AWS Security Blog

Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Identify unused IAM roles and remove them confidently with the last used timestamp

February 19, 2024: You can now use IAM Access Analyzer to easily identify unused roles. Read this blog post to learn more. November 25, 2019: We’ve corrected a documentation link. As you build on AWS, you create AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles to enable teams and applications to use AWS services. As those […]

Working backward: From IAM policies and principal tags to standardized names and tags for your AWS resources

February 11, 2021: We updated the tag and instance creation policies for Amazon EC2 to reflect network interface support for attribute-based access control (ABAC). We also added a link to additional sample policies for launching an EC2 instance, and we corrected a condition key “aws:RequestTag/access-zone” to “aws:RequestTag/access-environment”. Amazon ElastiCache now supports names up to 50 […]

Create fine-grained session permissions using IAM managed policies

As a security best practice, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) recommends that you use temporary security credentials from AWS Security Token Service (STS) when you access your AWS resources. Temporary credentials are short-term credentials generated dynamically and provided to the user upon request. Today, one of the most widely used mechanisms for requesting temporary […]

How to centralize and automate IAM policy creation in sandbox, development, and test environments

To keep pace with AWS innovation, many customers allow their application teams to experiment with AWS services in sandbox environments as they move toward production-ready architecture. These teams need timely access to various sets of AWS services and resources, which means they also need a mechanism to help ensure least privilege is granted. In other […]

Automate analyzing your permissions using IAM access advisor APIs

As an administrator that grants access to AWS, you might want to enable your developers to get started with AWS quickly by granting them broad access. However, as your developers gain experience and your applications stabilize, you want to limit permissions to only what they need. To do this, access advisor will determine the permissions […]

Simplify granting access to your AWS resources by using tags on AWS IAM users and roles

Recently, AWS enabled tags on IAM principals (users and roles). The main benefit of this new feature is that you’ll be able to author a single policy to grant access to individual resources and you’ll no longer need to update your policies for each new resource that you add. In other words, you can now […]

Use YubiKey security key to sign into AWS Management Console with YubiKey for multi-factor authentication

April 25, 2023: We’ve updated this blog post to include more security learning resources. Update on October 8, 2018: After we launched support for security devices manufactured by Yubico on September 25, 2018, we received feedback from customers to support other U2F security key providers, as well. Starting October 8, 2018, you can now enable […]

AWS Organizations now requires email address verification in order to invite accounts to an organization

AWS Organizations, the service for centrally managing multiple AWS accounts, enables you to invite existing accounts to join your organization. To provide additional assurance about your organization’s identity to AWS accounts that you invite, AWS Organizations is adding a new feature. Beginning on September 27, 2018, you’ll need to verify the email address associated with […]

Delegate permission management to developers by using IAM permissions boundaries

Today, AWS released a new IAM feature that makes it easier for you to delegate permissions management to trusted employees. As your organization grows, you might want to allow trusted employees to configure and manage IAM permissions to help your organization scale permission management and move workloads to AWS faster. For example, you might want […]