Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now enables Amazon Web Services (AWS) administrators to use tags to manage and secure access to more types of IAM resources, such as customer managed IAM policies, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) providers, and virtual multi-factor authentication (MFA) devices. A tag is an attribute that consists of a key […]

December 4, 2020: We’ve updated this post to use s3:CreateBucket to simplify the intro example, replaced figure 8 removing the IfExists reference, and clarified qualifier information in the example. In this post, I’m going to share two techniques I’ve used to write least privilege AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. If you’re not familiar […]

October 3, 2021: In the section “Step 3: Create the role for the sysadmin persona,” we’ve corrected step 1 to indicate that sign in occurs through the administrator account, rather than the member account. AWS Security Hub provides you with a comprehensive view of your security posture across your accounts in Amazon Web Services (AWS) […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer generates comprehensive findings to help you identify resources that grant public and cross-account access. Now, you can also apply archive rules to existing findings, so you can better manage findings and focus on the findings that need your attention most. You can think of archive rules as […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer continuously monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resource-based policies for changes in order to identify resources that grant public or cross-account access from outside your AWS account or organization. Access Analyzer findings include detailed information that you can use to make an informed decision about whether access […]

If you have multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, and you have AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles among those multiple accounts that are supposed to be similar, those roles can deviate over time from your intended baseline due to manual actions performed directly out-of-band called drift. As part of regular compliance checks, you […]

Organizations are increasingly providing access to corporate resources from employee laptops and are required to apply the correct permissions to these computing devices to make sure that secrets and sensitive data are adequately protected. The combination of Amazon Web Services (AWS) long-term credentials and a YubiKey security token for multi-factor authentication (MFA) is an option […]

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. Amazon Cognito […]

In this post, I explain how you can use attribute-based access controls (ABAC) in Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help provision simple, maintainable access controls to different projects, teams, and workloads as your organization grows. ABAC gives you access to granular permissions and employee-attribute based authorization. By using ABAC, you need fewer AWS Identity and […]

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. Customers tell us that when their teams and projects are just getting started, administrators may grant broad access to inspire innovation and […]