aws-cli-federator

AWS CLI Federator

Based off the original AWS blog post, this small yet useful utility enables the generation and management of temporary IAM credentials via CLI using a SAML/ADFS federation provider.

This particular implementation was written in Go to ease dependency management and simplify the installation procedure for non-developers. It is compatible with both Windows and Unix based systems, and should work with a wide variety of SAML/ADFS IDP's.

aws-cli-federator assumes you have IAM SAML Federation configured and working.

Getting Started

Precompiled packages are available on the releases page. After downloading, place the binary in your $PATH for added convienice.

Usage

Before you can start generating temporary credentials, you'll need to create a basic federatedcli configuration file under your .aws directory. (This file is ~/.aws/federatedcli on Unix systems and %userprofile%/.aws/federatedcli for Windows)

[default]
sp_identity_url = <url to IDP initiated SP login>

You can then generate temporary credentials by running the aws-cli-federator utility:

$ aws-cli-federator
Enter Username: aidan
Enter Password:
1) arn:aws:iam::123456789123:role/GlobalAdmin
2) arn:aws:iam::123456789123:role/ReadOnly
3) arn:aws:iam::123456789123:role/DBAdministration
4) arn:aws:iam::123456789123:role/NetworkAdministrator
Enter the ID# of the role you want to assume: 3
-------------------------------------------------------
Temporary credentials successfully generated. Set the following environment variables to being using them:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<redacted>
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<redacted>
export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=<redacted>

These credentials will remain valid until 2017-01-03 03:29:22 +0000 UTC

If you log into multiple accounts using different IDP URL's, you can add multiple sp_identity_url's (under unique section names) and request credentials like so:

$ aws-cli-federator -account <account name>

This tool can also write the generated temporary credentials to the ~/.aws/credentials file using the -profile <section name> flag. The section and credentials will be created if they do not already exist and overwritten if they do.

$ aws-cli-federator -acount <account name> -profile <profile name>

If your IDP federates authentication to a number of different accounts, it can get difficult to keep track of which account number is which account. To simplify this, you can add a list of alias' to the federatedcli configuration file to overwrite the account number with a more memerable name.

[account_map]
123456789123 = production
317261927392 = development

Lastly, if you are constantly generating a lot of temporary credentials you might be interested to know that aws-cli-federator outputs all output to stderr except for the environment variables. This allows you to quickly set the environment variables in your current terminal session like so:

$ eval `aws-cli-federator`

Building

You can build the tool from source by running make in the base directory. The output binary will be located in the ./build/ directory.

IDP Compatibility

This utility tries to remain agnostic and should work with most SAML/SHIB/ADFS identity providers. I personally run this against a fairly generic SimpleSAMLphp configuration.

Contributing / Issues

If you have any feature suggestions or bug fixes, please open an issue or a pull request!

If you have an issue, please include as much information as possible including running the utility in debug mode (-v flag).