How to Disable Verification for Specific Users in Amazon Cognito

How to Disable Verification for Specific Users in Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito provides a robust user directory service that helps you create a secure user directory and add sign-up and sign-in to your mobile or web applications. However, there may be instances when you want to disable verification for certain users. This blog post aims to guide you through the process of achieving this in a few straightforward steps.

Step 1: Understanding the Context

Before diving into the technical aspect, let’s understand why you might need to disable verification. In some cases, you may want to create test accounts or give certain users immediate access without email or phone number verification. Amazon Cognito does not have a built-in feature for this, but it can be achieved by customizing your Lambda triggers.

Step 2: Setting Up the Lambda Function

Lambda functions enable you to run your code without provisioning or managing servers. They can be used to customize workflows in the Cognito User Pool during various operations. In this case, we will customize the Post Confirmation trigger.

Create a new Lambda function with an IAM role that has the AmazonCognitoPowerUser permission. Here’s a Node.js example of how your function should look:

exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => {
    if (event.request.userAttributes['custom:disableVerification']) {
        event.response.autoConfirmUser = true;
        event.response.autoVerifyEmail = true;
        event.response.autoVerifyPhone = true;
    }
    callback(null, event);
};

This function checks if the user has a custom attribute disableVerification and if true, it automatically confirms the user and verifies their email and phone number.

Step 3: Attach the Lambda Function to the User Pool

To attach the Lambda function to the User Pool:

1. Navigate to the Cognito section on the AWS Management Console.
2. Select ‘Manage User Pools’ and choose your User Pool.
3. Under ‘Triggers’, select the ‘Post confirmation’ trigger.
4. From the dropdown, select the Lambda function you created.

Step 4: Adding Custom Attribute

Next, add the custom attribute to your user pool:

1. In your User Pool, go to ‘Attributes’.
2. Under ‘Custom attributes’, select ‘Add custom attribute’.
3. Enter ‘disableVerification’ as the name and select Boolean as the attribute type.

Step 5: Disabling Verification

Now, when you want to disable verification for a user, all you need to do is set the disableVerification attribute to true during sign-up.

And that’s it! You can now disable verification for specific users in Amazon Cognito. Remember, this approach should be used judiciously since it bypasses the usual security best practices.

Conclusion

Although Amazon Cognito doesn’t directly provide the functionality to disable verification for some users, with the power of Lambda functions and custom attributes, we can successfully achieve this. Always ensure you follow best security practices when implementing such custom setups.

I hope this tutorial was helpful. If you have any questions or need further clarification, feel free to leave a comment below!

tags: AWS, Amazon Cognito, User Verification, Lambda Functions, User Pool, Serverless

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