AWS Security Blog

Companies using .NET applications to access sensitive user information, such as employee salary, Social Security Number, and credit card information, need an easy and secure way to manage access for users and applications. For example, let’s say that your company has a .NET payroll application. You want your Human Resources (HR) team to manage and […]

August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info You can now encrypt and decrypt your data at the command line and in scripts—no […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has made it easier for you to create and modify your IAM policies by using a point-and-click visual editor in the IAM console. The new visual editor guides you through granting permissions using IAM policies without requiring you to write the policy in JSON (although you can still author and edit policies in JSON, if you prefer). This update to the IAM console makes it easier to grant least privilege permissions for the AWS service actions you select by listing all the supported resource types and request conditions you can specify. And, as with policy summaries, the visual editor also identifies and helps you correct unrecognized services and actions and permissions errors when you import existing policies. In this blog post, I give a brief overview of policy concepts and show you how to create a new policy by using the visual editor.

Newly updated reports are available for AWS System and Organization Control Report 1 (SOC 1), formerly called AWS Service Organization Control Report 1, and AWS SOC 2: Security, Availability, & Confidentiality Report. You can download both reports for free and on demand in the AWS Management Console through AWS Artifact. The updated AWS SOC 3: […]

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is now a HIPAA Eligible Service and has been added to the AWS Business Associate Addendum (BAA). This means you can use ElastiCache for Redis to help you power healthcare applications as well as process, maintain, and store protected health information (PHI). ElastiCache for Redis is a Redis-compatible, fully-managed, in-memory data […]

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports encryption for secure internode communications to help keep personally identifiable information (PII) safe. Both encryption in transit and at rest are supported. The new encryption in-transit feature enables you to encrypt all communications between clients and Redis servers as well as between Redis servers (primary and read replica nodes). […]

Today, AWS introduced AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Standard Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition), which is managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD) that is performance optimized for small and midsize businesses. AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) offers you a highly available and cost-effective primary directory in the AWS Cloud that […]

In a previous AWS Security Blog post, Jeff Levine showed how you can monitor changes to your Amazon EC2 security groups. The methods he describes in that post are examples of detective controls, which can help you determine when changes are made to security controls on your AWS resources. In this post, I take that […]

September 16, 2025: AWS Private CA Connector for Active Directory now supports server-side LDAPS certificate enrollment for AWS Managed Microsoft AD domain controllers. To learn how to enable server-side LDAPS for your AWS Managed Microsoft AD directory using AWS Private CA Connector for Active Directory, please refer to our updated documentation. March 18, 2024: We […]

Earlier this year, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) introduced service-linked roles, which provide you an easy and secure way to delegate permissions to AWS services. Each service-linked role delegates permissions to an AWS service, which is called its linked service. Service-linked roles help with monitoring and auditing requirements by providing a transparent way to […]