cel-spec VS iamlive

My employer uses a combination of Protocol Buffers (for the config schema definition) and Bazel/Starlark (for concrete instantiations). Configs are validated at build time and runtime using CEL (https://github.com/google/cel-spec).

The Common Expression Language (CEL) implements common semantics for expression evaluation, enabling different applications to more easily interoperate. https://github.com/google/cel-spec

Looks like Google invented a specification for a simple "expression language." -> https://github.com/google/cel-spec/blob/master/doc/langdef.md. Writing the expressions feels like writing Java, C++, Go, or TypeScript code. Google then released C++ and Go versions of this langauge as a library.

https://github.com/google/cel-spec unfortunately, it's in Go or C++. Of course I can write a binding to them. But is there any other similar that you would know of for Java? My other course of action would be to offload computation to another service using this library in Go, or Jsonnet or Open Policy Agent/Rego based evaluation, which I'd prefer not to. Executing JS in Java via Nashorn also an option but it'd be heavy weight.

Having a standard way to share expressions does seem quite useful, especially when it's multilingual.

[0]: https://github.com/google/cel-spec

There's more information about CEL and its specifications here

Especially when dealing with more complex match rules, I personally much prefer Caddy's matchers over building some weird-ass if constructs in Nginx. It also supports CEL for request matching, giving you access to extremely powerful logic, if you need it.

Also things like this (same guy) if you have a sandbox to play in with wider permissions and are trying to build a more scoped profile: https://github.com/iann0036/iamlive

I know there is a tool called iamlive that logs all API calls on your local machine. So you can run commands as an admin user locally while this is running, and find out what permissions were needed. Then you tear down the infra you just deployed, and add those same permissions to a service user of some kind (e.g. a CICD role) to avoid over-privileging it. It's messy but it can be helpful.

actually Ian (aws hero) has a tool that does exactly this

https://github.com/iann0036/iamlive

I have used https://github.com/iann0036/iamlive with great success in the past. On high level, the approach you are describing is iamlive on steroids and UX improved.

Kudos on launch, will check your beta

Thanks! Permissions are determined per resource or datasource. There's no easy way that I had found, especially if you want this done statically, https://github.com/iann0036/iamlive does it by inspecting your api calls but there's always a look up somewhere. Hopefully ill manage to get a few community contributions and get the ball rolling, i've made it as easy as I could to add support for other resources without you even really having to know golang.

IAM isn’t fun, but there’s lots of options.

https://pypi.org/project/access-undenied-aws/ will allow you to start with least privilege and fix specific issues.

https://github.com/iann0036/iamlive allows an admin to perform the action via CLI and capture the policy.

Access advisor can inspect how you actually use the role and give suggestions on what to remove.

A more helpful suggestion is to experiment with these tools and then find gaps in IAM actions and submit those as feature requests via your TAM.