AWS Security Blog

Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

How to use Regional AWS STS endpoints

This blog post provides recommendations that you can use to help improve resiliency in the unlikely event of disrupted availability of the global (now legacy) AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) endpoint. Although the global (legacy) AWS STS endpoint https://sts.amazonaws.com is highly available, it’s hosted in a single AWS Region—US East (N. Virginia)—and like other […]

How to enforce creation of roles in a specific path: Use IAM role naming in hierarchy models

An AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role is an IAM identity that you create in your AWS account that has specific permissions. An IAM role is similar to an IAM user because it’s an AWS identity with permission policies that determine what the identity can and cannot do on AWS. However, as outlined in […]

SaaS architecture with role chaining

How to improve cross-account access for SaaS applications accessing customer accounts

Several independent software vendors (ISVs) and software as a service (SaaS) providers need to access their customers’ Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, especially if the SaaS product accesses data from customer environments. SaaS providers have adopted multiple variations of this third-party access scenario. In some cases, the providers ask the customer for an access key […]

Use IAM Roles Anywhere to help you improve security in on-premises container workloads

This blog post demonstrates how to help meet your security goals for a containerized process running outside of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of a hybrid cloud architecture. Managing credentials for such systems can be challenging, including when a workload needs to access cloud resources. IAM Roles Anywhere lets you exchange static AWS Identity […]

AWS Identity and Access Management

How to use the PassRole permission with IAM roles

iam:PassRole is an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permission that allows an IAM principal to delegate or pass permissions to an AWS service by configuring a resource such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance or AWS Lambda function with an IAM role. The service then uses that role to interact with […]

Upcoming improvements to your AWS sign-in experience

Starting in mid-2024, Amazon Web Services (AWS) will introduce a series of UI improvements to the AWS sign-in pages. Our primary focus is to revamp the UI, especially the root and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user sign-in page and switch role page. With these design updates, we aim to facilitate smoother transitions and […]

Writing IAM Policies: Grant Access to User-Specific Folders in an Amazon S3 Bucket

November 14, 2023: We’ve updated this post to use IAM Identity Center and follow updated IAM best practices. In this post, we discuss the concept of folders in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and how to use policies to restrict access to these folders. The idea is that by properly managing permissions, you can […]

Set up AWS Private Certificate Authority to issue certificates for use with IAM Roles Anywhere

Traditionally, applications or systems—defined as pieces of autonomous logic functioning without direct user interaction—have faced challenges associated with long-lived credentials such as access keys. In certain circumstances, long-lived credentials can increase operational overhead and the scope of impact in the event of an inadvertent disclosure. To help mitigate these risks and follow the best practice […]

circuit board

Refine permissions for externally accessible roles using IAM Access Analyzer and IAM action last accessed

When you build on Amazon Web Services (AWS) across accounts, you might use an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to allow an authenticated identity from outside your account—such as an IAM entity or a user from an external identity provider—to access the resources in your account. IAM roles have two types of policies […]

IAM Roles Anywhere with an external certificate authority

IAM Roles Anywhere with an external certificate authority

AWS Identity and Access Management Roles Anywhere allows you to use temporary Amazon Web Services (AWS) credentials outside of AWS by using X.509 Certificates issued by your certificate authority (CA). Faraz Angabini goes deep into using IAM Roles Anywhere in his blog post Extend AWS IAM roles to workloads outside of AWS with IAM Roles […]