AWS Security Blog

Have you ever needed to quickly look up the last time one of your users signed in to your AWS account? Or have you been following security best practices and want verify that no one in your organization has been signing in using the AWS root account? If you use AWS CloudTrail, the information is […]

We’ve seen a question appear periodically on the IAM forum about granting IAM users access to the AWS Billing console. The question is this: even after an administrator sets appropriate permissions for an IAM user to access the console, the user can’t get to the console. Why not? Access to the console actually requires two […]

If you use AWS CloudTrail to log API calls in your account, you can share your log files with other AWS accounts, whether you own those accounts or not. In this post, Greg Pettibone, a technical writer on the CloudTrail team, walks through some cross-account scenarios to show you how. AWS CloudTrail captures information about […]

We’ve heard from many of you that you want greater visibility into when users sign in to the AWS Management Console. We are excited to announce that AWS CloudTrail now captures console sign-in events whenever an account owner, a federated user, or an IAM user signs into the console. For those of you who aren’t […]

The AWS IAM team recently released new credential lifecycle management features that enable AWS account administrators to define and enforce security best practices for IAM users. We’ve expanded IAM password policies to enable self-service password rotation, on top of existing options to enforce password complexity. Furthermore, you can download reports for better visibility into the […]

In this post, Graham Evans, a developer on the AWS Billing team, describes new security features that expand how you can secure access to billing information in your AWS account. My team—AWS Billing— recently released the new and improved Billing and Cost Management Console.  We’re now happy to introduce an improvement to the access and […]

One of the advantages of using the AWS SDKs for programmatic access to AWS is that the SDKs handle the task of signing requests. All you have to do is provide AWS credentials (access key id and secret access key), and when you invoke a method that makes a call to AWS, the SDK translates […]

Some customers have asked how they should be using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help limit their exposure to problems like those that have recently been in the news. In general, AWS recommends that you enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your AWS account and for IAM users who are allowed to perform sensitive […]

When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance, you can associate an AWS IAM role with the instance to give applications or CLI commands that run on the instance permissions that are defined by the role. When a role is associated with an instance, EC2 obtains temporary security credentials for the role you associated with the […]

This week, Kati Paizee, a technical writer on the Amazon EC2 team, takes an in-depth look at the permissions you need to give your users so that they can administer EC2 using the console. The Amazon EC2 console provides an easy-to-use interface that allows your users to carry out compute-based tasks without asking them to […]