Integrating Amazon Cognito with Amazon Verified Permissions

Introduction

Integrating Amazon Verified Permissions (AVP) with Amazon Cognito can enhance the security and flexibility of your application's permission management. Here's a simplified overview of how to set up this integration and use it effectively:

Setting Up Amazon Cognito

1. Create a User Pool: In Amazon Cognito, set up a user pool to manage user identities. This involves configuring settings such as MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication), which you might disable for simplicity during testing but should enable in production for added security.
2. Add Custom Attributes: Customize your user attributes by adding custom fields. For instance, you can add a "discountPrivilege" attribute, a mutable string that can be modified post user creation.
3. Create an App Client: Set up an app client in Cognito with the necessary authentication flow configurations.

User and Token Management

• User Creation: In your Cognito user pool, create users and assign them custom attributes as needed.
• Token Generation: Ensure you obtain the correct ID token for users. This token is crucial for integrating with AVP, as it contains the custom claims.

Integrating with Amazon Verified Permissions

1. Policy Configuration in AVP: Define policies in AVP using the Cedar Policy Language. These policies can be tailored to check specific user attributes or claims present in the Cognito tokens.
2. Token Mapping: Map Cognito token attributes to the AVP schema. This step is vital to ensure that the token claims can be effectively used in AVP policy evaluation.
3. Policy Evaluation: Configure your application to send user tokens to AVP for authorization decisions. AVP compares the claims in the token against the defined policies and returns an Allow or Deny decision based on the evaluation.

Testing the Integration

• Authentication Flow: Authenticate users in Cognito and acquire an ID token. This process might involve dealing with initial password setup and authentication challenges.
• Policy Testing: Use the acquired ID token to test your AVP policies. This can be done using AWS CLI commands, where you input the policy store ID, ID token, action, resource, and context. The command returns an authorization decision based on the AVP policy evaluation.

Conclusion

By following these steps, you can effectively integrate Amazon Verified Permissions with Amazon Cognito, enabling a more robust and flexible authorization mechanism in your applications. This setup allows for fine-grained access control and a secure way to manage user permissions based on specific attributes and context.