Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices recommend using IAM users or roles to access your AWS resources, instead of using your root credentials. If you follow this best practice, though, how can you monitor for root activity and take action if such activity occurs? AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch provide the solution. In […]

PCI compliance in the cloud is an important topic for many of our customers. Our PCI FAQ page has received more than 45,000 views, and we have issued our PCI compliance package directly to customers in all major regions and industry verticals. To build on our growing demand of PCI enablers, today we’re happy to […]

Just in case you missed any of the AWS Security Blog posts from the last month or so, we have summarized and linked to them in this blog post. The linked posts are shown in reverse chronological order (most recent first), and the subject matter ranges from privacy and data security at Amazon to AWS […]

Amazon knows customers care deeply about privacy and data security, and we optimize our work to get these issues right for customers. With this post I’d like to provide a number of observations on our policies and positions: Amazon does not disclose customer information unless we’re required to do so to comply with a legally […]

The security of personally identifiable information (PII) continues to be an important topic among all sectors, and education is no exception. Covered entities subject to FERPA are turning to cloud computing as a highly efficient way to manage and secure vast amounts of educational records and student data. To bring clarity to securing student data […]

Note from September 20, 2017: Based on customer feedback, we have moved the process outlined in this post to the official AWS documentation. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has a list of best practices that you are encouraged to use. One of those best practices is to enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your AWS root […]

Note 1: On August 12, 2015, I published a follow-up to this post, which is called How to Implement a General Solution for Federated API/CLI Access Using SAML 2.0. Be sure to see that post if you want to implement a general federation solution (not specific to AD FS). Note 2: This post focuses on NTLM authentication, […]

In November 2014, AWS launched Key Management Service (KMS), a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data managed by AWS services and within your own applications. One of the features KMS offers is the key alias, an arbitrary string that can be […]

You can now use the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy simulator to test and validate your roles’ access control policies. The policy simulator is a tool to help you author and validate the policies that set permissions on your AWS resources. This tool provides a “playground” where you can iteratively author least privilege […]

We are now in our sixth year of regularly publishing comprehensive independent audit reports attesting to our alignment with globally accepted security best practices. We have just completed our thorough and extensive semiannual audit and are happy to announce that Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and our newest region in Europe (Frankfurt) are now in-scope […]