Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

As I said last week, the breakout sessions for the Security & Compliance track have been announced and are shown in the re:Invent 2015 session catalog. If you are going to re:Invent 2015, you can add these sessions to your schedule now. Today, I will highlight the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) sessions that […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has added two new APIs that enable you to automate validation and auditing of permissions for your IAM users, groups, and roles. Using these two APIs, you can call the IAM policy simulator using the AWS CLI or any of the AWS SDKs. Use the new iam:SimulatePrincipalPolicy API to […]

This year we released managed policies to enable you to create a set of stand-alone policies that you can attach to multiple IAM entities (users, groups, and roles) in your AWS account. Since that release, we have heard from many of you that you’d prefer to mix and match policies instead of just using one universal […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices recommend using IAM users or roles to access your AWS resources, instead of using your root credentials. If you follow this best practice, though, how can you monitor for root activity and take action if such activity occurs? AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch provide the solution. In […]

Note from September 20, 2017: Based on customer feedback, we have moved the process outlined in this post to the official AWS documentation. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has a list of best practices that you are encouraged to use. One of those best practices is to enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your AWS root […]

Feb 21 2023: This post is out of date. AWS now recommends using IAM Identity Center for federated identities accessing AWS by the CLI. Please see this post for more info: AWS CLI v2 Preview Now Supports AWS Single Sign-On Important note from July 18, 2019: The original version of this blog uses Python2.x scripts. […]

You can now use the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy simulator to test and validate your roles’ access control policies. The policy simulator is a tool to help you author and validate the policies that set permissions on your AWS resources. This tool provides a “playground” where you can iteratively author least privilege […]

As part of the AWS Webinar Series, AWS will present Getting Started with AWS Identity and Access Management on Friday, May 22. This webinar will start at 10:30 A.M. and end at 11:30 A.M. Pacific Time (UTC-7). AWS Security Solutions Architect Jonathan Desrocher will introduce the fundamental concepts of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) […]

Rotate access keys regularly and remove inactive users. You’ve probably heard us mention these as two AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) security best practices. But how do you know when access keys (for an IAM user or the root account) are no longer in use and safe to delete? To help you answer this […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) recently launched managed policies, which enable you to attach a single access control policy to multiple entities (IAM users, groups, and roles). Managed policies also give you precise, fine-grained control over how your users can manage policies and permissions for other entities. For example, you can control which managed […]