AWS Security Blog
Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Aligning IAM policies to user personas for AWS Security Hub
October 3, 2021: In the section “Step 3: Create the role for the sysadmin persona,” we’ve corrected step 1 to indicate that sign in occurs through the administrator account, rather than the member account. AWS Security Hub provides you with a comprehensive view of your security posture across your accounts in Amazon Web Services (AWS) […]
New! Streamline existing IAM Access Analyzer findings using archive rules
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer generates comprehensive findings to help you identify resources that grant public and cross-account access. Now, you can also apply archive rules to existing findings, so you can better manage findings and focus on the findings that need your attention most. You can think of archive rules as […]
How to automatically archive expected IAM Access Analyzer findings
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer continuously monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resource-based policies for changes in order to identify resources that grant public or cross-account access from outside your AWS account or organization. Access Analyzer findings include detailed information that you can use to make an informed decision about whether access […]
New IAMCTL tool compares multiple IAM roles and policies
If you have multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, and you have AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles among those multiple accounts that are supposed to be similar, those roles can deviate over time from your intended baseline due to manual actions performed directly out-of-band called drift. As part of regular compliance checks, you […]
Enhance programmatic access for IAM users using a YubiKey for multi-factor authentication
Organizations are increasingly providing access to corporate resources from employee laptops and are required to apply the correct permissions to these computing devices to make sure that secrets and sensitive data are adequately protected. The combination of Amazon Web Services (AWS) long-term credentials and a YubiKey security token for multi-factor authentication (MFA) is an option […]
Role-based access control using Amazon Cognito and an external identity provider
September 8, 2023: It’s important to know that if you activate user sign-up in your user pool, anyone on the internet can sign up for an account and sign in to your apps. Don’t enable self-registration in your user pool unless you want to open your app to allow users to sign up. Amazon Cognito […]
Securing resource tags used for authorization using a service control policy in AWS Organizations
In this post, I explain how you can use attribute-based access controls (ABAC) in Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help provision simple, maintainable access controls to different projects, teams, and workloads as your organization grows. ABAC gives you access to granular permissions and employee-attribute based authorization. By using ABAC, you need fewer AWS Identity and […]
Tighten S3 permissions for your IAM users and roles using access history of S3 actions
September 28, 2023: IAM is incrementally adding support for actions from more services. For a list of services that report action last accessed information, see IAM action last accessed information services and actions. Customers tell us that when their teams and projects are just getting started, administrators may grant broad access to inspire innovation and […]
Easily control the naming of individual IAM role sessions
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now has a new sts:RoleSessionName condition element for the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS), that makes it easy for AWS account administrators to control the naming of individual IAM role sessions. IAM roles help you grant access to AWS services and resources by using dynamically generated short-term credentials. […]
AWS IAM introduces updated policy defaults for IAM user passwords
November 2, 2020: This post has been updated to reflect the change in date for the default password policy from October 28 to November 18. October 20, 2020: This post has been updated to reflect the change in date for the default password policy from October 2 to October 21 to October 28. July 27, […]