Grant permission to tag Amazon EC2 resources during creation - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Control access to specific tags

Grant permission to tag Amazon EC2 resources during creation

Some resource-creating Amazon EC2 API actions enable you to specify tags when you create the resource. You can use resource tags to implement attribute-based control (ABAC). For more information, see Tag your resources and Control access using attribute-based access.

To enable users to tag resources on creation, they must have permissions to use the action that creates the resource, such as ec2:RunInstances or ec2:CreateVolume. If tags are specified in the resource-creating action, Amazon performs additional authorization on the ec2:CreateTags action to verify if users have permissions to create tags. Therefore, users must also have explicit permissions to use the ec2:CreateTags action.

In the IAM policy definition for the ec2:CreateTags action, use the Condition element with the ec2:CreateAction condition key to give tagging permissions to the action that creates the resource.

The following example demonstrates a policy that allows users to launch instances and apply any tags to instances and volumes during launch. Users are not permitted to tag any existing resources (they cannot call the ec2:CreateTags action directly).

{
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
         "ec2:RunInstances"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    },
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
         "ec2:CreateTags"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:111122223333:*/*",
      "Condition": {
         "StringEquals": {
             "ec2:CreateAction" : "RunInstances"
          }
       }
    }
  ]
}

Similarly, the following policy allows users to create volumes and apply any tags to the volumes during volume creation. Users are not permitted to tag any existing resources (they cannot call the ec2:CreateTags action directly).

{
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
         "ec2:CreateVolume"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    },
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": [
         "ec2:CreateTags"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:111122223333:*/*",
      "Condition": {
         "StringEquals": {
             "ec2:CreateAction" : "CreateVolume"
          }
       }
    }
  ]
}

The ec2:CreateTags action is only evaluated if tags are applied during the resource-creating action. Therefore, a user that has permissions to create a resource (assuming there are no tagging conditions) does not require permissions to use the ec2:CreateTags action if no tags are specified in the request. However, if the user attempts to create a resource with tags, the request fails if the user does not have permissions to use the ec2:CreateTags action.

The ec2:CreateTags action is also evaluated if tags are provided in a launch template. For an example policy, see Tags in a launch template.

Control access to specific tags

You can use additional conditions in the Condition element of your IAM policies to control the tag keys and values that can be applied to resources.

The following condition keys can be used with the examples in the preceding section:

  • aws:RequestTag: To indicate that a particular tag key or tag key and value must be present in a request. Other tags can also be specified in the request.

    • Use with the StringEquals condition operator to enforce a specific tag key and value combination, for example, to enforce the tag cost-center=cc123:

      "StringEquals": { "aws:RequestTag/cost-center": "cc123" }

    • Use with the StringLike condition operator to enforce a specific tag key in the request; for example, to enforce the tag key purpose:

      "StringLike": { "aws:RequestTag/purpose": "*" }

  • aws:TagKeys: To enforce the tag keys that are used in the request.

    • Use with the ForAllValues modifier to enforce specific tag keys if they are provided in the request (if tags are specified in the request, only specific tag keys are allowed; no other tags are allowed). For example, the tag keys environment or cost-center are allowed:

      "ForAllValues:StringEquals": { "aws:TagKeys": ["environment","cost-center"] }

    • Use with the ForAnyValue modifier to enforce the presence of at least one of the specified tag keys in the request. For example, at least one of the tag keys environment or webserver must be present in the request:

      "ForAnyValue:StringEquals": { "aws:TagKeys": ["environment","webserver"] }

These condition keys can be applied to resource-creating actions that support tagging, as well as the ec2:CreateTags and ec2:DeleteTags actions. To learn whether an Amazon EC2 API action supports tagging, see Actions, resources, and condition keys for Amazon EC2.

To force users to specify tags when they create a resource, you must use the aws:RequestTag condition key or the aws:TagKeys condition key with the ForAnyValue modifier on the resource-creating action. The ec2:CreateTags action is not evaluated if a user does not specify tags for the resource-creating action.

For conditions, the condition key is not case-sensitive and the condition value is case-sensitive. Therefore, to enforce the case-sensitivity of a tag key, use the aws:TagKeys condition key, where the tag key is specified as a value in the condition.

For example IAM policies, see Example policies to control access the Amazon EC2 API. For more information, see Conditions with multiple context keys or values in the IAM User Guide.