AWS Security Blog

Tag: Best Practices

Read What Others Recommend for IAM Best Practices

Here on the AWS Security Blog we’ve published several posts that recommend IAM best practices. We’re pleased to find that third-party bloggers are adding their own voices. Codeship, a company that provides a continuous code deployment and testing service, just published a great post about how to secure your AWS account using Identity and Access […]

New Whitepaper: AWS Cloud Security Best Practices

November 3, 2020: This blog is out of date. Please refer to this post for updated info: Introducing the AWS Best Practices for Security, Identity, & Compliance Webpage and Customer Polling Feature We have just published an updated version of our AWS Security Best Practices whitepaper. You wanted us to provide a holistic and familiar […]

Guidelines for When to Use Accounts, Users, and Groups

I often get asked when to use different AWS accounts to enforce separation of duties versus using IAM users and groups within a single account. While the complete answer depends on what AWS services you use, the general guidelines in this post will point you in the right direction. As context for the guidelines, consider […]

How to Rotate Access Keys for IAM Users

Changing access keys (which consist of an access key ID and a secret access key) on a regular schedule is a well-known security best practice because it shortens the period an access key is active and therefore reduces the business impact if they are compromised. Having an established process that is run regularly also ensures […]

Using IAM Roles to Distribute Non-AWS Credentials to Your EC2 Instances

Last week’s blog post explained how to distribute AWS credentials to EC2 instances using IAM roles.  Will Kruse, Security Engineer on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, is back again this week to discuss how roles can also be used to distribute arbitrary secrets to EC2 instances. As we discussed last week, Amazon EC2 Roles for Instances […]

A Safer Way to Distribute AWS Credentials to EC2

If you have applications running on EC2 that also access other AWS services like Amazon S3 or Amazon DynamoDB, then these applications require credentials out on the EC2 instance.  You can hard-code AWS access keys into your application, but you’re faced with the added responsibility of distributing them to the instance securely and then the […]

A Primer on RDS Resource-Level Permissions

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 […]

2013 PCI Compliance Package Available Now

We’re happy to announce the availability of the 2013 PCI Compliance Package. Along with the AWS PCI Attestation of Compliance, this package includes our independent assessor’s revised and expanded PCI Customer Responsibility Matrix, which describes the customer and AWS shared responsibility for each of the 200+ PCI Data Security Standard controls. This document will help […]