AWS Security Blog

Category: Amazon Cognito

Access token security for microservice APIs on Amazon EKS

In this blog post, I demonstrate how to implement service-to-service authorization using OAuth 2.0 access tokens for microservice APIs hosted on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). A common use case for OAuth 2.0 access tokens is to facilitate user authorization to a public facing application. Access tokens can also be used to identify and […]

Protect public clients for Amazon Cognito by using an Amazon CloudFront proxy

September 8, 2023: It’s important to know that if you activate user sign-up in your user pool, anyone on the internet can sign up for an account and sign in to your apps. Don’t enable self-registration in your user pool unless you want to open your app to allow users to sign up. Sep 6 […]

How to integrate third-party IdP using developer authenticated identities

Amazon Cognito identity pools enable you to create and manage unique identifiers for your users and provide temporary, limited-privilege credentials to your application to access AWS resources. Currently, there are several out of the box external identity providers (IdPs) to integrate with Amazon Cognito identity pools, including Facebook, Google, and Apple. If your application’s primary […]

Building fine-grained authorization using Amazon Cognito, API Gateway, and IAM

September 8, 2023: It’s important to know that if you activate user sign-up in your user pool, anyone on the internet can sign up for an account and sign in to your apps. Don’t enable self-registration in your user pool unless you want to open your app to allow users to sign up. June 5, […]

Highlights from the latest AWS Identity launches

August 10, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more about the name change here. Here is the latest from AWS Identity from November 2020 through February 2021. The features highlighted in this blog post can help you manage […]

How to implement password-less authentication with Amazon Cognito and WebAuthn

In this blog post, I show you how to offer a password-less authentication experience to your customers. To do this, you’ll allow physical security keys or platform authenticators (like finger-print scanners) to be used as the authentication factor to your web or mobile applications that use Amazon Cognito user pools for authentication. An Amazon Cognito […]

How to configure Duo multi-factor authentication with Amazon Cognito

October 23: This post has been updated to utilize Duo Web v4 SDK and OIDC approach for integration with Duo two-factor authentication. Adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) reduces the risk of user account take-over, phishing, and password theft. Adding MFA while providing a frictionless sign-in experience requires you to offer a variety of MFA options that […]

Role-based access control using Amazon Cognito and an external identity provider

September 8, 2023: It’s important to know that if you activate user sign-up in your user pool, anyone on the internet can sign up for an account and sign in to your apps. Don’t enable self-registration in your user pool unless you want to open your app to allow users to sign up. Amazon Cognito […]

How to set case sensitivity in the Amazon Cognito console

AWS recently updated how Amazon Cognito user pools are created so that new user pools are case insensitive by default. An Amazon Cognito user pool is a user directory that helps you manage end-user identities. With this new feature, the native user name, email alias, and preferred user name alias are marked as case insensitive […]