Use AWS Identity and Access Management to authenticate

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an AWS service that helps an administrator securely control access to AWS resources. IAM administrators control who can be authenticated (signed in) and authorized (have permissions) to use Amazon Location resources. IAM is an AWS service that you can use with no additional charge.

Audience

How you use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) differs based on your role:

Authenticating with identities

Authentication is how you sign in to AWS using your identity credentials. You must be authenticated as the AWS account root user, an IAM user, or by assuming an IAM role.

You can sign in as a federated identity using credentials from an identity source like AWS IAM Identity Center (IAM Identity Center), single sign-on authentication, or Google/Facebook credentials. For more information about signing in, see How to sign in to your AWS account in the AWS Sign-In User Guide.

For programmatic access, AWS provides an SDK and CLI to cryptographically sign requests. For more information, see AWS Signature Version 4 for API requests in the IAM User Guide.

AWS account root user

When you create an AWS account, you begin with one sign-in identity called the AWS account root user that has complete access to all AWS services and resources. We strongly recommend that you don't use the root user for everyday tasks. For tasks that require root user credentials, see Tasks that require root user credentials in the IAM User Guide.

Federated identity

As a best practice, require human users to use federation with an identity provider to access AWS services using temporary credentials.

A federated identity is a user from your enterprise directory, web identity provider, or AWS Directory Service that accesses AWS services using credentials from an identity source. Federated identities assume roles that provide temporary credentials.

For centralized access management, we recommend AWS IAM Identity Center. For more information, see What is IAM Identity Center? in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

IAM users and groups

An IAM user is an identity with specific permissions for a single person or application. We recommend using temporary credentials instead of IAM users with long-term credentials. For more information, see Require human users to use federation with an identity provider to access AWS using temporary credentials in the IAM User Guide.

An IAM group specifies a collection of IAM users and makes permissions easier to manage for large sets of users. For more information, see Use cases for IAM users in the IAM User Guide.

IAM roles

An IAM role is an identity with specific permissions that provides temporary credentials. You can assume a role by switching from a user to an IAM role (console) or by calling an AWS CLI or AWS API operation. For more information, see Methods to assume a role in the IAM User Guide.

IAM roles are useful for federated user access, temporary IAM user permissions, cross-account access, cross-service access, and applications running on Amazon EC2. For more information, see Cross account resource access in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Managing access using policies

You control access in AWS by creating policies and attaching them to AWS identities or resources. A policy defines permissions when associated with an identity or resource. AWS evaluates these policies when a principal makes a request. Most policies are stored in AWS as JSON documents. For more information about JSON policy documents, see Overview of JSON policies in the IAM User Guide.

Using policies, administrators specify who has access to what by defining which principal can perform actions on what resources, and under what conditions.

By default, users and roles have no permissions. An IAM administrator creates IAM policies and adds them to roles, which users can then assume. IAM policies define permissions regardless of the method used to perform the operation.

Identity-based policies

Identity-based policies are JSON permissions policy documents that you attach to an identity (user, group, or role). These policies control what actions identities can perform, on which resources, and under what conditions. To learn how to create an identity-based policy, see Define custom IAM permissions with customer managed policies in the IAM User Guide.

Identity-based policies can be inline policies (embedded directly into a single identity) or managed policies (standalone policies attached to multiple identities). To learn how to choose between managed and inline policies, see Choose between managed policies and inline policies in the IAM User Guide.

Resource-based policies

Resource-based policies are JSON policy documents that you attach to a resource. Examples include 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. You must specify a principal in a resource-based policy.

Resource-based policies are inline policies that are located in that service. You can't use AWS managed policies from IAM in a resource-based policy.

Other policy types

AWS supports additional policy types that can set the maximum permissions granted by more common policy types:

Multiple policy types

When multiple types of policies apply to a request, the resulting permissions are more complicated to understand. To learn how AWS determines whether to allow a request when multiple policy types are involved, see Policy evaluation logic in the IAM User Guide.

How Amazon Location Service works with IAM

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

To get a high-level view of how Amazon Location 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 Location

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 Define custom IAM permissions with customer managed 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. 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 Location

To view examples of Amazon Location identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Location Service.

Resource-based policies within Amazon Location

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. For more information, see Cross account resource access in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Policy actions for Amazon Location

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

To see a list of Amazon Location actions, see Actions Defined by Amazon Location Service in the Service Authorization Reference.

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

geo

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

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

You can specify multiple actions using wildcards (*). For example, to specify all actions that begin with the word Get, include the following action:

"Action": "geo:Get*"

To view examples of Amazon Location identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Location Service.

Policy resources for Amazon Location

Supports policy resources: 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 Resource JSON policy element specifies the object or objects to which the action applies. As a best practice, specify a resource using its Amazon Resource Name (ARN). For actions that don't support resource-level permissions, use a wildcard (*) to indicate that the statement applies to all resources.

"Resource": "*"

To see a list of Amazon Location resource types and their ARNs, see Resources Defined by Amazon Location Service in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn with which actions you can specify the ARN of each resource, see Actions Defined by Amazon Location Service.

To view examples of Amazon Location identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Location Service.

Policy condition keys for Amazon Location

Supports service-specific policy condition keys: 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 Condition element specifies when statements execute based on defined criteria. You can create conditional expressions that use condition operators, such as equals or less than, to match the condition in the policy with values in the request. To see all AWS global condition keys, see AWS global condition context keys in the IAM User Guide.

To see a list of Amazon Location condition keys, see Condition Keys for Amazon Location Service in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn with which actions and resources you can use a condition key, see Actions Defined by Amazon Location Service.

Amazon Location supports condition keys to allow you to allow or deny access to specific geofences or devices in your policy statements. The following condition keys are available:

The following actions can be used with geo:GeofenceIds in your IAM policy:

The following actions can be used with geo:DeviceIds in your IAM policy:

To view examples of Amazon Location identity-based policies, see Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Location Service.

ACLs in Amazon Location

Supports ACLs: No

Access control lists (ACLs) control which principals (account members, users, or roles) have permissions to access a resource. ACLs are similar to resource-based policies, although they do not use the JSON policy document format.

ABAC with Amazon Location

Supports ABAC (tags in policies): Yes

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on attributes called tags. You can attach tags to IAM entities and AWS resources, then design ABAC policies to allow operations when the principal's tag matches the tag on the resource.

To control access based on tags, you provide tag information in the condition element of a policy using the aws:ResourceTag/key-name, aws:RequestTag/key-name, or aws:TagKeys condition keys.

If a service supports all three condition keys for every resource type, then the value is Yes for the service. If a service supports all three condition keys for only some resource types, then the value is Partial.

For more information about ABAC, see Define permissions with ABAC authorization in the IAM User Guide. To view a tutorial with steps for setting up ABAC, see Use attribute-based access control (ABAC) in the IAM User Guide.

For more information about tagging Amazon Location resources, see How to use tags.

To view an example identity-based policy for limiting access to a resource based on the tags on that resource, see Control resource access based on tags.

Using temporary credentials with Amazon Location

Supports temporary credentials: Yes

Temporary credentials provide short-term access to AWS resources and are automatically created when you use federation or switch roles. AWS recommends that you dynamically generate temporary credentials instead of using long-term access keys. For more information, see Temporary security credentials in IAM and AWS services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Cross-service principal permissions for Amazon Location

Supports forward access sessions (FAS): No

Forward access sessions (FAS) use the permissions of the principal calling an AWS service, combined with the requesting AWS service to make requests to downstream services. For policy details when making FAS requests, see Forward access sessions.

Service roles for Amazon Location

Supports service roles: No

A service role is an IAM role that a service assumes to perform actions on your behalf. An IAM administrator can create, modify, and delete a service role from within IAM. For more information, see Create a role to delegate permissions to an AWS service in the IAM User Guide.

Service-linked roles for Amazon Location

Supports service-linked roles: No

A service-linked role is a type of service role that is linked to an AWS service. The service can assume the role to perform an action on your behalf. Service-linked roles appear in your AWS account and are owned by the service. An IAM administrator can view, but not edit the permissions for service-linked roles.

For details about creating or managing service-linked roles, see AWS services that work with IAM. Find a service in the table that includes a Yes in the Service-linked role column. Choose the Yes link to view the service-linked role documentation for that service.

How Amazon Location Service works with unauthenticated users

Many scenarios for using Amazon Location Service, including showing maps on the web or in a mobile application, require allowing access to users who haven't signed in with IAM. For these unauthenticated scenarios, you have two options.

For an overview of providing access to unauthenticated users, see Authenticate with Amazon Location Service.

Identity-based policy examples for Amazon Location Service

By default, users and roles don't have permission to create or modify Amazon Location resources. To grant users permission to perform actions on the resources that they need, an IAM administrator can create IAM policies.

To learn how to create an IAM identity-based policy by using these example JSON policy documents, see Create IAM policies (console) in the IAM User Guide.

For details about actions and resource types defined by Amazon Location, including the format of the ARNs for each of the resource types, see Actions, Resources, and Condition Keys for Amazon Location Service in the Service Authorization Reference.

Policy best practices

Identity-based policies determine whether someone can create, access, or delete Amazon Location resources in your account. These actions can incur costs for your AWS account. When you create or edit identity-based policies, follow these guidelines and recommendations:

For more information about best practices in IAM, see Security best practices in IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Using the Amazon Location console

To access the Amazon Location Service console, you must have a minimum set of permissions. These permissions must allow you to list and view details about the Amazon Location resources in your AWS account. If you create an identity-based policy that is more restrictive than the minimum required permissions, the console won't function as intended for entities (users or roles) with that policy.

You don't need to allow minimum console permissions for users that are making calls only to the AWS CLI or the AWS API. Instead, allow access to only the actions that match the API operation that they're trying to perform.

To ensure that users and roles can use the Amazon Location console, attach the following policy to the entities. For more information, see Adding permissions to a user in the IAM User Guide.

The following policy gives access to the Amazon Location Service console, to be able to create, delete, list and view details about Amazon Location resources in your AWS account.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",		 	 	 
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "GeoPowerUser",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "geo:*",
        "geo-maps:*",
        "geo-places:*",
        "geo-routes:*"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}

Alternatively, you can grant read-only permissions to facilitate read-only access. With read-only permissions, an error message will appear if the user attempts write actions such as creating or deleting resources. As an example, see Read-only policy for tracker resources

Allow users to view their own permissions

This example shows how you might create a policy that allows IAM users to view the inline and managed policies that are attached to their user identity. This policy includes permissions to complete this action on the console or programmatically using the AWS CLI or AWS API.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",		 	 	 
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "ViewOwnUserInfo",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "iam:GetUserPolicy",
                "iam:ListGroupsForUser",
                "iam:ListAttachedUserPolicies",
                "iam:ListUserPolicies",
                "iam:GetUser"
            ],
            "Resource": ["arn:aws:iam::*:user/${aws:username}"]
        },
        {
            "Sid": "NavigateInConsole",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "iam:GetGroupPolicy",
                "iam:GetPolicyVersion",
                "iam:GetPolicy",
                "iam:ListAttachedGroupPolicies",
                "iam:ListGroupPolicies",
                "iam:ListPolicyVersions",
                "iam:ListPolicies",
                "iam:ListUsers"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Using Amazon Location Service resources in policy

Amazon Location Service uses the following prefixes for resources:

Use the following ARN syntax:

arn:Partition:geo:Region:Account:ResourcePrefix/ResourceName

For more information about the format of ARNs, see Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) and AWS Service Namespaces.

Examples

To see a list of Amazon Location resource types and their ARNs, see Resources Defined by Amazon Location Service in the Service Authorization Reference. To learn with which actions you can specify the ARN of each resource, see Actions Defined by Amazon Location Service.

Permissions for updating device positions

To update device positions for multiple trackers, you'll want to grant a user access to one or more of your tracker resources. You will also want to allow the user to update a batch of device positions.

In this example, in addition to granting access to the Tracker1 and Tracker2 resources, the following policy grants permission to use the geo:BatchUpdateDevicePosition action against the Tracker1 and Tracker2 resources.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",		 	 	 
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "UpdateDevicePositions",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "geo:BatchUpdateDevicePosition"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:geo:us-west-2:account-id:tracker/Tracker1",
        "arn:aws:geo:us-west-2:account-id:tracker/Tracker2"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

If you want to limit the user to only be able to update device positions for a specific device, you can add a condition key for that device id.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",		 	 	 
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "UpdateDevicePositions",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "geo:BatchUpdateDevicePosition"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:geo:us-west-2:account-id:tracker/Tracker1",
        "arn:aws:geo:us-west-2:account-id:tracker/Tracker2"
      ],
      "Condition":{
        "ForAllValues:StringLike":{
          "geo:DeviceIds":[
            "deviceId"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Read-only policy for tracker resources

To create a read-only policy for all tracker resources in your AWS account, you'll need to grant access to all tracker resources. You'll also want to grant a user access to actions that allow them to get the device position for multiple devices, get the device position from a single device and get the position history.

In this example, the following policy grants permission to the following actions:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",		 	 	 
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "GetDevicePositions",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "geo:BatchGetDevicePosition",
        "geo:GetDevicePosition",
        "geo:GetDevicePositionHistory"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:geo:us-west-2:account-id:tracker/*"
    }
  ]
}

Policy for creating geofences

To create a policy to allow a user to create geofences, you'll need to grant access to specific actions that allow users to create one or more geofences on a geofence collection.

The policy below grants permission to the following actions on Collection:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",		 	 	 
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "CreateGeofences",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "geo:BatchPutGeofence",
        "geo:PutGeofence"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:geo:us-west-2:account-id:geofence-collection/Collection"
    }
  ]
}

Read-only policy for geofences

To create a read-only policy for geofences stored in a geofence collection in your AWS account, you'll need to grant access to actions that read from the geofence collection storing the geofences.

The policy below grants permission to the following actions on Collection:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",		 	 	 
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "GetGeofences",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "geo:ListGeofences",
        "geo:GetGeofence"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:geo:us-west-2:account-id:geofence-collection/Collection"
    }
  ]
}

Permissions for rendering a map resource

To grant sufficient permissions to render maps, you'll need to grant access to map tiles, sprites, glyphs, and the style descriptor:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",		 	 	 
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "GetTiles",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "geo:GetMapTile",
        "geo:GetMapSprites",
        "geo:GetMapGlyphs",
        "geo:GetMapStyleDescriptor"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:geo:us-west-2:account-id:map/Map"
    }
  ]
}

Permissions to allow search operations

To create a policy to allow search operations, you'll first need to grant access to the place index resource in your AWS account. You'll also want to grant access to actions that let the user search using text by geocoding and search using a position by reverse geocoding.

In this example, in addition to granting access to PlaceIndex, the following policy also grants permission to the following actions:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",		 	 	 
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "Search",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "geo:SearchPlaceIndexForPosition",
        "geo:SearchPlaceIndexForText"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:geo:us-west-2:account-id:place-index/PlaceIndex"
    }
  ]
}

Read-only policy for route calculators

You can create a read-only policy to allow a user access to a route calculator resource to calculate a route.

In this example, in addition to granting access to ExampleCalculator, the following policy grants permission to the following operation:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",		 	 	 
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "RoutesReadOnly",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "geo:CalculateRoute"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:geo:us-west-2:accountID:route-calculator/ExampleCalculator"
    }
  ]
}

Control resource access based on condition keys

When you create an IAM policy to grant access to use geofences or device positions, you can use Condition operators for more precise control over which geofences or devices a user can access. You can do this by including the geofence id or device id in the Condition element of your policy.

The following example policy shows how you might create a policy that allows a user to update device positions for a specific device.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",		 	 	 
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "UpdateDevicePositions",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "geo:BatchUpdateDevicePosition"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:geo:us-west-2:account-id:tracker/Tracker"
      ],
      "Condition":{
        "ForAllValues:StringLike":{
          "geo:DeviceIds":[
            "deviceId"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Control resource access based on tags

When you create an IAM policy to grant access to use your Amazon Location resources, you can use attribute-based access control for better control over which resources a user can modify, use, or delete. You can do this by including tag information in the Condition element of your policy to control access based on your resource tags.

The following example policy shows how you might create a policy that allows a user to create geofences. This grants the permission to the following actions to create one or more geofences on a geofence collection called Collection:

However, this policy uses the Condition element to grant the permission only if the Collection tag, Owner, has the value of that user's user name.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",		 	 	 
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "CreateGeofencesIfOwner",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "geo:BatchPutGeofence",
        "geo:PutGeofence"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:geo:us-west-2:account-id:geofence-collection/Collection",
      "Condition": {
                "StringEquals": {"geo:ResourceTag/Owner": "${aws:username}"}
      }
    }
  ]
}

For a tutorial about how to define permissions to access AWS resources based on tags, see the AWS Identity and Access Management User Guide.

Troubleshooting Amazon Location Service identity and access

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

I am not authorized to perform an action in Amazon Location

If you receive an error that you're not authorized to perform an action, your policies must be updated to allow you to perform the action.

The following example error occurs when the mateojackson IAM user tries to use the console to view details about a fictional my-example-widget resource but doesn't have the fictional geo:GetWidget permissions.

User: arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/mateojackson is not authorized to perform: geo:GetWidget on resource: my-example-widget

In this case, the policy for the mateojackson user must be updated to allow access to the my-example-widget resource by using the geo:GetWidget action.

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

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 Location.

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 Location. 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 Location 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: