access-analyzer

This component is responsible for configuring AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer within an AWS Organization.

IAM Access Analyzer helps identify resources in your organization and accounts that are shared with external entities, as well as unused access permissions. This enables you to identify unintended access to your resources and data, which is a critical security risk. Access Analyzer uses logic-based reasoning to analyze resource-based policies in your AWS environment and generates findings for each instance of a resource shared outside your account.

Key Features

External Access Analysis: Identifies resources shared with external principals outside your organization
Unused Access Analysis: Detects unused IAM roles, users, and permissions to implement least privilege
Policy Validation: Validates IAM policies against policy grammar and AWS best practices
Custom Policy Checks: Validates IAM policies against your specified security standards
Policy Generation: Generates least-privilege IAM policies based on CloudTrail access activity

Analyzer Types

This component creates two types of organization-wide analyzers:

Analyzer Type	Purpose	Findings
`ORGANIZATION`	External access analysis	Public access, cross-account access, cross-organization access
`ORGANIZATION_UNUSED_ACCESS`	Unused access analysis	Unused roles, users, permissions (configurable threshold)

Supported Resources

External access analyzer monitors the following resource types:

Amazon S3 buckets and access points
IAM roles and policies
AWS KMS keys
AWS Lambda functions and layers
Amazon SQS queues
AWS Secrets Manager secrets
Amazon SNS topics
Amazon EBS volume snapshots
Amazon RDS DB snapshots and cluster snapshots
Amazon ECR repositories
Amazon EFS file systems

Regional Deployment

IAM Access Analyzer is a regional service. You must deploy analyzers to each region where you have resources that need monitoring. The delegation from the management account only needs to happen once (globally), but analyzers must be created in each region.

Deployment Workflow

Important: Step 1 must be completed successfully before Step 2 can run. The delegation and service-linked role created in Step 1 are prerequisites for creating organization-level analyzers in Step 2.

Step 1 - Delegate Access Analyzer (Management Account): From the Organization management (root) account, delegate administration to the security account. This step also creates the required service-linked role.

Step 2 - Create Analyzers (Delegated Administrator): Deploy the external access and unused access analyzers in the delegated administrator account for each region.

Service-Linked Role

AWS Access Analyzer requires a service-linked role (AWSServiceRoleForAccessAnalyzer) in the organization management account before organization-level analyzers can be created from the delegated administrator. This component automatically creates this role when deploying to the root account with organizations_delegated_administrator_enabled: true.

The service-linked role creation can be controlled with the service_linked_role_enabled variable:

true (default): Creates the service-linked role when delegating administration
false: Skips creation (use if the role already exists or was created manually/by another process)

Configuration

Note: The examples below use Cloud Posse naming conventions (e.g., core-security for the security account, plat-gbl-root for stack names). Adjust these values to match your organization's account and stack naming conventions.

Defaults (Abstract Component)

components:
  terraform:
    access-analyzer/defaults:
      metadata:
        component: access-analyzer
        type: abstract
      vars:
        enabled: true
        global_environment: gbl
        account_map_tenant: core
        root_account_stage: root
        # The account name of your delegated administrator (typically your security account)
        # Adjust to match your organization's account naming convention
        delegated_administrator_account_name: core-security
        accessanalyzer_service_principal: "access-analyzer.amazonaws.com"
        accessanalyzer_organization_enabled: false
        accessanalyzer_organization_unused_access_enabled: false
        organizations_delegated_administrator_enabled: false
        service_linked_role_enabled: true

Root Account Configuration (Step 1)

import:
  - catalog/access-analyzer/defaults

components:
  terraform:
    # Step 1: Deploy to root account to delegate administration and create service-linked role
    access-analyzer/root:
      metadata:
        component: access-analyzer
        inherits:
          - access-analyzer/defaults
      vars:
        organizations_delegated_administrator_enabled: true
        # Set to false if the service-linked role already exists
        service_linked_role_enabled: true

Delegated Administrator Configuration (Step 2)

import:
  - catalog/access-analyzer/defaults

components:
  terraform:
    # Step 2: Deploy to delegated administrator (security) account to create analyzers
    access-analyzer/delegated-administrator:
      metadata:
        component: access-analyzer
        inherits:
          - access-analyzer/defaults
      vars:
        accessanalyzer_organization_enabled: true
        accessanalyzer_organization_unused_access_enabled: true
        # Number of days without use before generating unused access findings (default: 30)
        unused_access_age: 30

Provisioning

Note: Replace the stack names below (e.g., plat-gbl-root, plat-use1-security) with your actual stack names based on your Atmos stack configuration.

Step 1: Delegate Access Analyzer to the security account (run once from root/management account):

# Replace with your root account stack name
atmos terraform apply access-analyzer/root -s plat-gbl-root

This step:

Creates the service-linked role for Access Analyzer (if service_linked_role_enabled: true)
Delegates Access Analyzer administration to the security account

Step 2: Create analyzers in the delegated administrator (security) account for each region:

# Replace with your security account stack names for each region
atmos terraform apply access-analyzer/delegated-administrator -s plat-use1-security
atmos terraform apply access-analyzer/delegated-administrator -s plat-usw2-security

This step creates the organization-wide analyzers:

External access analyzer (type: ORGANIZATION)
Unused access analyzer (type: ORGANIZATION_UNUSED_ACCESS)

Cost Considerations

External Access Analyzer: No additional charge (included with AWS account)
Unused Access Analyzer: Charged per IAM role or user analyzed per month
See IAM Access Analyzer pricing for current rates

References

AWS Documentation

Terraform Resources

Additional Resources

Variables

Required Variables

accessanalyzer_organization_enabled (bool) required: Flag to enable the Organization Access Analyzer
accessanalyzer_organization_unused_access_enabled (bool) required: Flag to enable the Organization unused access Access Analyzer
account_map_tenant (string) required: The tenant where the account_map component required by remote-state is deployed
delegated_administrator_account_name (string) required: The name of the account that is the AWS Organization Delegated Administrator account
organizations_delegated_administrator_enabled (bool) required: Flag to enable the Organization delegated administrator
region (string) required: AWS Region

Optional Variables

accessanalyzer_service_principal (string) optional

The Access Analyzer service principal for which you want to make the member account a delegated administrator

Default value: "access-analyzer.amazonaws.com"

global_environment (string) optional

Global environment name

Default value: "gbl"

root_account_stage (string) optional

The stage name for the Organization root (management) account. This is used to lookup account IDs from account names
using the account-map component.

Default value: "root"

service_linked_role_enabled (bool) optional

Create the service-linked role access-analyzer.amazonaws.com in the management account

Default value: true

unused_access_age (number) optional

The specified access age in days for which to generate findings for unused access

Default value: 30

Context Variables

The following variables are defined in the context.tf file of this module and part of the terraform-null-label pattern.

additional_tag_map (map(string)) optional

Additional key-value pairs to add to each map in tags_as_list_of_maps. Not added to tags or id.
This is for some rare cases where resources want additional configuration of tags
and therefore take a list of maps with tag key, value, and additional configuration.

Required: No

Default value: { }

attributes (list(string)) optional

ID element. Additional attributes (e.g. workers or cluster) to add to id,
in the order they appear in the list. New attributes are appended to the
end of the list. The elements of the list are joined by the delimiter
and treated as a single ID element.

Required: No

Default value: [ ]

context (any) optional

Single object for setting entire context at once.
See description of individual variables for details.
Leave string and numeric variables as null to use default value.
Individual variable settings (non-null) override settings in context object,
except for attributes, tags, and additional_tag_map, which are merged.

Required: No

Default value:

{
  "additional_tag_map": {},
  "attributes": [],
  "delimiter": null,
  "descriptor_formats": {},
  "enabled": true,
  "environment": null,
  "id_length_limit": null,
  "label_key_case": null,
  "label_order": [],
  "label_value_case": null,
  "labels_as_tags": [
    "unset"
  ],
  "name": null,
  "namespace": null,
  "regex_replace_chars": null,
  "stage": null,
  "tags": {},
  "tenant": null
}

delimiter (string) optional

Delimiter to be used between ID elements.
Defaults to - (hyphen). Set to "" to use no delimiter at all.

Required: No

Default value: null

descriptor_formats (any) optional

Describe additional descriptors to be output in the descriptors output map.
Map of maps. Keys are names of descriptors. Values are maps of the form
\{<br/> format = string<br/> labels = list(string)<br/> \}
(Type is any so the map values can later be enhanced to provide additional options.)
format is a Terraform format string to be passed to the format() function.
labels is a list of labels, in order, to pass to format() function.
Label values will be normalized before being passed to format() so they will be
identical to how they appear in id.
Default is {} (descriptors output will be empty).

Required: No

Default value: { }

enabled (bool) optional

Set to false to prevent the module from creating any resources
Required: No

Default value: null

environment (string) optional

ID element. Usually used for region e.g. 'uw2', 'us-west-2', OR role 'prod', 'staging', 'dev', 'UAT'
Required: No

Default value: null

id_length_limit (number) optional

Limit id to this many characters (minimum 6).
Set to 0 for unlimited length.
Set to null for keep the existing setting, which defaults to 0.
Does not affect id_full.

Required: No

Default value: null

label_key_case (string) optional

Controls the letter case of the tags keys (label names) for tags generated by this module.
Does not affect keys of tags passed in via the tags input.
Possible values: lower, title, upper.
Default value: title.

Required: No

Default value: null

label_order (list(string)) optional

The order in which the labels (ID elements) appear in the id.
Defaults to ["namespace", "environment", "stage", "name", "attributes"].
You can omit any of the 6 labels ("tenant" is the 6th), but at least one must be present.

Required: No

Default value: null

label_value_case (string) optional

Controls the letter case of ID elements (labels) as included in id,
set as tag values, and output by this module individually.
Does not affect values of tags passed in via the tags input.
Possible values: lower, title, upper and none (no transformation).
Set this to title and set delimiter to "" to yield Pascal Case IDs.
Default value: lower.

Required: No

Default value: null

labels_as_tags (set(string)) optional

Set of labels (ID elements) to include as tags in the tags output.
Default is to include all labels.
Tags with empty values will not be included in the tags output.
Set to [] to suppress all generated tags.
Notes:
The value of the name tag, if included, will be the id, not the name.
Unlike other null-label inputs, the initial setting of labels_as_tags cannot be
changed in later chained modules. Attempts to change it will be silently ignored.

Required: No

Default value:

[
  "default"
]

name (string) optional

ID element. Usually the component or solution name, e.g. 'app' or 'jenkins'.
This is the only ID element not also included as a tag.
The "name" tag is set to the full id string. There is no tag with the value of the name input.

Required: No

Default value: null

namespace (string) optional

ID element. Usually an abbreviation of your organization name, e.g. 'eg' or 'cp', to help ensure generated IDs are globally unique
Required: No

Default value: null

regex_replace_chars (string) optional

Terraform regular expression (regex) string.
Characters matching the regex will be removed from the ID elements.
If not set, "/[^a-zA-Z0-9-]/" is used to remove all characters other than hyphens, letters and digits.

Required: No

Default value: null

stage (string) optional

ID element. Usually used to indicate role, e.g. 'prod', 'staging', 'source', 'build', 'test', 'deploy', 'release'
Required: No

Default value: null

tags (map(string)) optional

Additional tags (e.g. {'BusinessUnit': 'XYZ'}).
Neither the tag keys nor the tag values will be modified by this module.

Required: No

Default value: { }

tenant (string) optional

ID element (Rarely used, not included by default). A customer identifier, indicating who this instance of a resource is for
Required: No

Default value: null

Outputs

aws_organizations_delegated_administrator_id: AWS Organizations Delegated Administrator ID
aws_organizations_delegated_administrator_status: AWS Organizations Delegated Administrator status
organization_accessanalyzer_id: Organization Access Analyzer ID
organization_unused_access_accessanalyzer_id: Organization unused access Access Analyzer ID
service_linked_role_arn: ARN of the Access Analyzer service-linked role
service_linked_role_name: Name of the Access Analyzer service-linked role

Dependencies

Requirements

terraform, version: >= 1.3.0
aws, version: >= 4.9.0, < 6.0.0

Providers

aws, version: >= 4.9.0, < 6.0.0

Modules

Name	Version	Source	Description
`account_map`	1.8.0	`cloudposse/stack-config/yaml//modules/remote-state`	n/a
`iam_roles`	latest	`../account-map/modules/iam-roles`	n/a
`this`	0.25.0	`cloudposse/label/null`	n/a

Resources

The following resources are used by this module:

aws_accessanalyzer_analyzer.organization (resource)
aws_accessanalyzer_analyzer.organization_unused_access (resource)
aws_iam_service_linked_role.access_analyzer (resource)
aws_organizations_delegated_administrator.default (resource)

Data Sources

The following data sources are used by this module:

Key Features​

Analyzer Types​

Supported Resources​

Regional Deployment​

Deployment Workflow​

Service-Linked Role​

Configuration​

Defaults (Abstract Component)​

Root Account Configuration (Step 1)​

Delegated Administrator Configuration (Step 2)​

Provisioning​

Cost Considerations​

References​

AWS Documentation​

Terraform Resources​

Additional Resources​

Variables​

Required Variables​

Optional Variables​

Context Variables​

Outputs​

Dependencies​

Requirements​

Providers​

Modules​

Resources​

Data Sources​

Key Features

Analyzer Types

Supported Resources

Regional Deployment

Deployment Workflow

Service-Linked Role

Configuration

Defaults (Abstract Component)

Root Account Configuration (Step 1)

Delegated Administrator Configuration (Step 2)

Provisioning

Cost Considerations

References

AWS Documentation

Terraform Resources

Additional Resources

Variables

Required Variables

Optional Variables

Context Variables

Outputs

Dependencies

Requirements

Providers

Modules

Resources

Data Sources