AWS Security Blog

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 […]

When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance, you can associate an AWS IAM role with the instance to give applications or CLI commands that run on the instance permissions that are defined by the role. When a role is associated with an instance, EC2 obtains temporary security credentials for the role you associated with the […]

This week, Kati Paizee, a technical writer on the Amazon EC2 team, takes an in-depth look at the permissions you need to give your users so that they can administer EC2 using the console. The Amazon EC2 console provides an easy-to-use interface that allows your users to carry out compute-based tasks without asking them to […]

Is your key chain too full for yet another key fob? Ever find yourself locked out of AWS because you didn’t have your key chain on hand? Gemalto, a third-party provider, has just released a new multi-factor authentication (MFA) device in a convenient “credit card” form factor that fits comfortably into a wallet. It works […]

On May 21, AWS launched encryption for EBS volumes, a frequently requested feature, which can help you meet stricter security and encryption compliance requirements. You can now create an encrypted EBS volume and attach it to an EC2 instance. Data on the volume, disk I/O, and snapshots created from the volume are all encrypted. The […]

Updated May 21, 2014: Clarified that for the Mac, the private key is stored in memory and the passphrase in the keychain. Important note: You should enable SSH agent forwarding with caution. When you set up agent forwarding, a socket file is created on the forwarding host, which is the mechanism by which the key […]

July 26, 2017, update: We recommend that you use cross-account access by switching roles in the AWS Management Console. Also see the related documentation: Switching to a Role (AWS Management Console). Last December we described how you can delegate access to your AWS account using IAM roles. Using IAM roles, you can take advantage of […]

Update from January 17, 2018: The techniques demonstrated in this blog post relate to traditional SAML federation for AWS. These techniques are still valid and useful. However, AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) provides analogous capabilities by way of a managed service. If you are just getting started with federating access to your AWS accounts, we recommend […]