AWS Security Blog

Tag: AWS IAM

IAM Access Analyzer makes it easier to implement least privilege permissions by generating IAM policies based on access activity

In 2019, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer was launched to help you remove unintended public and cross account access by analyzing your existing permissions. In March 2021, IAM Access Analyzer added policy validation to help you set secure and functional permissions during policy authoring. Now, IAM Access Analyzer takes that a step […]

Highlights from the latest AWS Identity launches

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 about the name change here. Here is the latest from AWS Identity from November 2020 through February 2021. The features highlighted in this blog post can help you manage […]

Validate access to your S3 buckets before deploying permissions changes with IAM Access Analyzer

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer helps you monitor and reduce access by using automated reasoning to generate comprehensive findings for resource access. Now, you can preview and validate public and cross-account access before deploying permission changes. For example, you can validate whether your S3 bucket would allow public access before deploying your […]

Analyze and understand IAM role usage with Amazon Detective

In this blog post, we’ll demonstrate how you can use Amazon Detective’s new role session analysis feature to investigate security findings that are tied to the usage of an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role. You’ll learn about how you can use this new role session analysis feature to determine which Amazon Web Services […]

Use tags to manage and secure access to additional types of IAM resources

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now enables Amazon Web Services (AWS) administrators to use tags to manage and secure access to more types of IAM resources, such as customer managed IAM policies, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) providers, and virtual multi-factor authentication (MFA) devices. A tag is an attribute that consists of a key […]

Use new account assignment APIs for AWS SSO to automate multi-account access

September 28, 2022: In July 2022, we renamed AWS Single Sign-On to AWS IAM Identity Center. In this blog, you will notice that we preserved backward compatibility with API calls and CLI scripts by retaining the API and CLI namespaces that were used under AWS Single Sign-On. September 12, 2022: This blog post has been […]

How to deploy public ACM certificates across multiple AWS accounts and Regions using AWS CloudFormation StackSets

December, 6, 2022: The post had been updated to reflect the updates on Lambda function runtime in the cloudformation template from version 3.6 to 3.9, as 3.6 is deprecated, as well as updates in Lambda deployment package filename in the same template. In this post, I take you through the steps to deploy a public […]

Techniques for writing least privilege IAM policies

December 4, 2020: We’ve updated this post to use s3:CreateBucket to simplify the intro example, replaced figure 8 removing the IfExists reference, and clarified qualifier information in the example. In this post, I’m going to share two techniques I’ve used to write least privilege AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. If you’re not familiar […]

Automatically update security groups for Amazon CloudFront IP ranges using AWS Lambda

June 21, 2023: This blog post is out of date. You should now use the new managed prefix list for CloudFront in your Security Group instead of this custom Lambda solution. Please refer to this blog post for detailed info. Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network that can help you increase the performance of […]

Announcement: Availability of AWS recommendations for the management of AWS root account credentials

When AWS customers open their first account, they assume the responsibility for securely managing access to their root account credentials, under the Shared Responsibility Model. Initially protected by a password, it is the responsibility of each AWS customer to make decisions based on their operational and security requirements as to how they configure and manage […]