Amazon S3 bucket returning 403 Forbidden

The issue is that the transfer was done according to this thread, which by itself is not an issue. The issue came from the previous developer not changing permissions on the files before transferring. This meant I could not manage any of the files, even though they were in my bucket.

Issue was solved by re-downloading the files cleanly from the previous bucket, deleting the old phantom files, re-uploading the fresh files and setting their permissions to allow public reading of the files.

It could also be that a proper policy needs to be set according to the AWS docs.

Give the bucket in question this policy:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "PublicReadGetObject",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": "*",
      "Action": [
        "s3:GetObject"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::YOUR-BUCKET-NAME/*"
    }
  ]
}

I know this is an old thread, but I just encountered the same problem. I had everything working for months and it just suddenly stopped working giving me a 403 Forbidden error. It turns out the system clock was the real culprit. I think s3 uses some sort of time-based token that has a very short lifespan. And in my case I just ran:

ntpdate pool.ntp.org

And the problem went away. I'm running CentOS 6 if it's of any relevance. This was the sample output:

19 Aug 20:57:15 ntpdate[63275]: step time server ip_address offset 438.080758 sec

Hope in helps!