Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

The AWS IAM team recently released new credential lifecycle management features that enable AWS account administrators to define and enforce security best practices for IAM users. We’ve expanded IAM password policies to enable self-service password rotation, on top of existing options to enforce password complexity. Furthermore, you can download reports for better visibility into the […]

In this post, Graham Evans, a developer on the AWS Billing team, describes new security features that expand how you can secure access to billing information in your AWS account. My team—AWS Billing— recently released the new and improved Billing and Cost Management Console.  We’re now happy to introduce an improvement to the access and […]

Some customers have asked how they should be using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help limit their exposure to problems like those that have recently been in the news. In general, AWS recommends that you enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your AWS account and for IAM users who are allowed to perform sensitive […]

As one of our most active customers, Netflix has hundreds of administrators who need access to AWS daily. Therefore, by eliminating their need to use AWS credentials via identity federation, they saved time, money, and administrative effort almost immediately. They were able to use SAML and OneLogin, their existing identity management provider, to federate users […]

When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance, you can associate an AWS IAM role with the instance to give applications or CLI commands that run on the instance permissions that are defined by the role. When a role is associated with an instance, EC2 obtains temporary security credentials for the role you associated with the […]

The Elastic Load Balancing team announced on May 13, 2014 that they’ve added support for resource-level permissions. Not only can you specify which ELB actions a user can perform, you can specify which resources the user can perform those actions on. For more information about the new ELB permissions, see Controlling Access to Your Load […]

Is your key chain too full for yet another key fob? Ever find yourself locked out of AWS because you didn’t have your key chain on hand? Gemalto, a third-party provider, has just released a new multi-factor authentication (MFA) device in a convenient “credit card” form factor that fits comfortably into a wallet. It works […]

July 26, 2017, update: We recommend that you use cross-account access by switching roles in the AWS Management Console. Also see the related documentation: Switching to a Role (AWS Management Console). Last December we described how you can delegate access to your AWS account using IAM roles. Using IAM roles, you can take advantage of […]

Keeping your AWS keys secure is one of the most important things you can do. This week Will Kruse, Security Engineer on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, explains the steps to safeguard your account in the event you inadvertently expose your AWS access key. Your AWS credentials (access key ID and secret access […]

As part of our ongoing efforts to help keep your resources secure, on April 21, 2014, AWS removed the ability to retrieve existing secret access keys for your AWS (root) account. See the updated blog post Where’s My Secret Access Key? for more information about access keys and secret access keys. -Kai