AWS Vault is a tool to securely store and access AWS credentials in a development environment.

AWS Vault stores IAM credentials in your operating system's secure keystore and then generates temporary credentials from those to expose to your shell and applications. It's designed to be complementary to the AWS CLI tools, and is aware of your profiles and configuration in ~/.aws/config.

The supported backends are:

• macOS Keychain
• Windows Credential Manager
• Secret Service (Gnome Keyring, KWallet)
• KWallet
• Pass
• Encrypted file

Check out the announcement blog post for more details.

You can install aws-vault:

• by downloading the latest release
• on macOS via Homebrew Cask with brew cask install aws-vault
• on Linux via Homebrew on Linux with brew install aws-vault
• on Windows via choco with choco install aws-vault
• on Archlinux via the AUR
• by compiling with go get github.com/99designs/aws-vault

# Store AWS credentials for the "home" profile
$ aws-vault add home
Enter Access Key Id: ABDCDEFDASDASF
Enter Secret Key: %%%

# Execute a command (using temporary credentials)
$ aws-vault exec home -- aws s3 ls
bucket_1
bucket_2

# open a browser window and login to the AWS Console
$ aws-vault login home

# List credentials
$ aws-vault list
Profile                  Credentials              Sessions
=======                  ===========              ========
home                     home                     -

See the USAGE document for more help and tips.

$ aws-vault exec home -- env | grep AWS
AWS_VAULT=home
AWS_REGION=us-east-1
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=%%%
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=%%%
AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=%%%
AWS_SECURITY_TOKEN=%%%

Notice in the above environment how a session token gets written out. This is because aws-vault uses Amazon's STS service to generate temporary credentials via the GetSessionToken or AssumeRole API calls. These expire in a short period of time, so the risk of leaking credentials is reduced.

The credentials are exposed to the subprocess in one of two ways:

• Environment variables are written to the sub-process.

• Local EC2 Instance Metadata server is started. This approach has the advantage that anything that uses Amazon's SDKs will automatically refresh credentials as needed, so session times can be as short as possible. The downside is that only one can run per host and because it binds to 169.254.169.254:80, your sudo password is required.

The default is to use environment variables, but you can opt-in to the local instance metadata server with the --server flag on the exec command.

Best-practice is to create Roles to delegate permissions.

First you'll need to create the users and roles in IAM. Next, edit your ~/.aws/config to add profiles with a role_arn. For example:

[profile jonsmith]
region = us-east-1

[profile prod-readonly]
region=us-east-1
role_arn = arn:aws:iam::111111111111:role/ReadOnly
source_profile = jonsmith

[profile prod-admin]
region=us-east-1
role_arn = arn:aws:iam::111111111111:role/Administrator
source_profile = jonsmith

Now when you use the prod-admin profile, aws-vault will look in the jonsmith profile's keychain for credentials and then use those credentials to assume the Administrator role.

For security, you should also require that users provide a one-time key generated from a multi-factor authentication (MFA) device.

First you'll need to setup an MFA device. You can then set up IAM roles to enforce MFA. Next, add a line to the role profile that specifies the ARN of the user's MFA device. For example:

[profile jonsmith]
region = us-east-1

[profile prod-readonly]
region=us-east-1
role_arn = arn:aws:iam::111111111111:role/ReadOnly
source_profile = jonsmith

[profile prod-admin]
region=us-east-1
role_arn = arn:aws:iam::111111111111:role/Administrator
mfa_serial = arn:aws:iam::111111111111:mfa/jonsmith
source_profile = jonsmith

Now when you use the prod-admin profile aws-vault will prompt you for an MFA token. This assumed role's session is stored in your keychain so you will only have to enter your MFA once.

The macOS release builds are code-signed to avoid extra prompts in Keychain. You can verify this with:

$ codesign --verify --verbose $(which aws-vault)

If you are developing or compiling the aws-vault binary yourself, you can generate a self-signed certificate by accessing Keychain Access > Certificate Assistant > Create Certificate > Code Signing Certificate. You can then sign your binary with:

$ go build .
$ codesign --sign "Name of my certificate" ./aws-vault

• https://github.com/pda/aws-keychain
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/MFAProtectedAPI.html
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/IAMBestPractices.html#create-iam-users
• https://github.com/makethunder/awsudo
• https://github.com/AdRoll/hologram
• https://github.com/realestate-com-au/credulous
• https://github.com/dump247/aws-mock-metadata
• https://boto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/boto_config_tut.html