing option you want to use for the event data store. The pricing option determines the cost for ingesting and storing events, and the default and maximum retention period for the event data store. For more information about CloudTrail pricing, see AWS CloudTrail Pricing.

Macie management events in AWS CloudTrail

Management events provide information about management operations that are performed on resources in your AWS account. These are also known as control plane operations. By default, CloudTrail logs management events.

Amazon Macie logs all Macie control plane operations as management events in CloudTrail. For example, calls to the ListFindings, DescribeBuckets, and CreateClassificationJob operations generate management events in CloudTrail. Each event includes an eventSource field. This field indicates the AWS service that a request was made to. For Macie events, the value for this field is: macie2.amazonaws.com.

For a list of the control plane operations that Macie logs in CloudTrail, see Operations in the Amazon Macie API Reference.

Examples of Macie events in AWS CloudTrail

An event represents a single request from any source and includes information about the requested API operation, the date and time of the operation, request parameters, and so on. CloudTrail log files aren't an ordered stack trace of the public API calls, so events don't appear in any specific order.

The following examples show CloudTrail events that demonstrate Amazon Macie operations. For details about the information that an event might contain, see CloudTrail record contents in the AWS CloudTrail User Guide.

Example: Listing findings

The following example shows a CloudTrail event for the Amazon Macie ListFindings operation. In this example, an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user (Mary_Major) used the Amazon Macie console to retrieve a subset of information about current policy findings for their account.

{
    "eventVersion": "1.08",
    "userIdentity": {
        "type": "IAMUser",
        "principalId": "123456789012",
        "arn": "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/Mary_Major",
        "accountId": "123456789012",
        "accessKeyId": "AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE",
        "userName": "Mary_Major",
        "sessionContext":{
            "attributes": {
                "creationdate": "2023-11-14T15:49:57Z",
                "mfaAuthenticated": "false"
            }
        }
    },
    "eventTime": "2023-11-14T16:09:56Z",
    "eventSource": "macie2.amazonaws.com",
    "eventName": "ListFindings",
    "awsRegion": "us-east-1",
    "sourceIPAddress": "198.51.100.1",
    "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
    "requestParameters": {
        "sortCriteria": {
            "attributeName": "updatedAt",
            "orderBy": "DESC"
        },
        "findingCriteria": {
            "criterion": {
                "archived": {
                    "eq": [
                        "false"
                    ]
                },
                "category": {
                    "eq": [
                        "POLICY"
                    ]
                }
            }
        },
        "maxResults": 25,
        "nextToken": ""
    },
    "responseElements": null,
    "requestID": "d58af6be-1115-4a41-91f8-ace03example",
    "eventID": "ad97fac5-f7cf-4ff9-9cf2-d0676example",
    "readOnly": true,
    "eventType": "AwsApiCall",
    "managementEvent": true,
    "recipientAccountId": "123456789012",
    "eventCategory": "Management"
}

Example: Retrieving sensitive data samples for a finding

This example shows CloudTrail events for retrieving and revealing samples of sensitive data that Amazon Macie reported in a finding. In this example, an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user (JohnDoe) used the Amazon Macie console to retrieve and reveal sensitive data samples. The user's account is configured to assume an IAM role (MacieReveal) to retrieve and reveal sensitive data samples from affected Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) objects.

The following event shows details about the user's request to retrieve and reveal sensitive data samples by performing the Amazon Macie GetSensitiveDataOccurrences operation.

{
    "eventVersion": "1.08",
    "userIdentity": {
        "type": "AssumedRole",
        "principalId": "UU4MH7OYK5ZCOAEXAMPLE:JohnDoe",
        "arn": "arn:aws:sts::111122223333:assumed-role/Admin/JohnDoe",
        "accountId": "111122223333",
        "accessKeyId": "AKIAI44QH8DHBEXAMPLE",
        "sessionContext": {
            "sessionIssuer": {
                "type": "Role",
                "principalId": "UU4MH7OYK5ZCOAEXAMPLE",
                "arn": "arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/Admin",
                "accountId": "111122223333",
                "userName": "Admin"
            },
            "webIdFederationData": {},
            "attributes": {
                "creationDate": "2023-12-12T14:40:23Z",
                "mfaAuthenticated": "false"
            }
        }
    },
    "eventTime": "2023-12-12T17:04:47Z",
    "eventSource": "macie2.amazonaws.com",
    "eventName": "GetSensitiveDataOccurrences",
    "awsRegion": "us-east-1",
    "sourceIPAddress": "198.51.100.252",
    "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
    "requestParameters": {
        "findingId": "3ad9d8cd61c5c390bede45cd2example"
    },
    "responseElements": null,
    "requestID": "c30cb760-5102-47e7-88d8-ff2e8example",
    "eventID": "baf52d92-f9c3-431a-bfe8-71c81example",
    "readOnly": true,
    "eventType": "AwsApiCall",
    "managementEvent": true,
    "recipientAccountId": "111122223333",
    "eventCategory": "Management"
}

The next event shows details about Macie then assuming the specified IAM role (MacieReveal) by performing the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) AssumeRole operation.

{
    "eventVersion": "1.08",
    "userIdentity": {
        "type": "AWSService",
        "invokedBy": "reveal-samples.macie.amazonaws.com"
    },
    "eventTime": "2023-12-12T17:04:47Z",
    "eventSource": "sts.amazonaws.com",
    "eventName": "AssumeRole",
    "awsRegion": "us-east-1",
    "sourceIPAddress": "reveal-samples.macie.amazonaws.com",
    "userAgent": "reveal-samples.macie.amazonaws.com",
    "requestParameters": {
        "roleArn": "arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/MacieReveal",
        "roleSessionName": "RevealCrossAccount"
    },
    "responseElements": {
        "credentials": {
            "accessKeyId": "AKIAI44QH8DHBEXAMPLE",
            "sessionToken": "XXYYaz...
EXAMPLE_SESSION_TOKEN
XXyYaZAz",
            "expiration": "Dec 12, 2023, 6:04:47 PM"
        },
        "assumedRoleUser": {
            "assumedRoleId": "AROAXOTKAROCSNEXAMPLE:RevealCrossAccount",
            "arn": "arn:aws:sts::111122223333:assumed-role/MacieReveal/RevealCrossAccount"
        }
    },
    "requestID": "d905cea8-2dcb-44c1-948e-19419example",
    "eventID": "74ee4d0c-932d-3332-87aa-8bcf3example",
    "readOnly": true,
    "resources": [
        {
            "accountId": "111122223333",
            "type": "AWS::IAM::Role",
            "ARN": "arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/MacieReveal"
        }
    ],
    "eventType": "AwsApiCall",
    "managementEvent": true,
    "recipientAccountId": "111122223333",
    "eventCategory": "Management"
}

For information about the contents of CloudTrail events, see CloudTrail record contents in the AWS CloudTrail User Guide.