AWS Security Blog
Tag: IAM
Introducing New APIs to Help Test Your Access Control Policies
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 […]
Organize Your Permissions by Using Separate Managed Policies
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 […]
How to Receive Notifications When Your AWS Account’s Root Access Keys Are Used
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 […]
Test Your Roles’ Access Policies Using the AWS Identity and Access Management Policy Simulator
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 […]
New in IAM: Quickly Identify When an Access Key Was Last Used
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 […]
How to Create a Limited IAM Administrator by Using Managed Policies
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 […]
Newly Upgraded: Identity and Access Management Policy Validation
Earlier this month, we let you know that AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) would be upgrading policy validation today (March 25, 2015) to help you ensure that your IAM policies match your intentions. This upgrade is now in effect for all IAM policies. Starting today, to save changes to your IAM policies, you must […]
Coming March 25, 2015: Upgrades to IAM Policy Validation
On March 25, 2015, we will upgrade the Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy validation to help ensure that your policies reflect your intentions. Starting on this day, to save changes to policies, you must first ensure that your policies comply with the IAM policy grammar. Your existing policies will continue to work as they […]
Enable Autoformatting for Your Policies in the Identity and Access Management Console
Have you ever thought that authoring Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies would be easier if the JSON of your policies were automatically formatted? If so, you will be excited to hear you can now enable autoformatting for all your policies by simply selecting a single check box. In this blog post, I will show […]
Quickly Diagnose Policy Errors by Using the AWS Identity and Access Management Console
Have you ever spent time searching for a syntax error—such as a missing comma—when editing an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy? If so, you will be happy to hear that AWS has made it easier for you to identify and correct such errors. To help you find the source of the errors, we’ve […]