AWS Security Blog

Amazon knows customers care deeply about privacy and data security, and we optimize our work to get these issues right for customers. With this post I’d like to provide a number of observations on our policies and positions: Amazon does not disclose customer information unless we’re required to do so to comply with a legally […]

July 24, 2020: The whitepaper Auditing Security Checklist in the list of additional resources has been replaced by a Cloud Audit Academy course.   The security of personally identifiable information (PII) continues to be an important topic among all sectors, and education is no exception. Covered entities subject to FERPA are turning to cloud computing […]

Note from September 20, 2017: Based on customer feedback, we have moved the process outlined in this post to the official AWS documentation. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has a list of best practices that you are encouraged to use. One of those best practices is to enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your AWS root […]

Feb 21 2023: This post is out of date. AWS now recommends using IAM Identity Center for federated identities accessing AWS by the CLI. Please see this post for more info: AWS CLI v2 Preview Now Supports AWS Single Sign-On Important note from July 18, 2019: The original version of this blog uses Python2.x scripts. […]

August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. In November 2014, AWS launched Key Management Service (KMS), a managed service that makes it […]

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 […]

Let’s face it—not all APIs were created equal. For example, you may be really interested in knowing when any of your Amazon EC2 instances are terminated (ec2:TerminateInstance), but less interested when an object is put in an Amazon S3 bucket (s3:PutObject). In this example, you can delete an object, but you can’t bring back that […]

Earlier this year, the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team announced support for the Switch Role feature, which allows your users to switch between accounts in the AWS Management Console. The benefit to your users is that they can switch accounts without being required to sign out and sign in for each account. In […]

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 […]

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 […]