Author: Jim Scharf

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 […]

Keeping your AWS keys secure is one of the most important things you can do. This week Will Kruse, Security Engineer on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, explains the steps to safeguard your account in the event you inadvertently expose your AWS access key. Your AWS credentials (access key ID and secret access […]

We have reviewed all AWS services for impact by CVE-2014-0160 (also known as the Heartbleed bug) and have either determined that the services were unaffected or we’ve applied mitigations that do not require customer action. In a few cases, we are recommending that customers rotate SSL certificates or secret keys. For additional detail see AWS […]

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, […]

Previously, we blogged about how to use resource-level permissions for Amazon EC2 to control access to specific EC2 instances.  Resource-level permissions can now also be applied to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).  This week’s guest blogger, Chris Checkwitch, Software Development Manager on the RDS team, will explain how to tackle the commonly requested use case of controlling access to […]

March 12, 2019: You can now find and update your access keys from a single, central location in the AWS Management Console. Learn how in this post. In this blog post, I’ll discuss what you should do in case you’ve lost your secret access key or need a new one. This post assumes that you are […]

Note: As of March 28, 2017,  Amazon EC2 supports tagging on creation, enforced tag usage, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resource-level permissions, and enforced volume encryption. See New – Tag EC2 Instances & EBS Volumes on Creation on the AWS Blog for more information. We are happy to announce that we launched resource-level permissions […]

Dear readers, We hope you’ve found our posts over the past couple of months both informative and useful. While we’ve posted a variety of topics to appeal to a broad audience, we’d like to hear directly from you about what we could do better. What additional topics would you like us to write about related […]

If you’ve worked with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, you know that they’re expressed as JSON documents. For example, here’s a policy that grants permission to perform some actions in our Amazon Glacier storage service: { “Version”: “2012-10-17”, “Statement”: [ { “Action”: [ “glacier:ListVaults”, “glacier:DescribeVault”, “glacier:GetVaultNotifications” ], “Effect”: “Allow”, “Resource”: “*” } ] } […]

In part I of our series on multi-factor authentication (MFA), we mentioned that the next topic would be securing access to AWS APIs with MFA. This week’s guest blogger Kai Zhao, Product Manager on our AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, will give a brief overview of AWS MFA-protected API access. Introduction MFA-protected API […]