AWS Security Blog

Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

Enable Your Federated Users to Work in the AWS Management Console for up to 12 Hours

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) supports identity federation, which enables external identities, such as users in your corporate directory, to sign in to the AWS Management Console via single sign-on (SSO). Now with a small configuration change, your AWS administrators can allow your federated users to work in the AWS Management Console for up […]

How to Audit Cross-Account Roles Using AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch Events

You can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles to grant access to resources in your AWS account, another AWS account you own, or a third-party account. For example, you may have an AWS account used for production resources and a separate AWS account for development resources. Throughout this post, I will refer to […]

AWS Becomes First Cloud Service Provider to Adopt New PCI DSS 3.2

We are happy to announce the availability of the Amazon Web Services PCI DSS 3.2 Compliance Package for the 2016/2017 cycle. AWS is the first cloud service provider (CSP) to successfully complete the assessment against the newly released PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) version 3.2, 18 months in advance of the mandatory February 1, 2018, deadline. […]

New AWS Compute Blog Post: Help Secure Container-Enabled Applications with IAM Roles for ECS Tasks

Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) now allows you to specify an IAM role that can be used by the containers in an ECS task, as a new AWS Compute Blog post explains. When an application makes use of the AWS SDK or CLI to make requests to the AWS API, it must sign each request with valid AWS access […]

New Whitepaper Now Available: The Security Perspective of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework

February 23, 2023: We updated the link to the whitepaper in the first paragraph. Today, AWS released the Security Perspective of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF). The AWS CAF provides a framework to help you structure and plan your cloud adoption journey, and build a comprehensive approach to cloud computing throughout the IT […]

How to Use AWS CloudFormation to Automate Your AWS WAF Configuration with Example Rules and Match Conditions

Note from July 4, 2017: The solution in this post has been integrated into AWS WAF Security Automations, and AWS maintains up-to-date solution code in the companion GitHub repository.   AWS WAF is a web application firewall that integrates closely with Amazon CloudFront (AWS’s content delivery network [CDN]). AWS WAF gives you control to allow or block […]

How to Use SAML to Automatically Direct Federated Users to a Specific AWS Management Console Page

Identity federation enables your enterprise users (such as Active Directory users) to access the AWS Management Console via single sign-on (SSO) by using their existing credentials. In Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, RelayState is an optional parameter that identifies a specified destination URL your users will access after signing in with SSO. When using […]

AWS Earns Department of Defense Impact Level 4 Provisional Authorization

I am pleased to share that, for our AWS GovCloud (US) Region, AWS has received a Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Provisional Authorization (PA) at Impact Level 4 (IL4). This will allow Department of Defense (DoD) agencies to use the AWS Cloud for production workloads with export-controlled data, privacy information, and protected health information as well as […]

AWS Achieves FedRAMP High JAB Provisional Authorization

We are pleased to announce that AWS has received a FedRAMP High JAB Provisional Authorization to Operate (P-ATO) from the Joint Authorization Board (JAB) for the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. The new Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High JAB Provisional Authorization is mapped to more than 400 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) security controls. This […]