Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

We’ve heard from many of you that you want greater visibility into when users sign in to the AWS Management Console. We are excited to announce that AWS CloudTrail now captures console sign-in events whenever an account owner, a federated user, or an IAM user signs into the console. For those of you who aren’t […]

The AWS IAM team recently released new credential lifecycle management features that enable AWS account administrators to define and enforce security best practices for IAM users. We’ve expanded IAM password policies to enable self-service password rotation, on top of existing options to enforce password complexity. Furthermore, you can download reports for better visibility into the […]

In this post, Graham Evans, a developer on the AWS Billing team, describes new security features that expand how you can secure access to billing information in your AWS account. My team—AWS Billing— recently released the new and improved Billing and Cost Management Console.  We’re now happy to introduce an improvement to the access and […]

One of the advantages of using the AWS SDKs for programmatic access to AWS is that the SDKs handle the task of signing requests. All you have to do is provide AWS credentials (access key id and secret access key), and when you invoke a method that makes a call to AWS, the SDK translates […]

Some customers have asked how they should be using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help limit their exposure to problems like those that have recently been in the news. In general, AWS recommends that you enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your AWS account and for IAM users who are allowed to perform sensitive […]

When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance, you can associate an AWS IAM role with the instance to give applications or CLI commands that run on the instance permissions that are defined by the role. When a role is associated with an instance, EC2 obtains temporary security credentials for the role you associated with the […]

Is your key chain too full for yet another key fob? Ever find yourself locked out of AWS because you didn’t have your key chain on hand? Gemalto, a third-party provider, has just released a new multi-factor authentication (MFA) device in a convenient “credit card” form factor that fits comfortably into a wallet. It works […]

On May 21, AWS launched encryption for EBS volumes, a frequently requested feature, which can help you meet stricter security and encryption compliance requirements. You can now create an encrypted EBS volume and attach it to an EC2 instance. Data on the volume, disk I/O, and snapshots created from the volume are all encrypted. The […]

July 26, 2017, update: We recommend that you use cross-account access by switching roles in the AWS Management Console. Also see the related documentation: Switching to a Role (AWS Management Console). Last December we described how you can delegate access to your AWS account using IAM roles. Using IAM roles, you can take advantage of […]

Update from January 17, 2018: The techniques demonstrated in this blog post relate to traditional SAML federation for AWS. These techniques are still valid and useful. However, AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) provides analogous capabilities by way of a managed service. If you are just getting started with federating access to your AWS accounts, we recommend […]