AWS Security Blog
Use AWS CloudFormation to Configure Web Identity Federation
Web identity federation in AWS STS enables you to create apps where users can sign in using a web-based identity provider like Login with Amazon, Facebook, or Google. Your app can then trade identity information from the provider for temporary security credentials that the app can use to access AWS. The AWS mobile development team […]
High-Availability IAM Design Patterns
Today Will Kruse, Senior Security Engineer on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, provides a tutorial on how to enable resiliency against authentication and authorization failures in an application deployed on Amazon EC2 using a high availability design pattern based on IAM roles. Background Many of you invest significant effort to ensure that a […]
How Do I Protect Cross-Account Access Using MFA?
Today AWS announced support for adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) for cross-account access. In this blog post, I will walk you through a common use case, including a code sample, which demonstrates how to create policies that enforce MFA when IAM users from one AWS account make programmatic requests for resources in a different account. Many […]
New Whitepaper: Security at Scale: Logging in AWS
The newly released Security at Scale: Logging in AWS whitepaper is designed to illustrate how AWS CloudTrail can help you meet compliance and security requirements through the logging of API calls. The API call history can be used to track changes to resources, perform security analysis, operational troubleshooting and as an aid in meeting compliance […]
Make a New Year Resolution
Make a New Year Resolution for 2014 to adhere to best practices put forth by AWS Security and Identity. There are two great pieces of work published in 2013 that are filled with guidance and are highly actionable. AWS published the Security Best Practices whitepaper, providing a landscape of various security oriented technologies, including IAM, […]
Analyzing OS-Related Security Events on EC2 with SplunkStorm
September 3, 2021: This blog post was updated to clarify that the S3 bucket name DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET is a placeholder name that readers should replace with their own S3 bucket name. An important objective of analyzing OS-generated data is to detect, correlate, and report on potential security events. Several partner solutions available in AWS Marketplace provide this functionality, […]
Delegating API Access to AWS Services Using IAM Roles
Suppose you run a research lab and you dump a terabyte or so of data into Amazon DynamoDB for easy processing and analysis. Your colleagues at other labs and in the commercial sphere have become aware of your research and would like to reproduce your results and perform further analysis on their own. AWS supports this very important […]
AWS SDK Blog Posts About IAM Roles
The .NET Developers Blog recently published two easy-to-read posts about access key management for .NET applications. The first one goes through some of the background of access key management, as well as the use of IAM roles for EC2. The second post goes deeper into creating and using IAM users and groups instead of using root […]
Enabling Federation to AWS Using Windows Active Directory, ADFS, and SAML 2.0
Update from September 7, 2022: This post had been updated to correct the reference to the CloudFormation template. Update from January 17, 2018: The techniques demonstrated in this blog post relate to traditional SAML federation for AWS. These techniques are still valid and useful. However, AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) provides analogous capabilities by way of […]
Credentials Best Practices on the AWS Java Developers Blog
David Murray published a great post about best practices for IAM credentials earlier today (December 9th). He gives a high level description of IAM, followed by methods for using IAM roles for EC2. To learn more go to the Java Developers Blog. – Ben