AWS S3 IAM user can't access bucket

Question

I have an IAM user called server that uses s3cmd to backup up to S3 .

s3cmd sync /path/to/file-to-send.bak s3://my-bucket-name/

Which gives:

ERROR: S3 error: 403 (SignatureDoesNotMatch): The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided. Check your key and signing method.

The same user can send email via SES so I know that the access_key and secret_key are correct.

I have also attached AmazonS3FullAccess policy to the IAM user and clicked on Simulate policy . I added all of the Amazon S3 actions and then clicked Run simulation . All of the actions were allowed so it seems that S3 thinks I should have access. The policy is:

{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
  {
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Action": "s3:*",
  "Resource": "*"
  }
 ]
}

The only way I can get access is to use use the root accounts access_key and secret_key . I can not get any IAM user to be able to login.

Using s3cmd --debug gives:

DEBUG: Response: {'status': 403, 'headers': {'x-amz-bucket-region': 'eu-west-1', 'x-amz-id-2': 'XXX', 'server': 'AmazonS3', 'transfer-encoding': 'chunked', 'x-amz-request-id': 'XXX', 'date': 'Tue, 30 Aug 2016 09:10:52 GMT', 'content-type': 'application/xml'}, 'reason': 'Forbidden', 'data': '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>\n<Error><Code>SignatureDoesNotMatch</Code><Message>The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided. Check your key and signing method.</Message><AWSAccessKeyId>XXX</AWSAccessKeyId><StringToSign>GET\n\n\n\nx-amz-date:Tue, 30 Aug 2016 09:10:53 +0000\n/XXX/</StringToSign><SignatureProvided>XXX</SignatureProvided><StringToSignBytes>XXX</StringToSignBytes><RequestId>490BE76ECEABF4B3</RequestId><HostId>XXX</HostId></Error>'}
DEBUG: ConnMan.put(): connection put back to pool (https://XXX.s3.amazonaws.com#1)
DEBUG: S3Error: 403 (Forbidden)

Where I have replaced anything sensitive looking with XXX .

Have I missed something in the permissions setup?

Answer 1

explictly use the correct iam access key and secret key used with the s3cmd ie

s3cmd --access_key=75674745756 --secret_key=F6AFHDGFTFJGHGH sync /path/to/file-to-send.bak s3://my-bucket-name/

The error shown is for an incorrect access key and/or secret key