Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

We’ve seen a question appear periodically on the IAM forum about granting IAM users access to the AWS Billing console. The question is this: even after an administrator sets appropriate permissions for an IAM user to access the console, the user can’t get to the console. Why not? Access to the console actually requires two […]

With the steady cadence of updates and enhancements for AWS services, it can sometimes be easy to miss announcements about features that relate to security. Here are some recent security-related updates in AWS services that we’re excited about and that you might not have heard about. AWS Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and finds […]

I’m very excited to share that AWS has received the first ever U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) level 3-5 Provisional Authorization for the AWS GovCloud (US) region under the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) Cloud Security Model (CSM). AWS has been authorized for CSM levels 1-2 workloads for all US regions since March of this […]

We are excited to announce the redesigned IAM console, now with a streamlined look and feel that makes it even easier to manage your IAM settings. We’ve made it more convenient to manage large resource lists (for example, hundreds of users, groups, or roles), eliminated tab switching, and optimized the console to offer a better […]

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 […]

As you might have seen, AWS recently released Amazon Cognito, a user identity and data synchronization service that helps you securely manage and synchronize app data for your users across their mobile devices. If you develop mobile apps that call AWS services, you definitely want to check out Amazon Cognito. What is Amazon Cognito? Amazon […]

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 […]