AWS Security Blog

July 29, 2025: This blog post is outdated. Use CloudFront’s managed prefix list for Security Groups instead of the Lambda solution. CloudFront now supports VPC origins, allowing secure connectivity to private VPC resources. For details on managed prefix lists, see this post. For VPC origins implementation guide, refer to this post. April 1, 2021: Before […]

AWS supports Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, an open standard for identity federation used by many identity providers (IdPs). SAML enables federated single sign-on (SSO), which enables your users to sign in to the AWS Management Console or to make programmatic calls to AWS APIs by using assertions from a SAML-compliant IdP. Many of […]

As a security best practice, AWS recommends writing AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies that adhere to the principle of least privilege, which means granting only the permissions required to perform a specific task. However, verifying which permissions an application or user actually needs can be a challenge. To help you determine which permissions […]

Many AWS customers keep their environments separated from each other: development resources do not interact with production, and vice versa. One way to achieve this separation is by using multiple AWS accounts. Though this approach does help with resource isolation, it can increase your user management because each AWS account can have its own AWS […]

Great security research combines extremely high levels of creativity, paranoia, and attention to detail. All of these qualities are in evidence in two new research papers about how s2n, our Open Source implementation of the SSL/TLS protocols, handles the Lucky 13 attack from 2013. The research found issues with how s2n mitigates Lucky 13 and improvements that […]

Today, AWS introduced the preview of Short Message Service (SMS) support for multi-factor authentication (MFA), making it easier for you to implement a security best practice. Until now, you could enable MFA for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users only with hardware or virtual MFA tokens, but this new feature enables you to use […]

One of the most important and critical concepts in AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for advanced and secure data usage is EncryptionContext. Using EncryptionContext properly can help significantly improve the security of your applications. In this blog post, I will show the importance of EncryptionContext and will provide a simple example showing how you can […]

To make it easier for you to test, verify, and understand resource-level permissions in your account, the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy simulator will now automatically provide a list of resources and parameters required for each AWS action. These enhancements provide you with more accurate simulation results and help ensure that your policies […]

Today, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) made it easier to help you verify your permissions by adding support for resource-based policies in the IAM policy simulator. This extends the capabilities of the IAM policy simulator console and APIs to help you understand, test, and validate how your resource-based policies and IAM policies work together […]

Amazon WorkDocs (formerly Amazon Zocalo) is a fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service that incorporates feedback capabilities to improve user productivity. You can comment on files, send them to others for feedback, and upload new versions without having to resort to emailing multiple versions of files as attachments. WorkDocs includes security features such […]