Question

I’m developing a web application and I currently have the following ACL assigned to the AWS account it uses to access its data:

{
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "xxxxxxxxx", // don't know if this is supposed to be confidential
      "Action": [
        "s3:*"
      ],
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:s3:::cdn.crayze.com/*"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

However I’d like to make this a bit more restrictive so that if our AWS credentials were ever compromised, an attacker could not destroy any data.

From the documentation, it looks like I want to allow just the following actions: s3:GetObject and s3:PutObject, but I specifically want the account to only be able to create objects that don’t exist already – i.e. a PUT request on an existing object should be denied. Is this possible?

Answer 1

This is not possible in Amazon S3 like you probably envisioned it; however, you can work around this limitation by Using Versioning which is a means of keeping multiple variants of an object in the same bucket and has been developed with use cases like this in mind:

You might enable versioning to prevent objects from being deleted or
overwritten by mistake, or to archive objects so that you can retrieve
previous versions of them.

There are a couple of related FAQs as well, for example:

• What is Versioning? – Versioning allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Once you enable Versioning for a bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects anytime you perform a PUT, POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request.

• Why should I use Versioning? – Amazon S3 provides customers with a highly durable storage infrastructure. Versioning offers an additional level of protection by providing a means of recovery when customers accidentally overwrite or delete objects. This allows you to easily recover from unintended user actions and application failures. You can also use Versioning for data retention and archiving. [emphasis mine]

• How does Versioning protect me from accidental deletion of my objects? – When a user performs a DELETE operation on an object, subsequent default requests will no longer retrieve the object. However, all versions of that object will continue to be preserved in your Amazon S3 bucket and can be retrieved or restored. Only the owner of an Amazon S3 bucket can permanently delete a version. [emphasis mine]

If you are really paramount about the AWS credentials of the bucket owner (who can be different than the accessing users of course), you can take that one step further even, see How can I ensure maximum protection of my preserved versions?:

Versioning’s MFA Delete capability, which uses multi-factor authentication, can be used to provide an additional layer of
security. […] If you enable Versioning with MFA Delete
on your Amazon S3 bucket, two forms of authentication are required to
permanently delete a version of an object: your AWS account
credentials and a valid six-digit code and serial number from an
authentication device in your physical possession. […]