AWS Security Blog

Tag: How-to guides

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 […]

Important Notification About Your AWS Virtual MFA Device

** Update:  the Google Autenticator application for iOS has been updated and now available from Apple’s App Store.  It no longer has an issue of potentially losing existing AWS MFA tokens as reported in this post. Do you use Google Authenticator for iOS for AWS MFA? If so, then read this! If you use Google […]

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 […]

New Playground App to Explore Web Identity Federation with Amazon, Facebook, and Google

In May 2013, we announced support for federation using identities Amazon, Facebook, and Google (a.k.a. web identity federation), which allows your apps to authenticate users via Amazon, Facebook, or Google and then access AWS resources managed under your account. To help you understand how web identity federation works, today we’re releasing the Web Identity Federation […]

Resource-Level Permissions for EC2–Controlling Management Access on Specific Instances

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 […]