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# AWS Execution Role ARN and Task Role ARN are different in ECS Task definitions misconfiguration dete

## Rule Details

|                        |                       |
| ---------------------- | --------------------- |
| Cortex AppSec Rule ID  | APPSEC\_AWS\_249      |
| Category - Subcategory | IAM - Role Separation |
| Provider               | AWS                   |
| Severity               | LOW                   |
| Framework              | Terraform             |

## Impact

In Amazon ECS, it's important to distinguish between the execution task roles as they fulfill separate roles and serve distinct purposes:

* The *execution role* is used by the ECS agent to make AWS API calls on behalf of the user.
* The *task role* grants permissions specifically to the tasks.

If the same role is used for both purposes, it might lead to a broader set of permissions than required. For example, the execution role might end up with unnecessary task-specific permissions, or the task role might have permissions that are not relevant to the execution role.

## How to Fix

*Resource:* aws\_ecs\_task\_definition

* *Arguments:* execution\_role\_arn, task\_role\_arn

## Ensure that the `execution_role_arn` does not match the `task_role_arn` \[source,go]

resource "aws\_ecs\_task\_definition" "example" { ...

* execution\_role\_arn = "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/execution\_role"
* task\_role\_arn = "arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/task\_role" ... }

***


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