AWS Security Blog

Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Coming March 2015: Upgrades to IAM Policy Validation

Several weeks ago, we released documentation for the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy grammar and published a back-to-school policy grammar blog post to let you know of common errors in policies. To help you ensure that your policies match your intentions, we are taking policy validation a step further. Starting March 2015, any new or updated policy must […]

Federated Users Can Now Access the AWS Support Center

Recently, the AWS Support Center moved to the AWS Management Console. In addition to providing a better user experience, it enabled another important feature – federated access. Users in your company can now use their existing credentials to access the AWS Support Center for actions like creating a case, looking at the case history, or […]

Back to School: Understanding the IAM Policy Grammar

Have you ever had to create access policies for users, groups, roles, or resources and wished you could learn more about the policy language? If so, you’ve come to the right place. In this blog, I’ll describe the attributes and structure of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy language. I’ll also include examples that […]

Easier Role Selection for SAML-Based Single Sign-On

At the end of 2013, we introduced single sign-on to the AWS Management Console using the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0. This enables you to use your organization’s existing identity system to sign in to the console without having to provide AWS credentials. Today we’re happy to announce that, in response to your feedback, […]

Don’t Forget to Enable Access to the Billing Console!

We’ve seen a question appear periodically on the IAM forum about granting IAM users access to the AWS Billing console. The question is this: even after an administrator sets appropriate permissions for an IAM user to access the console, the user can’t get to the console. Why not? Access to the console actually requires two […]

AWS CloudTrail Now Logs AWS Management Console Sign-In Events

We’ve heard from many of you that you want greater visibility into when users sign in to the AWS Management Console. We are excited to announce that AWS CloudTrail now captures console sign-in events whenever an account owner, a federated user, or an IAM user signs into the console. For those of you who aren’t […]