6

I am attempting to set up the MTurkR R Package for the first time which requires Access Keys, both "Access Key Id" and "Secret Access Key" from AWS see: http://polmeth.wustl.edu/methodologist/tpm_v20_n2.pdf

However Amazon recently "removed the ability to retrieve existing secret access keys for your AWS (root) account." see here

I tried creating an IAM User and using their Access Key within the credentials() command, but get the following error: 

Error (AWS.MechanicalTurk.UnacceptableIdentity):
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user accounts cannot be used for Amazon 
Mechanical Turk.

Is there any way around this issue? Do I have to wait for a package update?

Thomas
  • 43,637
  • 12
  • 109
  • 140
symbiotic
  • 373
  • 1
  • 8
  • Did you find a way around this issue? – knk Jun 03 '14 at 18:15
  • 1
    I talked to the maintainter of the package and he said: Thanks for your email. Unfortunately MTurk doesn't work with IAM. So you'll have to create an access key and secret key (details on how to do it are here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/managing-aws-access-keys.html). You can't retrieve an old secret key, but you can create a new keypair (without deleting a previous one) at which point you'll have one-time access to the secret key. AWS doesn't seem to invest a lot of resources in the MTurk API, so I suspect this will remain the only authentication method for some time. – symbiotic Jun 03 '14 at 19:09
  • 2
    An update on this: In December 2015, [AWS announced](http://mechanicalturk.typepad.com/blog/2015/12/introducing-mechanical-turk-api-support-for-iam-credentials.html) that IAM is now supported on MTurk. – Thomas Dec 24 '15 at 19:40

0 Answers0