Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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

Today, AWS updated the sign-in experience for IAM users accessing AWS websites such as the AWS Management Console, Support, or Forums. As previously announced, the new sign-in experience continues to provide the same functionality as the previous one, it but provides a more consistent experience for IAM users when signing in to AWS account whether it […]

This week’s guest blogger, Ajith Ranabahu, Software Development Engineer on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, presents an in-depth look at the IAM policy simulator. Many of you have asked about how to author and troubleshoot access control policies. To help with this task, last year we launched the policy simulator, which makes it easier […]

Today Will Kruse, Senior Security Engineer on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, provides a tutorial on how to enable resiliency against authentication and authorization failures in an application deployed on Amazon EC2 using a high availability design pattern based on IAM roles. Background Many of you invest significant effort to ensure that a […]

Today AWS announced support for adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) for cross-account access. In this blog post, I will walk you through a common use case, including a code sample, which demonstrates how to create policies that enforce MFA when IAM users from one AWS account make programmatic requests for resources in a different account. Many […]