security

Managing Access to S3 Buckets By default all Amazon resources (buckets, objects and related subresources) are private, only the resource owner (the AWS account that created it) can access the resource. To grant access to others the resource owner has to write access policy. As explained in the AWS Identity and Access Management article, these policies are either identity (or user) based or resource based. Bucket (resource based) policy and user (identity based) policy are two of the access policy options available to grant permissions to S3 resources, they both use JSON based access policy language.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps to securely control access to AWS resources. IAM is used to control who is authenticated (signed in) and authorized (has permissions) to use resources. When an AWS account is first created a single sign in identity (called the AWS account root user) that has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account is also created, this identity is accessed by signing in with the email address and password used to create the account.