Troubleshoot Amazon VPC identity and access

Use the following information to help you diagnose and fix common issues that you might encounter when working with Amazon VPC and IAM.

I am not authorized to perform an action in Amazon VPC

If the AWS Management Console tells you that you're not authorized to perform an action, then you must contact your administrator for assistance. Your administrator is the person that provided you with your sign-in credentials.

The following example error occurs when the mateojackson IAM user tries to use the console to view details about a subnet but belongs to an IAM role that does not have ec2:DescribeSubnets permissions.

User: arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/mateojackson is not authorized to perform: ec2:DescribeSubnets on resource: subnet-id

In this case, Mateo asks his administrator to update the policy to allow him to access the subnet.

I am not authorized to perform iam:PassRole

If you receive an error that you're not authorized to perform the iam:PassRole action, your policies must be updated to allow you to pass a role to Amazon VPC.

Some AWS services allow you to pass an existing role to that service instead of creating a new service role or service-linked role. To do this, you must have permissions to pass the role to the service.

The following example error occurs when an IAM user named marymajor tries to use the console to perform an action in Amazon VPC. However, the action requires the service to have permissions that are granted by a service role. Mary does not have permissions to pass the role to the service.

User: arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/marymajor is not authorized to perform: iam:PassRole

In this case, Mary's policies must be updated to allow her to perform the iam:PassRole action.

If you need help, contact your AWS administrator. Your administrator is the person who provided you with your sign-in credentials.

I want to allow people outside of my AWS account to access my Amazon VPC resources

You can create a role that users in other accounts or people outside of your organization can use to access your resources. You can specify who is trusted to assume the role. For services that support resource-based policies or access control lists (ACLs), you can use those policies to grant people access to your resources.

To learn more, consult the following:

• To learn whether Amazon VPC supports these features, see How Amazon VPC works with IAM.

• To learn how to provide access to your resources across AWS accounts that you own, see Providing access to an IAM user in another AWS account that you own in the IAM User Guide.

• To learn how to provide access to your resources to third-party AWS accounts, see Providing access to AWS accounts owned by third parties in the IAM User Guide.

• To learn how to provide access through identity federation, see Providing access to externally authenticated users (identity federation) in the IAM User Guide.

• To learn the difference between using roles and resource-based policies for cross-account access, see Cross account resource access in IAM in the IAM User Guide.