A Trust Anchor that Is Not Your Whole Corporate CA
Any certificate chaining to the trust anchor can exchange itself for AWS credentials, so the CA is the perimeter - and it is usually run by people who were never told. The profile carries the scope, sessions are narrowed below the role, the caller cannot name itself in CloudTrail, and CA expiry warns before every workload loses credentials at once.
Verification
Static-verifiedPassed: validated and lint-clean (provider-schema-validated for AWS/Azure/GCP; Terraform-language lint elsewhere).
Conformance
- Static validation (fmt · validate · tflint)
- Security scan clean (Checkov)
- Plan tests (mocked: validation rules · outputs)
Provenance
- SHA-256 checksum
- Signature (pending)
Functional
- Live test pending (no cloud run yet)
Last verified 2026-09-13 · how we verify
Use it from the registry
terraform · opentofumodule "rolesanywhere" {
source = "www.iac-bazaar.com/iac-bazaar/aws-rolesanywhere/aws"
version = "1.0.0"
}Needs a registry token from /account/tokens. The module itself is free; the account is what identifies you. Full setup: registry docs.
Inputs & outputs
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Documentation
aws-rolesanywhere
IAM Roles Anywhere: a trust anchor and a profile, scoped so that the answer to
"who can get credentials" is smaller than "whoever the CA will sign for".
Works with Terraform and OpenTofu (>= 1.6), AWS provider >= 6.0, < 7.0.
The trust anchor is the perimeter. Any certificate that chains to it can exchange itself for AWS credentials, which makes the real access-control question "what will this CA issue, and to whom" - a question answered somewhere else entirely, often by a PKI team who were never told what the certificates would be used for. Point an anchor at a corporate CA that issues to every laptop, and every laptop can assume the roles in the profile. Use a dedicated CA.
The profile is where the scope actually lives. role_arns lists what may be
assumed and session_policy narrows the session below the role's own policy.
Without a session policy the caller simply gets the whole role, so a precondition
refuses that unless accept_full_role_sessions states it.
accept_role_session_name = true lets the caller name itself in your audit
log. The session name is what appears in CloudTrail, so turning it on means
the attribution is asserted by the thing being attributed. Off here.
Without a CA-expiry notification, the certificate expires and every workload
loses credentials at the same moment. There is no partial failure mode and no
warning - it is simply the day nothing can authenticate. Three notifications by
default, and a precondition refuses an empty list unless
accept_no_expiry_warning says so.
duration_seconds matters more than it looks. Revoking a certificate does
not shorten a session already issued, so this is how long a compromised
credential stays useful. An hour here, with a precondition on anything longer.
Verification
Static validation runs tofu fmt, init, validate, tflint and checkov.
This module has not yet had a live test, so it is published as statically
validated with its live test pending and does not carry the live-tested mark.
Usage code & full reference need an account
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- Usage
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