Can additional permissions be given to a lambda PostAuthenticate function provisioned with AWS Amplify?

Question

TL;DR: Can Amplify CloudFormation template for a Post Authentication function configuration been manually changed to give permissions to (for example) IoT attachPrincipalPolicy?

I am using AWS Amplify and the amplify CLI to setup a new project. Overall, Amplify has made things very easy however I am stuck with this feeling that you can only go "so far" with Amplify before things become difficult or impossible to do through an Amplify controlled project.

The use case I am interested in has to do with setting up PubSub with IoT - the AWS instructions cover how to get this working but I would call this more "proof of concept" than "something that you should use in anything close to production" - it involves manually calling aws iot attach-principal-policy --policy-name 'myIoTPolicy' --principal '<YOUR_COGNITO_IDENTITY_ID>' on every single Cognito identity.

Instead what I would like to do is use a Post Authentication lambda function / event hook to call the attachPrincipalPolicy when a user logs into the website (potentially first checking to see if the policy is already attached!).

Perhaps obviously this does not "just work", I tested

var iot = new AWS.Iot();

  var params = {
    policyName: 'myIoTPolicy', /* required */
    principal: 'XYZ123XYZ123' /* required */
  };

  try {
    iot.attachPrincipalPolicy(params, function (err, data) {
      if (err) console.log(err, err.stack); // an error occurred
      else console.log(data);           // successful response

      callback(null, event);
    });
  } catch (e) {
    console.log(e);           // successful response
  }

and ended up with an error like

AccessDeniedException: User: arn:aws:sts::123123123123123:assumed-role/project82382PostAuthentication-master/project82382PostAuthentication-master is not authorized to perform: iot:AttachPrincipalPolicy on resource: XYZ123XYZ123

The heart of the question is, how do I give this lambda function permissions in a way that is going to not break when / if I modify the project using the Amplify CLI? For example, I could in theory change project82382PostAuthentication-cloudformation-template.json and add some sort of configuration that would give permission to execute iot:AttachPrincipalPolicy, but this would then be removed I'd think if / when I change configuration of something causing Amplify CLI to regenerate the CloudFormation templates?

Did you figure it out? Is it possible to attach a policy to IAM programmatically? — Thomas Dittmar
wondering the same thing...need to give my lambda execution role access to secrets manager — CoryDorning

Demetrios Christopher Demetrios Christopher · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-19T19:38:16

Although it is quite the manual process, go to ./amplify/backend/function/your-function-name/your-function-name-cloud-formation-template.json and find "lambdaexecutionpolicy" -> "Properties" -> "PolicyDocument" -> "Statement". This is an array of policies. Simply add another object to the array with whatever you need. For example,

{
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Action": [
    "sns:*"
  ],
  "Resource": "*"
}

Then run amplify status and you should see a pending update to your lambda. Run amplify push and those changes will be deployed to the cloud.

Can additional permissions be given to a lambda PostAuthenticate function provisioned with AWS Amplify?

1 Answers