Category: Security

I often get asked when to use different AWS accounts to enforce separation of duties versus using IAM users and groups within a single account. While the complete answer depends on what AWS services you use, the general guidelines in this post will point you in the right direction. As context for the guidelines, consider […]

Today AWS CloudFormation released added support for  temporary security credentials provided by the AWS Security Token Service.  This release enables a number of scenarios such as federated users being able to use CloudFormation from the AWS Management Console and authorizing Amazon EC2 instances with IAM roles to call CloudFormation APIs.  To learn more about this new […]

AWS re:Invent 2013, AWS’s second annual conference for developers and technical leaders, is less than a month away.  We have some great sessions and activities lined up to ensure that content quality is high and that your questions are answered. Update (20 May 2014): For links to the session videos and slide presentations from AWS […]

One of the benefits of AWS is the highly available, durable, and practically unlimited cloud-based storage you can get with Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3).  Over two trillion objects are already stored in S3 and customers are always finding more creative uses for S3.  One of the more commonly requested use cases is how […]

Changing access keys (which consist of an access key ID and a secret access key) on a regular schedule is a well-known security best practice because it shortens the period an access key is active and therefore reduces the business impact if they are compromised. Having an established process that is run regularly also ensures […]

Yesterday AWS announced that it now supports resource-level permissions for seven additional EC2 APIs, including: DeleteNetworkAcl DeleteNetworkAclEntry DeleteRoute DeleteRouteTable DeleteDhcpOptions DeleteInternetGateway DeleteCustomerGateway As with other EC2 API actions that support resource-level permissions, you can also construct policies based on the tags associated with the resources.  To learn more, go to either our recent post on […]

<Repost from AWS Blog, here in its entirety> One of the most powerful features of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is its ability to issue temporary security credentials and grant controlled access to people in a network without having to define individual identities for each user (i.e., identity federation). This enables customers to extend their existing authentication […]

Last week’s blog post explained how to distribute AWS credentials to EC2 instances using IAM roles.  Will Kruse, Security Engineer on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, is back again this week to discuss how roles can also be used to distribute arbitrary secrets to EC2 instances. As we discussed last week, Amazon EC2 Roles for Instances […]

If you have applications running on EC2 that also access other AWS services like Amazon S3 or Amazon DynamoDB, then these applications require credentials out on the EC2 instance.  You can hard-code AWS access keys into your application, but you’re faced with the added responsibility of distributing them to the instance securely and then the […]

** Update:  the Google Autenticator application for iOS has been updated and now available from Apple’s App Store.  It no longer has an issue of potentially losing existing AWS MFA tokens as reported in this post. Do you use Google Authenticator for iOS for AWS MFA? If so, then read this! If you use Google […]