How can I access an AWS DynamoDB as a guest user?

Question

I am using aws-amplify and aws-sdk in Angular JS/Typescript. I can successfully access my AWS DynamoDB as an authenticated user.

I am also trying to add guest user access for a certain table in Dynamo, but I am struggling to understand how I would get a reference to the DynamoDB without any credentials.

My code looks like this at the moment

   getDocumentClient() {
    return Auth.currentCredentials()
     .then(credentials => new AWS.DynamoDB.DocumentClient({ credentials: credentials }))
     .catch(err => logger.debug('error getting document client', err));

How would I do something similar to get access to the DynamoDB as an unauthenticated guest user?

Cheers

Lee

jarmod jarmod · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-15T18:02:55

Try makeUnauthenticatedRequest.

Here's an example with S3 - I've shown this because I know you can make requests to S3 from the AWS SDK as an unauthenticated user. I'm assuming that this will also work for DynamoDB but have not tested it.

var s3 = new AWS.S3();

var params = {
    Bucket: 'mybucket'
};

s3.makeUnauthenticatedRequest('listObjects', params, callback);

The more strategic approach would be Amazon Cognito Identity Pools which support unauthenticated/guest identities. Cognito vends an identity and AWS credentials, and you can configure an IAM role allowing DynamoDB read access for unauthenticated identity types.

How can I access an AWS DynamoDB as a guest user?

2 Answers