AWS Security Blog

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 […]

Let’s face it—not all APIs were created equal. For example, you may be really interested in knowing when any of your Amazon EC2 instances are terminated (ec2:TerminateInstance), but less interested when an object is put in an Amazon S3 bucket (s3:PutObject). In this example, you can delete an object, but you can’t bring back that […]

Earlier this year, the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team announced support for the Switch Role feature, which allows your users to switch between accounts in the AWS Management Console. The benefit to your users is that they can switch accounts without being required to sign out and sign in for each account. In […]

Rotate access keys regularly and remove inactive users. You’ve probably heard us mention these as two AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) security best practices. But how do you know when access keys (for an IAM user or the root account) are no longer in use and safe to delete? To help you answer this […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) recently launched managed policies, which enable you to attach a single access control policy to multiple entities (IAM users, groups, and roles). Managed policies also give you precise, fine-grained control over how your users can manage policies and permissions for other entities. For example, you can control which managed […]

Earlier this month, we let you know that AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) would be upgrading policy validation today (March 25, 2015) to help you ensure that your IAM policies match your intentions. This upgrade is now in effect for all IAM policies. Starting today, to save changes to your IAM policies, you must […]

Have you ever spent time searching for a syntax error—such as a missing comma—when editing an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy? If so, you will be happy to hear that AWS has made it easier for you to identify and correct such errors. To help you find the source of the errors, we’ve […]

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create, control, rotate, and use your encryption keys in your applications. KMS allows you to create custom keys that other AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles in your AWS account can use. You can also enable […]

With the AWS Frankfurt Region officially launched, we’d like to share European and data protection–specific information we’ve published to assist AWS customers who want to store content containing personal data. This information can be found in the newly released Whitepaper on EU Data Protection, a key resource available to customers who want to use AWS […]

Today, we made it possible for you to enable a user to switch roles directly in the AWS Management Console to access resources across multiple AWS accounts—while using only one set of credentials. Previously, as Anders discussed in his blog post, Delegating API Access to AWS Services Using IAM Roles, you could delegate access to […]