Is it possible to share files for selective users using Amazon S3

Question

I have few files in my S3 bucket. Is it possible to share them with selected users. Those people might not have Amazon S3 account. I know if i make it public everyone could able to download the files using URL.

I want something like an encrypted URL or an URL that asks for some Username and password immediately when it is been hit.

And also i do not want to install any new/ third party softwares to be installed by everyone.

Thanks

Answer 1

Absolutely.

You can make your files private and then generate time expiring signed urls to your files.

The signed urls are generated using your public key and secret key and are set to expire at a specified time in the future.

Depending on what technology you are using, its probably easiest to generate the urls using one of the AWS SDKS.

Signed urls look something like:

http://[bucket].s3.amazonaws.com/[key]?AWSAccessKeyId=[AWS_Public_Key]&Expires=1294766482&Signature=[generated_hash]

I explain a bit more about these urls in this answer.