Posted On: Jul 26, 2023

Today, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Roles Anywhere released credential helper version 1.0.5 to include support for X.509 certificates and private keys that are stored in macOS and Windows certificate stores. IAM Roles Anywhere credential helper is a tool that manages the process of signing the CreateSession API with the private key associated with an X.509 end-entity certificate and calls the endpoint to obtain temporary AWS credentials. With this release, you can now use IAM Roles Anywhere credential helper to delegate signing operations to keys stored within those OS-specific certificate stores, without those keys ever leaving those stores; which can improve your security posture. In Windows, both CryptoAPI and Cryptography API: Next Generation (CNG) are supported; in macOS, Keychain is supported. 

IAM Roles Anywhere enables workloads that run outside of AWS, such as servers, containers, and applications, to use X.509 digital certificates to obtain temporary AWS credentials and access AWS resources using the same IAM roles and policies that you have configured for your AWS workloads to access AWS resources.

IAM Roles Anywhere is available in most commercial regions. The IAM Roles Anywhere credential helper source code is available on GitHub, and for more information on IAM Roles Anywhere credential helper v1.0.5, see the release note.