Presigned S3 URLs May Pose HIPAA Risks Without Bucket Policy Safeguards
Organizations sharing protected health information through S3 presigned URLs may not be HIPAA compliant, depending on their bucket policies. A presigned URL embeds credentials that let anyone holding it download the object without AWS authentication or MFA, and default expirations can last up to seven days. Such URLs can bypass IAM policies, VPC endpoint conditions, and IP restrictions unless the bucket policy explicitly limits them. The author argues that presigned URLs do not satisfy HIPAA's access control requirement and recommends bucket policy conditions such as s3:signatureAge or s3:authType to constrain them. A compliance check tool, Stave, is described as flagging buckets that lack these safeguards.
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