AWS Security Blog

Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Validate IAM policies in CloudFormation templates using IAM Access Analyzer

In this blog post, I introduce IAM Policy Validator for AWS CloudFormation (cfn-policy-validator), an open source tool that extracts AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies from an AWS CloudFormation template, and allows you to run existing IAM Access Analyzer policy validation APIs against the template. I also show you how to run the tool […]

AWS introduces changes to access denied errors for easier permissions troubleshooting

To help you more easily troubleshoot your permissions in Amazon Web Services (AWS), we’re introducing additional context in the access denied error messages. We’ll start to introduce this change in September 2021, and gradually make it available in all AWS services over the next few months. If you’re currently relying on the exact text of […]

Strengthen the security of sensitive data stored in Amazon S3 by using additional AWS services

October 13, 2021: We’ve added a section on redacting and transforming personally identifiable information with Amazon S3 Object Lambda. In this post, we describe the AWS services that you can use to both detect and protect your data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). When you analyze security in depth for your Amazon […]

How to restrict IAM roles to access AWS resources from specific geolocations using AWS Client VPN

You can improve your organization’s security posture by enforcing access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources based on IP address and geolocation. For example, users in your organization might bring their own devices, which might require additional security authorization checks and posture assessment in order to comply with corporate security requirements. Enforcing access to AWS […]

How to implement SaaS tenant isolation with ABAC and AWS IAM

April 25, 2023: We’ve updated this blog post to include more security learning resources. August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. Multi-tenant […]

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, […]

IAM makes it easier for you to manage permissions for AWS services accessing your resources

November 24, 2023: This post has been updated to show the differences between accessing data by way of an AWS service over public endpoints and over AWS PrivateLink (data access pattern 2). July 7, 2023: This post had been updated to use Amazon S3 Replication as an example in Data access pattern 3b section. Amazon […]

Review last accessed information to identify unused EC2, IAM, and Lambda permissions and tighten access for your IAM roles

September 28, 2023: IAM is incrementally adding support for actions from more services. For a list of services that report action last accessed information, see IAM action last accessed information services and actions. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps customers analyze access and achieve least privilege. When you are working on new permissions for […]

How to relate IAM role activity to corporate identity

September 8, 2021: The post was updated to correct a typo about the CloudTrail log snippet. April 14, 2021: In the section “Use the SourceIdentity attribute with identity federation,” we updated “AWS SSO” to “sign-in endpoint” for clarity. AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) now offers customers the ability to specify a unique identity attribute […]

How to scale your authorization needs by using attribute-based access control with S3

August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. May 26, 2021: In the section “Secure your tags using an AWS Organizations service control […]