AWS Documentation » AWS Systems Manager » User Guide » AWS Systems Manager Instances & Nodes » AWS Systems Manager Session Manager » Getting Started with Session Manager » Step 2: Verify or Create an IAM Instance Profile with Session Manager Permissions » Adding Session Manager Permissions to an Existing Instance Profile

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Adding Session Manager Permissions to an Existing Instance Profile

Follow these steps to embed Session Manager permissions in an existing IAM instance profile that does not rely on the AWS-provided default policy AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore for instance permissions. Note that this procedure assumes that your existing profile already includes other Systems Manager ssm permissions for actions you want to allow access to. This policy alone is not enough to use Session Manager.

To add Session Manager permissions to an existing instance profile (console)

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the IAM console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Roles.

3. Choose the name of the role to embed a policy in.

4. Choose the Permissions tab.

5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and choose Add inline policy.

6. Choose the JSON tab.

7. Replace the default content with the following:

   {
       "Version": "2012-10-17",
       "Statement": [
           {
               "Effect": "Allow",
               "Action": [
                   "ssmmessages:CreateControlChannel",
                   "ssmmessages:CreateDataChannel",
                   "ssmmessages:OpenControlChannel",
                   "ssmmessages:OpenDataChannel"
               ],
               "Resource": "*"
           },
           {
               "Effect": "Allow",
               "Action": [
                   "s3:GetEncryptionConfiguration"
               ],
               "Resource": "*"
           },
           {
               "Effect": "Allow",
               "Action": [
                   "kms:Decrypt"
               ],
               "Resource": "key-name"
           }
       ]
   }

   About 'ssmmessages'

   For information about ssmmessages, see Reference: ec2messages, ssmmessages, and Other API Calls.

   About 'kms:Decrypt'

   In this policy, the kms:Decrypt permission enables customer key encryption and decryption for session data. If you will use AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) encryption for your session data, replace key-name with the ARN of the customer master key (CMK) you want to use, in the format arn:aws:kms:us-west-2:111122223333:key/1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-12345EXAMPLE.

   If you will not use AWS KMS encryption for your session data, you can remove the following content from the policy:

   ,
           {
               "Effect": "Allow",
               "Action": [
                   "kms:Decrypt"
               ],
               "Resource": "key-name"
           }

   For information about using AWS KMS and a CMK to encrypt session data, see Enable AWS KMS Key Encryption of Session Data (Console).

8. Choose Review policy.

9. On the Review policy page, for Name, enter a name for the inline policy. For example: SessionManagerPermissions.

10. Choose Create policy.