Tag: How-to guides

Last week’s blog post explained how to distribute AWS credentials to EC2 instances using IAM roles.  Will Kruse, Security Engineer on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, is back again this week to discuss how roles can also be used to distribute arbitrary secrets to EC2 instances. As we discussed last week, Amazon EC2 Roles for Instances […]

If you have applications running on EC2 that also access other AWS services like Amazon S3 or Amazon DynamoDB, then these applications require credentials out on the EC2 instance.  You can hard-code AWS access keys into your application, but you’re faced with the added responsibility of distributing them to the instance securely and then the […]

** Update:  the Google Autenticator application for iOS has been updated and now available from Apple’s App Store.  It no longer has an issue of potentially losing existing AWS MFA tokens as reported in this post. Do you use Google Authenticator for iOS for AWS MFA? If so, then read this! If you use Google […]

Previously, we blogged about how to use resource-level permissions for Amazon EC2 to control access to specific EC2 instances.  Resource-level permissions can now also be applied to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).  This week’s guest blogger, Chris Checkwitch, Software Development Manager on the RDS team, will explain how to tackle the commonly requested use case of controlling access to […]

March 12, 2019: You can now find and update your access keys from a single, central location in the AWS Management Console. Learn how in this post. In this blog post, I’ll discuss what you should do in case you’ve lost your secret access key or need a new one. This post assumes that you are […]

In May 2013, we announced support for federation using identities Amazon, Facebook, and Google (a.k.a. web identity federation), which allows your apps to authenticate users via Amazon, Facebook, or Google and then access AWS resources managed under your account. To help you understand how web identity federation works, today we’re releasing the Web Identity Federation […]

If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you probably know that AWS recommends as a security best practice that you set up one or more AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users for interaction with AWS services, rather than use your root account. Why? The credentials for your AWS root account provide full access […]

As the number of EC2 instances in your AWS environment grows, so too does the number of administrative access points to those instances. Depending on where your administrators connect to your instances from, you may consider enforcing stronger network-based access controls. A best practice in this area is to use a bastion. A bastion is […]

In Part 1 (configuring MFA for sign-in) and Part 2 (MFA-protected API access) of this series, we discussed various ways in which AWS Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) can improve the security of your account.  This week’s topic will be a brief overview of how you can use MFA in conjunction with Amazon S3 Versioning. What is […]

Note: As of March 28, 2017,  Amazon EC2 supports tagging on creation, enforced tag usage, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resource-level permissions, and enforced volume encryption. See New – Tag EC2 Instances & EBS Volumes on Creation on the AWS Blog for more information. We are happy to announce that we launched resource-level permissions […]