Shrink IAM Actions

Built in the Unix philosophy, this is a small tool with two goals:

1. Shrink IAM actions lists by creating patterns that match only the actions specified and no others.
2. Do #1 in a way that won't make your coworkers hate you.

Using Action Wildcards is not recommended, sometimes there are IAM Limits you can't get around. This tool helps you stay within those limits.

Getting Small While Staying Sane

IAM Actions are camel cased into a number of words. For example:

• s3:GetObject -> "Get" "Object"
• s3:GetObjectTagging -> "Get" "Object" "Tagging"

IAM Shrink will only replace one word at a time and will never replace part of a word. So for instance s3:GetObject will never get shrunk to something like s3:*et*. This is to balance size reduction with readability.

Use in Browser

https://iam.cloudcopilot.io/tools/iam-shrink

Use in CLI

Installation

You can install it globally. This also works in the default AWS CloudShell!

npm install -g @cloud-copilot/iam-shrink

Depending on your configuration sudo may be required to install globally.

Help

iam-shrink --help

Shrink IAM Actions

Pass in Argument

It's unlikely that you will pass in on the CLI a number of actions after the command name, but you can. You'll need a large number of actions for it to be pracitical, so it's mostly for automation.

Usage: iam-shrink s3:GetBucketTagging s3:GetJobTagging s3:GetObjectTagging s3:GetObjectVersionTagging s3:GetStorageLensConfigurationTagging
# Output
s3:Get*Tagging

Read from stdin

If no actions are passed as arguments, the CLI will read from stdin.

cat "s3:GetBucketTagging s3:GetJobTagging s3:GetObjectTagging s3:GetObjectVersionTagging s3:GetStorageLensConfigurationTagging" | iam-shrink
# Output
s3:Get*Tagging

Shrink JSON input

If the input is a valid json document, the CLI will find every instance of Action and NotAction that is an array of strings and shrink them.

Given policy.json

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "groundstation:GetAgentConfiguration",
        "groundstation:GetConfig",
        "groundstation:GetDataflowEndpointGroup",
        "groundstation:GetMinuteUsage",
        "groundstation:GetMissionProfile",
        "groundstation:GetSatellite",
        "groundstation:ListConfigs",
        "groundstation:ListContacts",
        "groundstation:ListDataflowEndpointGroups",
        "groundstation:ListEphemerides",
        "groundstation:ListGroundStations",
        "groundstation:ListMissionProfiles",
        "groundstation:ListSatellites",
        "groundstation:ListTagsForResource",
        "s3:GetBucketTagging",
        "s3:GetJobTagging",
        "s3:GetObjectTagging",
        "s3:GetObjectVersionTagging",
        "s3:GetStorageLensConfigurationTagging"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    },
    {
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "NotAction": [
        "organizations:DeleteOrganization",
        "organizations:DeleteOrganizationalUnit",
        "organizations:DeletePolicy",
        "organizations:DeleteResourcePolicy",
        "organizations:LeaveOrganization"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}

cat policy.json | iam-shrink > smaller-policy.json

Gives this file in smaller-policy.json

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
        "groundstation:List*",
        "groundstation:Get*",
        "s3:Get*Tagging"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    },
    {
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "NotAction": [
        "organizations:Delete*",
        "organizations:Leave*"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    }
  ]
}

Configuring iterations

By default, the CLI will do two iterations of shrinking. This generally does a good balance between reducing size and maintaining readability. This can be adjusted with the --iterations flag.

Assuming the AWS Read Only policy is in readonly.json

You can change this with the `--iterations` flag.

```bash
# Default two iterations
cat readonly.json | iam-shrink | wc -m
# 61305 characters

# Increasing iterations
cat readonly.json | iam-shrink --iterations=3 | wc -m
# 45983 characters
cat readonly.json | iam-shrink --iterations=4 | wc -m
# 43654 characters
cat readonly.json | iam-shrink --iterations=5 | wc -m
# 43336 characters

# Unlimited iterations until the policy cannot be further reduced
cat readonly.json | iam-shrink --iterations=0 | wc -m
# 43281 characters

If you want to shrink the policy as much as possible, you can use --iterations=0. This will keep shrinking the policy until it can't be reduced any further.

Use in TypeScript/Node

You can use the shrink function in your own code.

import { shrink } from '@cloud-copilot/iam-shrink';

const actions = [
  "s3:GetBucketTagging",
  "s3:GetJobTagging",
  "s3:GetObjectTagging",
  "s3:GetObjectVersionTagging",
  "s3:GetStorageLensConfigurationTagging"
];

const shrunk = await shrink(actions);
console.log(shrunk);
// [ s3:Get*Tagging ]

You can specify the number of iterations as well.

import { shrink } from '@cloud-copilot/iam-shrink';

const bigListOfActions = getBigListOfActions();

const smallerList = await shrink(bigListOfActions, { iterations: 3 });
console.log(shrunk);