AWS Security Blog
Tag: IAM
Customize the scope of IAM Access Analyzer unused access analysis
AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer simplifies inspecting unused access to guide you towards least privilege. You can use unused access findings to identify over-permissive access granted to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and users in your accounts or organization. From a delegated administrator account for IAM Access Analyzer, you can use the dashboard […]
Using Amazon Detective for IAM investigations
January 31, 2025: This post was revised to update several paragraphs in the section Scenario 1: Automated investigations. Uncovering AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles potentially involved in a security event can be a challenging task, requiring security analysts to gather and analyze data from various sources, and determine the full scope […]
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management in AWS
Customers use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to securely build, deploy, and scale their applications. As your organization grows, you want to streamline permissions management towards least privilege for your identities and resources. At AWS, we see two customer personas working towards least privilege permissions: security teams and developers. Security teams want to centrally inspect permissions […]
How to use AWS managed applications with IAM Identity Center: Enable Amazon Q without migrating existing IAM federation flows
June 9, 2025: We added a section on how to use a service control policy to block permission sets from being used in your organization’s member accounts. AWS IAM Identity Center is the preferred way to provide workforce access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, and enables you to provide workforce access to many AWS […]
How to access AWS resources from Microsoft Entra ID tenants using AWS Security Token Service
March 19, 2025: We made some corrections to the syntax, including fixing a hyphen and the format of the quotation marks. September 20, 2024: Updated with information on the v1.0 and v2.0 access tokens in the Microsoft identity platform and changes in the Audience value when v2.0 access tokens are used. Removed a note about […]
IAM Access Analyzer simplifies inspection of unused access in your organization
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer offers tools that help you set, verify, and refine permissions. You can use IAM Access Analyzer external access findings to continuously monitor your AWS Organizations organization and Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts for public and cross-account access to your resources, and verify that only intended external access […]
Security at multiple layers for web-administered apps
In this post, I will show you how to apply security at multiple layers of a web application hosted on AWS. Apply security at all layers is a design principle of the Security pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It encourages you to apply security at the network edge, virtual private cloud (VPC), load balancer, […]
Introducing IAM Access Analyzer custom policy checks
July 12, 2024: AWS has extended custom policy checks to include a new check called Check No Public Access. This new check determines whether a resource policy grants public access to a specified resource type. In addition to this new check, there has been an update to the existing Check Access Not Granted check. The […]
Writing IAM Policies: Grant Access to User-Specific Folders in an Amazon S3 Bucket
Mar 25, 2024: We have fixed the JSON code examples which caused errors by replacing the curly quotes with straight quotes. November 14, 2023: We’ve updated this post to use IAM Identity Center and follow updated IAM best practices. In this post, we discuss the concept of folders in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) […]
Get the full benefits of IMDSv2 and disable IMDSv1 across your AWS infrastructure
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) helps customers build secure and scalable applications. IMDS solves a security challenge for cloud users by providing access to temporary and frequently-rotated credentials, and by removing the need to hardcode or distribute sensitive credentials to instances manually or programmatically. The Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) […]









