aws-sts-helper

A library for facilitating the acquisition of temporary security tokens through the AWS Security Token Service (STS)

What does it do?

Using a particular AWS access key pair, query for and store a new access key pair, plus session token that is suitable to use for another role, that may have more specific or narrower permissions than the original access key pair.

For example, a role could be constructed with a policy that only allows for the creation of a named S3 bucket dev-projects-*, and provide all read-write permissions to the bucket created. Then this role can be access using the generated temporary access key and token by a locally developed project, limited to accessing just the dev-projects-* buckets in S3.

By default, any credentials created in this way are stored in a file, ./.aws-sts.json. This way the credentials are cached locally and available to reuse for the duration that the temporary credentials last. This library will look for the existence of the stored credentials and if they are still valid (not-expired) it will return them instead of generating a new set.

Usage:

You can set environment variables and/or set values in the configuration map passed into the getTemporaryCredentials call.

Available variables and their usage:

Env Variable	Maps to	Purpose/Default
AWS_STS_ACCESS_KEY	Equivalent to AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	Used to assume a role and generate temporary credentials for it
AWS_STS_ACCESS_SECRET	Equivalent to AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	Used to assume a role and generate temporary credentials for it
AWS_ROLE_ARN	The Role to assume in ARN format
AWS_ROLE_SESSION_NAME	A name that will be assigned to the temporary credentials	Defaults to temporary
AWS_STS_FILE_NAME	Fully qualified path to credential file, JSON	Used to store credentials in JSON format, defaults to ./.aws-sts.json
AWS_ROLE_DURATION_SECONDS	Number of seconds the temporary access key lasts	defaults to 12 hours or 43200 seconds
AWS_STS_FILE_MODE	permissions setting on JSON file that caches credentials	Defaults to 0o600 or user read-write only

These values can be passed either in the environment or in a configuration object:

const sts = require('aws-sts-helper');

sts.getTemporaryCredentials({
    {
        credentials: {
            fileName: './.aws-sts.json',
            mode: 0o600
        },
        role: {
            arn: 'arn:aws:iam::<account number>:role/ProjectsS3Development',
            sessionName: 'colbyProjectsDev',
            durationSeconds: 43200
        },
        key: {
            access: 'access key that allows calls to STS assume role',
            secret: 'secret key paired to access key'
        }
    }
}, (err, awsRaw) => {
    if (err) {
        console.log('err:',err);
        process.exit(-1);
    }
    var aws = JSON.parse(awsRaw);

    console.log('aws:',aws);
    var sh = `AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=${aws.Credentials.AccessKeyId}\n` +
       `AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=${aws.Credentials.SecretAccessKey}\n` +
       `AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=${aws.Credentials.SessionToken}\n`;
    fs.writeFileSync("aws-temp-credentials.sh", sh, {encoding:'utf-8'});
});