A company stores premium content in an S3 bucket and wants only paying subscribers of its website to be able to download those files. The bucket and objects are currently private. How can the company restrict download access for a given premium file to paid subscribers only?

Generating a pre-signed URL is the correct approach because it provides temporary, time-limited access to a private S3 object. When a paying subscriber requests content, the application can programmatically generate a URL with embedded security credentials that grants permission to download the specific file for a defined duration. This ensures only authenticated and authorized users (paid subscribers) can access the content, without making the bucket or objects publicly accessible. Adding a bucket policy that allows anonymous users to download objects would make the content publicly accessible, defeating the purpose of restricting access to paying subscribers. Requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA) for bucket access is designed for administrative access control, not for controlling end-user content downloads from a website. Enabling server-side encryption protects data at rest but does not control who can download the content; access control mechanisms like pre-signed URLs are needed for that.