rds_publicly_accessible

AWS Publicly Accessible RDS Instances

What It Does

This policy template reports on AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) instances that are publicly accessible. Optionally, this report can be emailed, and these instances can have their public access revoked or be terminated after approval.

How It Works

This policy uses the AWS RDS API to gather information on all RDS instances in the AWS account. An RDS instance is determined to be publicly accessible if the API returns the following fields for an instance:

• PubliclyAccessible: true
• DeletionProtection: false
• DBInstanceStatus: available

Input Parameters

• Email Addresses - Email addresses of the recipients you wish to notify when new incidents are created.
• Account Number - The Account number for use with the AWS STS Cross Account Role. Leave blank when using AWS IAM Access key and secret. It only needs to be passed when the desired AWS account is different than the one associated with the Flexera One credential. More information is available in our documentation.
• Minimum Savings Threshold - Minimum potential savings required to generate a recommendation.
• Allow/Deny Regions - Whether to treat Allow/Deny Regions List parameter as allow or deny list. Has no effect if Allow/Deny Regions List is left empty.
• Allow/Deny Regions List - A list of regions to allow or deny for an AWS account. Please enter the regions code if SCP is enabled. See Available Regions in AWS; otherwise, the policy may fail on regions that are disabled via SCP. Leave blank to consider all the regions.
• Exclusion Tags - The policy will filter resources containing the specified tags from the results. The following formats are supported:
  • Key - Filter all resources with the specified tag key.
  • Key==Value - Filter all resources with the specified tag key:value pair.
  • Key!=Value - Filter all resources missing the specified tag key:value pair. This will also filter all resources missing the specified tag key.
  • Key=~/Regex/ - Filter all resources where the value for the specified key matches the specified regex string.
  • Key!~/Regex/ - Filter all resources where the value for the specified key does not match the specified regex string. This will also filter all resources missing the specified tag key.
• Exclusion Tags: Any / All - Whether to filter instances containing any of the specified tags or only those that contain all of them. Only applicable if more than one value is entered in the Exclusion Tags field.
• Automatic Actions - When this value is set, this policy will automatically take the selected action(s).

Please note that the "Automatic Actions" parameter contains a list of action(s) that can be performed on the resources. When it is selected, the policy will automatically execute the corresponding action on the data that failed the checks, post incident generation. Please leave it blank for manual action. For example if a user selects the "Terminate RDS Instances" action while applying the policy, all the resources that didn't satisfy the policy condition will be terminated.

Policy Actions

• Sends an email notification.
• Disables AWS RDS instance public access after approval.
• Terminates AWS RDS instance after approval.

Prerequisites

This Policy Template uses Credentials for authenticating to datasources -- in order to apply this policy you must have a Credential registered in the system that is compatible with this policy. If there are no Credentials listed when you apply the policy, please contact your Flexera Org Admin and ask them to register a Credential that is compatible with this policy. The information below should be consulted when creating the credential(s).

• AWS Credential (provider=aws) which has the following permissions:

  • sts:GetCallerIdentity
  • ec2:DescribeRegions
  • rds:DescribeDBInstances
  • rds:ListTagsForResource
  • rds:ModifyDBInstance*
  • rds:DeleteDBInstance*

  * Only required for taking action; the policy will still function in a read-only capacity without these permissions.

  Example IAM Permission Policy:

  {
      "Version": "2012-10-17",
      "Statement": [
          {
              "Effect": "Allow",
              "Action": [
                  "sts:GetCallerIdentity",
                  "ec2:DescribeRegions",
                  "rds:DescribeDBInstances",
                  "rds:ListTagsForResource",
                  "rds:ModifyDBInstance",
                  "rds:DeleteDBInstance"
              ],
              "Resource": "*"
          }
      ]
  }

• Flexera Credential (provider=flexera) which has the following roles:

  • billing_center_viewer

The Provider-Specific Credentials page in the docs has detailed instructions for setting up Credentials for the most common providers.

Supported Clouds

• AWS

Cost

This policy template does not incur any cloud costs.