AmazonElasticMapReduceRole

Last Modified

Mar 12, 2026

March 12, 2026 at 09:27 PM UTC

Version

v10

Total Versions

7

Created

Jun 24, 2020

Actions

68

Risk

High

An unrestricted escalation path, identity administration, secret reads or the power to switch off security monitoring. Read from this policy document alone: trust policies, boundaries and SCPs in your account still decide what actually succeeds. How this is assessed

  • High

    Can change identities and their permissions

    Grants 1 permissions management action on IAM, IAM Identity Center or Organizations, on any resource with no condition.

    iam:passrole

    Use with caution: Grant it only to identity administrators, and protect your admin roles and SCPs with a permissions boundary or an SCP of their own.

  • High

    Can launch resources that run as a more privileged role

    Grants every action of 2 documented escalation paths on any resource with no condition.

    • ec2-001iam:PassRole + ec2:RunInstancesunrestricted
    • ec2-003iam:PassRole + ec2:RequestSpotInstancesunrestricted

    Use with caution: Make sure no highly privileged role trusts the service involved, and restrict iam:PassRole in your own policies or boundary to named roles with iam:PassedToService.

  • Medium

    Can read data in every bucket or table

    Reads any object in any S3 bucket. Read-only is not the same as harmless when the data is the asset.

    s3:GetObject (via s3:Get*)

    Use with caution: Read access to data is still access to data. For people who only need to see configuration, ViewOnlyAccess carries none of these signals.

  • Medium

    Flagged by AWS IAM Access Analyzer

    AWS's own policy validation raises 1 security warning: PASS_ROLE_WITH_STAR_IN_RESOURCE.

    • Using the iam:PassRole action with wildcards (*) in the resource can be overly permissive because it allows iam:PassRole permissions on multiple resources. We recommend that you specify resource ARNs or add the iam:PassedToService condition key to your statement.

    Use with caution: Read AWS's finding and the documentation it links to.

IAM Access Analyzer (1)

  • Security warning / PASS_ROLE_WITH_STAR_IN_RESOURCE

    Using the iam:PassRole action with wildcards (*) in the resource can be overly permissive because it allows iam:PassRole permissions on multiple resources. We recommend that you specify resource ARNs or add the iam:PassedToService condition key to your statement. AWS docs

Policy Document

View on GitHub
{
  "PolicyVersion": {
    "Document": {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
        {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Resource": "*",
          "Action": [
            "ec2:AuthorizeSecurityGroupEgress",
            "ec2:AuthorizeSecurityGroupIngress",
            "ec2:CancelSpotInstanceRequests",
            "ec2:CreateFleet",
            "ec2:CreateLaunchTemplate",
            "ec2:CreateNetworkInterface",
            "ec2:CreateSecurityGroup",
            "ec2:CreateTags",
            "ec2:DeleteLaunchTemplate",
            "ec2:DeleteNetworkInterface",
            "ec2:DeleteSecurityGroup",
            "ec2:DeleteTags",
            "ec2:DescribeAvailabilityZones",
            "ec2:DescribeAccountAttributes",
            "ec2:DescribeDhcpOptions",
            "ec2:DescribeImages",
            "ec2:DescribeInstanceStatus",
            "ec2:DescribeInstances",
            "ec2:DescribeKeyPairs",
            "ec2:DescribeLaunchTemplates",
            "ec2:DescribeNetworkAcls",
            "ec2:DescribeNetworkInterfaces",
            "ec2:DescribePrefixLists",
            "ec2:DescribeRouteTables",
            "ec2:DescribeSecurityGroups",
            "ec2:DescribeSpotInstanceRequests",
            "ec2:DescribeSpotPriceHistory",
            "ec2:DescribeSubnets",
            "ec2:DescribeTags",
            "ec2:DescribeVpcAttribute",
            "ec2:DescribeVpcEndpoints",
            "ec2:DescribeVpcEndpointServices",
            "ec2:DescribeVpcs",
            "ec2:DetachNetworkInterface",
            "ec2:ModifyImageAttribute",
            "ec2:ModifyInstanceAttribute",
            "ec2:RequestSpotInstances",
            "ec2:RevokeSecurityGroupEgress",
            "ec2:RunInstances",
            "ec2:TerminateInstances",
            "ec2:DeleteVolume",
            "ec2:DescribeVolumeStatus",
            "ec2:DescribeVolumes",
            "ec2:DetachVolume",
            "iam:GetRole",
            "iam:GetRolePolicy",
            "iam:ListInstanceProfiles",
            "iam:ListRolePolicies",
            "iam:PassRole",
            "s3:CreateBucket",
            "s3:Get*",
            "s3:List*",
            "sdb:BatchPutAttributes",
            "sdb:Select",
            "sqs:CreateQueue",
            "sqs:Delete*",
            "sqs:GetQueue*",
            "sqs:PurgeQueue",
            "sqs:ReceiveMessage",
            "cloudwatch:PutMetricAlarm",
            "cloudwatch:DescribeAlarms",
            "cloudwatch:DeleteAlarms",
            "application-autoscaling:RegisterScalableTarget",
            "application-autoscaling:DeregisterScalableTarget",
            "application-autoscaling:PutScalingPolicy",
            "application-autoscaling:DeleteScalingPolicy",
            "application-autoscaling:Describe*"
          ]
        },
        {
          "Effect": "Allow",
          "Action": "iam:CreateServiceLinkedRole",
          "Resource": "arn:aws:iam::*:role/aws-service-role/spot.amazonaws.com/AWSServiceRoleForEC2Spot*",
          "Condition": {
            "StringLike": {
              "iam:AWSServiceName": "spot.amazonaws.com"
            }
          }
        }
      ]
    },
    "VersionId": "v10",
    "IsDefaultVersion": true,
    "CreateDate": "2020-06-24T22:24:20+00:00"
  }
}

Version History (10 recorded)

Raw history

AmazonElasticMapReduceRole - Policy Version v10

No recorded action delta - this version predates the change index. View the raw diff.

Mar 12, 2026

5d6e668

Update detected

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Sep 18, 2024

aafbae9

Update detected

No recorded action delta - this version predates the change index. View the raw diff.

May 13, 2024

1b36617

Update detected

No recorded action delta - this version predates the change index. View the raw diff.

Jun 25, 2020

40af169

Update detected

No recorded action delta - this version predates the change index. View the raw diff.

Sep 16, 2019

49aa1d0

Update detected

No recorded action delta - this version predates the change index. View the raw diff.

Sep 16, 2019

71619cf

Update detected

No recorded action delta - this version predates the change index. View the raw diff.

Sep 16, 2019

8279033

`2019-08-29`

No recorded action delta - this version predates the change index. View the raw diff.

Aug 29, 2019

5016d52

I updated my CLI and it looks like it reordered everything and changed the white-space, so everything looks changed, but is not

No recorded action delta - this version predates the change index. View the raw diff.

Jul 12, 2019

9d2dff1

First commit

No recorded action delta - this version predates the change index. View the raw diff.

Feb 10, 2019

ad4c2e8