Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

As you establish private connectivity between your on-premises networks and your AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environments, the need for Domain Name System (DNS) resolution across these environments grows in importance. One common approach used to address this need is to run DNS servers on Amazon EC2 across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) and integrate them […]

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. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) celebrated its one-year launch anniversary in November 2015, and […]

AWS Config recently added the ability to record changes to the configuration of your AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, groups, and roles (collectively referred to as IAM entities) and the policies associated with them. Using this feature, you can record configuration details for these IAM entities, including details about which policies are associated […]

July 29, 2025: This blog post is outdated. Use CloudFront’s managed prefix list for Security Groups instead of the Lambda solution. CloudFront now supports VPC origins, allowing secure connectivity to private VPC resources. For details on managed prefix lists, see this post. For VPC origins implementation guide, refer to this post. April 1, 2021: Before […]

AWS supports Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, an open standard for identity federation used by many identity providers (IdPs). SAML enables federated single sign-on (SSO), which enables your users to sign in to the AWS Management Console or to make programmatic calls to AWS APIs by using assertions from a SAML-compliant IdP. Many of […]

As a security best practice, AWS recommends writing AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies that adhere to the principle of least privilege, which means granting only the permissions required to perform a specific task. However, verifying which permissions an application or user actually needs can be a challenge. To help you determine which permissions […]

Many AWS customers keep their environments separated from each other: development resources do not interact with production, and vice versa. One way to achieve this separation is by using multiple AWS accounts. Though this approach does help with resource isolation, it can increase your user management because each AWS account can have its own AWS […]

Great security research combines extremely high levels of creativity, paranoia, and attention to detail. All of these qualities are in evidence in two new research papers about how s2n, our Open Source implementation of the SSL/TLS protocols, handles the Lucky 13 attack from 2013. The research found issues with how s2n mitigates Lucky 13 and improvements that […]

Today, AWS introduced the preview of Short Message Service (SMS) support for multi-factor authentication (MFA), making it easier for you to implement a security best practice. Until now, you could enable MFA for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users only with hardware or virtual MFA tokens, but this new feature enables you to use […]

One of the most important and critical concepts in AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for advanced and secure data usage is EncryptionContext. Using EncryptionContext properly can help significantly improve the security of your applications. In this blog post, I will show the importance of EncryptionContext and will provide a simple example showing how you can […]