AWS Security Blog

Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

How to Establish Federated Access to Your AWS Resources by Using Active Directory User Attributes

To govern federated access to your AWS resources, it’s a common practice to use Microsoft Active Directory (AD) groups. When using AD groups, establishing federation requires the number of AD groups to be equal to the number of your AWS accounts multiplied by the number of roles in each of your AWS accounts. As you […]

AWS Encryption SDK: How to Decide if Data Key Caching Is Right for Your Application

Today, the AWS Crypto Tools team introduced a new feature in the AWS Encryption SDK: data key caching. Data key caching lets you reuse the data keys that protect your data, instead of generating a new data key for each encryption operation. Data key caching can reduce latency, improve throughput, reduce cost, and help you […]

Newly Updated: Example AWS IAM Policies for You to Use and Customize

To help you grant access to specific resources and conditions, the Example Policies page in the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) documentation now includes more than thirty policies for you to use or customize to meet your permissions requirements. The AWS Support team developed these policies from their experiences working with AWS customers over the years. […]

How to Use AWS Organizations to Automate End-to-End Account Creation

AWS Organizations offers new capabilities for managing AWS accounts, including automated account creation via the Organizations API. For example, you can bring new development teams onboard by using the Organizations API to create an account, AWS CloudFormation templates to configure the account (such as for AWS Identity and Access Management [IAM] and networking), and service control […]

Coming Soon: Improvements to How You Sign In to Your AWS Account

Update from August 25, 2017: These improvements are now live. For more details, see Now Available: Improvements to How You Sign In to Your AWS Account. Coming soon, AWS will improve the way you sign in to your AWS account. Whether you sign in as your account’s root user or an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) […]

How to Configure Even Stronger Password Policies to Help Meet Your Security Standards by Using AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory

With AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD, you can now create and enforce custom password policies for your Microsoft Windows users. AWS Microsoft AD now includes five empty password policies that you can edit and apply with standard Microsoft password policy tools such as Active Directory […]

How to Increase the Redundancy and Performance of Your AWS Directory Service for Microsoft AD Directory by Adding Domain Controllers

You can now increase the redundancy and performance of your AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD, directory by deploying additional domain controllers. Adding domain controllers increases redundancy, resulting in even greater resilience and higher availability. This new capability enables you to have at least two domain […]

New Security Whitepaper Now Available: Use AWS WAF to Mitigate OWASP’s Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities

Today, we released a new security whitepaper: Use AWS WAF to Mitigate OWASP’s Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities. This whitepaper describes how you can use AWS WAF, a web application firewall, to address the top application security flaws as named by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). Using AWS WAF, you can write rules to […]

New Information in the AWS IAM Console Helps You Follow IAM Best Practices

Today, we added new information to the Users section of the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) console to make it easier for you to follow IAM best practices. With this new information, you can more easily monitor users’ activity in your AWS account and identify access keys and passwords that you should rotate regularly. You can […]