AWS Security Blog

Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Approaches for authenticating external applications in a machine-to-machine scenario

December 8, 2022: This post has been updated to reflect changes for M2M options with the new service of IAMRA. This blog post was first published November 19, 2013. August 10, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more […]

How to use trust policies with IAM roles

June 20 2023: The wording in this post has been updated to avoid confusion around the use of wildcards in the principal element of an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) trust policy statement. November 3, 2022: We updated this post to fix some syntax errors in the policy statements and to add additional use […]

IAM Access Analyzer makes it simpler to author and validate role trust policies

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer provides many tools to help you set, verify, and refine permissions. One part of IAM Access Analyzer—policy validation—helps you author secure and functional policies that grant the intended permissions. Now, I’m excited to announce that AWS has updated the IAM console experience for role trust policies to […]

Announcing an update to IAM role trust policy behavior

April 16, 2024: Updated with information on AWS CloudTrail logging for roles that are still using the implicit trust behavior, and additional sample queries to find these roles. June 15, 2023: Enforcement has changed from a fixed date to an automated process starting June 30, 2023 that removed roles based on observed role assumption behavior. […]

Extend AWS IAM roles to workloads outside of AWS with IAM Roles Anywhere

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has now made it easier for you to use IAM roles for your workloads that are running outside of AWS, with the release of IAM Roles Anywhere. This feature extends the capabilities of IAM roles to workloads outside of AWS. You can use IAM Roles Anywhere to provide a […]

Managing temporary elevated access to your AWS environment

September 27, 2023: We updated this post to include a list of newer temporary elevated access solutions that integrate with AWS IAM Identity Center. September 9, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more about the name change here. […]

Validate IAM policies in CloudFormation templates using IAM Access Analyzer

In this blog post, I introduce IAM Policy Validator for AWS CloudFormation (cfn-policy-validator), an open source tool that extracts AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies from an AWS CloudFormation template, and allows you to run existing IAM Access Analyzer policy validation APIs against the template. I also show you how to run the tool […]

AWS introduces changes to access denied errors for easier permissions troubleshooting

To help you more easily troubleshoot your permissions in Amazon Web Services (AWS), we’re introducing additional context in the access denied error messages. We’ll start to introduce this change in September 2021, and gradually make it available in all AWS services over the next few months. If you’re currently relying on the exact text of […]

Strengthen the security of sensitive data stored in Amazon S3 by using additional AWS services

October 13, 2021: We’ve added a section on redacting and transforming personally identifiable information with Amazon S3 Object Lambda. In this post, we describe the AWS services that you can use to both detect and protect your data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). When you analyze security in depth for your Amazon […]

How to restrict IAM roles to access AWS resources from specific geolocations using AWS Client VPN

You can improve your organization’s security posture by enforcing access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources based on IP address and geolocation. For example, users in your organization might bring their own devices, which might require additional security authorization checks and posture assessment in order to comply with corporate security requirements. Enforcing access to AWS […]