Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

When accessing AWS resources in an organization, we recommend that you have a standard and repeatable authentication method for purposes of security, auditability, compliance, and the capability to support role and account separation. As part of my AWS Professional Services engagements, I have helped AWS customers establish such an authentication mechanism via federated access to […]

I am happy to announce that AWS has achieved ISO 27017 certification. This new criterion builds upon the ISO 27002 standard, with additional controls specifically applicable to cloud service providers. AWS is the first cloud provider to obtain this certification, which is available now for download on our AWS Cloud Compliance site. Additionally, we’ve posted an FAQ […]

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, I’m happy to announce the completion of another successful Service Organization Controls (SOC) assessment. The AWS SOC program is an intense, period-in-time audit performed every six months. We have been releasing SOC Reports (or their SAS 70 predecessors) regularly since 2009, and we have, over the years, gradually built in more controls and added […]

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 […]

My previous blog post on November 11, 2015, reported that we were preparing to activate AWS Security Token Service (STS) by default in all AWS regions. As of today, AWS STS is active by default in all AWS regions, for all customers. This means that your applications and services can immediately take advantage of reduced […]

We continually review your input submitted via the Feedback link on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) console. Based on our recent review of that feedback, one of the features most frequently requested by you is the ability to search for an IAM user with their associated access key ID. To address this request […]

By the end of November 2015, AWS Security Token Service (STS) will be active by default in all AWS regions, which means that your applications and services can call AWS STS in a region geographically closer to you. This change will optimize latencies and improve application performance. Additionally, the multiregional resiliency provided by AWS STS […]

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 […]