configure-aws-credentials VS cfn_nag

The AWS configure-aws-credentials Github Action allows the connection to the AWS S3 bucket through an AWS Role. The configuration of this role is explained in the next chapter

In this example, we'll be using the aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials action with GitHub's OIDC provider. Make sure the configured role has the required permissions.

The first step is to set up GitHub Actions as a recognized identity provider in my AWS account. This is also called an "OIDC Trust" relationship. In AWS IAM, create an Identity Provider with GitHub's provider URL and Audience. I am using the open-source action configure-aws-credentials (link) which means I want to use an Audience value of sts.amazonaws.com. Be sure to click the "Get Thumbprint" button to save a copy of the x.509 certificate used by GitHub into the AWS identity provider.

You can use configure-aws-credentials Github aciton. Which is pretty good. Here is a blog post about it from AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/use-iam-roles-to-connect-github-actions-to-actions-in-aws/

We are now ready to utilize configure-aws-credentials within our GitHub Actions as we move onto deploying our code!

The AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity error manifests itself mostly around parallel access attempts, and how the various AWS interfaces are able to authenticate, as well as run and deploy services. We started encountering this issue when running our pipelines for deployment, and attempting to authenticate our Github account to AWS via the OIDC plugin. This is a well-known (and widely discussed) limitation for authentication to AWS for web application providers. In our case it was Github, but this is true for pretty much any web application integration.

What you are looking at is totally doable, you MUST use: https://github.com/aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials

AWS Actions: It's an open source project from AWS which the goal is to get easy to Configure AWS credential and region environment variables for use in other GitHub Actions.

In order to achieve this, AWS credentials need to be properly configured. Here we use a handy Github action called configure-aws-credential, from AWS itself. You can also read more about the many methods of authentication available. This step requires the AWS_REGION and AWS_ROLE_ARN secrets to be properly configured in the repo, both of which that should be shared by the platform team.

.pre-commit-config.yaml – contains the cfn-lint and cfn_nag pre-commit hooks.

For generic CloudFormation templates, check CFN-NAG.

If you use CDK, you should implement CDK nag; otherwise, use cfn-nag.

cfn_nag

CodeBuild will run a linting check against the CloudFormation Template using cfn-lint and will then run cfn-nag to check for patterns that indicate insecure resources within the CloudFormation template.

Security checks for the Cloudformation stack using cfn-nag

cdk-nag contains several Aspects to check your applications for best practices. It is especially useful if you need to be HIPAA-compliant or have other compliance requirements. It is inspired by cfn_nag which is a a tool checking for patterns in your CloudFormation templates.

cfn-lint and cfn_nag or other tools of that nature to check as you write so you don't need to continually try to deploy only to find that you've done something dumb.

There is another tool called cfn_nag that can check your code for potentially any insecure infrastructure. When you read the documentation around this tool, the author says it can check for things such as:

I recently wanted to use the cfn-nag tool on some templates I was writing but couldn't find any instructions to install on Windows, but I have found a way to do it.