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Taylor Brazelton
Taylor Brazelton

Posted on • Updated on

AWS Vault and MFA Setup on my Mac

#mfa #aws #vault

Recently, I decided to secure my local machine by downloading and using AWS Vault. To my surprise, setting up MFA with Vault required a step or two more that I wasn't expecting. Here are my findings/steps.

First, I used homebrew to install aws-vault.

brew cask install aws-vault
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Then I added my profile and followed the instructions which had me provide my Access ID and Secret.

aws-vault add taylor
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Then I tried to list out the S3 buckets via:

aws-vault exec taylor -- aws s3 ls
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This resulted in the following error.

An error occurred (AccessDenied) when calling the ListBuckets operation: Access Denied
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So I opened up my AWS config file in Visual Studio Code.

code ~/.aws/config
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Doing so lead me to see that my profile didn't have a mfa_serial variable defined. I found my key in IAM under my own user's Security Credentials tab and added it to the file.

Now, my config file had the following in it:

[profile taylor]
mfa_serial=arn:aws:iam::XXXXXXXXXX:mfa/taylor
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And when I performed my s3 listing again, it worked.

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