For example, if a user is not authorized to perform an operation that he
or she has requested, the request returns a
Client.UnauthorizedOperation
response (an HTTP 403 response). Some AWS
operations additionally return an encoded message that can provide
details about this authorization failure.
Only certain AWS operations return an encoded authorization message. The
documentation for an individual operation indicates whether that
operation returns an encoded message in addition to returning an HTTP
code.
The message is encoded because the details of the authorization status
can constitute privileged information that the user who requested the
operation should not see. To decode an authorization status message, a
user must be granted permissions via an IAM policy to request the
DecodeAuthorizationMessage
(sts:DecodeAuthorizationMessage
) action.
The decoded message includes the following type of information:
Whether the request was denied due to an explicit deny or due to the
absence of an explicit allow. For more information, see Determining Whether a Request is Allowed or Denied
in the IAM User Guide.
The principal who made the request.
The requested action.
The requested resource.
The values of condition keys in the context of the user\'s request.