AWS SAM managed policy for SSM get parameter

Question

Is there any managed policy similar to DynamoDBReadPolicy for the ssm:GetParameter* permission for a Lambda function? I'm using aws-sam-cli and trying to follow this, but when I try to fetch the parameters when using sam local start-api, I get the following error:

InvalidAction: The action or operation requested is invalid. Verify that the action is typed correctly.

Here is the snippet where I try to get the parameter:

const ssm = new AWS.SSM();
const param = {
    Name: "param1",
    WithDecryption: true
};
const secret = await ssm.getParameter(param).promise();

The relevant template sections are below. Thanks!

KeyAlias:
    Type: AWS::KMS::Alias
    Properties:
      AliasName: 'param1Key'
      TargetKeyId: !Ref Key
Key:
    Type: AWS::KMS::Key
    Properties:
      KeyPolicy:
        Id: default
        Statement:
        - Effect: Allow
          Principal:
            AWS: !Sub arn:aws:iam::${AWS::AccountId}:root
          Action:
          - 'kms:Create*'
          - 'kms:Encrypt'
          - 'kms:Describe*'
          - 'kms:Enable*'
          - 'kms:List*'
          - 'kms:Put*'
          - 'kms:Update*'
          - 'kms:Revoke*'
          - 'kms:Disable*'
          - 'kms:Get*'
          - 'kms:Delete*'
          - 'kms:ScheduleKeyDeletion'
          - 'kms:CancelKeyDeletion'
          Resource: '*'
          Sid: Allow root account all permissions except to decrypt the key
        Version: 2012-10-17

LambdaFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      CodeUri: ../
      Handler: app.lambda
      Runtime: nodejs8.10
      Policies:
      - DynamoDBReadPolicy:
          TableName: !Ref Table
      - KMSDecryptPolicy:
          KeyId: !Ref Key
      # I think I need the ssm policy here

Dunedan · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-30T15:01:19.600

The available SAM policy templates are listed in their Github repository. None of these policy templates grants permissions for any SSM operation, so you can't use a SAM policy template to grant your AWS Lambda function access to SSM parameters as of now.

What you can do as a workaround is to manually add the required policy statement inline to your policies. That would look like:

LambdaFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      CodeUri: ../
      Handler: app.lambda
      Runtime: nodejs8.10
      Policies:
      - DynamoDBReadPolicy:
          TableName: !Ref Table
      - KMSDecryptPolicy:
          KeyId: !Ref Key
      - Statement:
        - Action:
            - ssm:GetParameter
          Effect: Allow
          Resource: arn:aws:ssm:region:account-id:parameter/parameter_name

You should also consider opening a pull request for adding a policy template for SSM parameter access to SAM, as such a template would of course be a more convenient way to express such permissions. From my experience the developers are very friendly and always welcome such additions.

Update: There is a SSMParameterReadPolicy now available in AWS SAM, so instead of using the workaround you can now simply do:

LambdaFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      CodeUri: ../
      Handler: app.lambda
      Runtime: nodejs8.10
      Policies:
      - DynamoDBReadPolicy:
          TableName: !Ref Table
      - KMSDecryptPolicy:
          KeyId: !Ref Key
      - SSMParameterReadPolicy:
          ParameterName: parameter_name

Thanks! That helps get the parameter when I have deployed, but when testing locally, I still get the `Invalid Action` error. Perhaps SSM does not exist when running locally? — holtc, Nov 19 '18 at 15:04
That's right. When using AWS SAM CLI to run applications locally, there is no SSM Parameter Store available locally as well. Coincidentally I opened an issue regarding that a while ago: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-cli/issues/616 — Dunedan, Nov 19 '18 at 15:55

AWS SAM managed policy for SSM get parameter

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