AWS Security Blog

AWS has just completed our annual audit of ISO 27001, a certification we achieved back in 2010. 10 new services are now in scope under ISO 27001: Amazon CloudFront Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) Amazon WorkDocs Amazon WorkMail Amazon WorkSpaces AWS Directory Service AWS Key […]

In my previous post, I introduced service last accessed data, a new feature of the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) console that helps you define policies that adhere better to the principle of least privilege. As part of that post, I walked through a sample use case demonstrating how you can use service last […]

July 29, 2025: This blog post is outdated. Use CloudFront’s managed prefix list for Security Groups instead of the Lambda solution. CloudFront now supports VPC origins, allowing secure connectivity to private VPC resources. For details on managed prefix lists, see this post. For VPC origins implementation guide, refer to this post. April 1, 2021: Before […]

Today we’re happy to announce we’ve added 10 new services to our ISO 9001 certification: Amazon CloudFront Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) Amazon WorkDocs Amazon WorkMail Amazon WorkSpaces AWS Directory Service AWS Key Management Service (KMS) AWS WAF – Web Application Firewall This increases the […]

AWS supports Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, an open standard for identity federation used by many identity providers (IdPs). SAML enables federated single sign-on (SSO), which enables your users to sign in to the AWS Management Console or to make programmatic calls to AWS APIs by using assertions from a SAML-compliant IdP. Many of […]

Governance among IT teams has become increasingly challenging, especially when dealing with application deployments that involve many different technologies. For example, consider the case of trying to collocate multiple applications on a shared operating system. Accidental conflicts can stem from the applications themselves, or the underlying libraries and network ports they rely on. The likelihood […]

As a security best practice, AWS recommends writing AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies that adhere to the principle of least privilege, which means granting only the permissions required to perform a specific task. However, verifying which permissions an application or user actually needs can be a challenge. To help you determine which permissions […]

AWS Directory Service now offers an additional directory type. Now you can launch and run a Microsoft Active Directory (AD) as a managed service in the AWS cloud. AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also referred to as Microsoft AD, is powered by Windows Server 2012 R2. When you select and launch […]

November 1, 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. We’re happy to make two announcements about what’s new in AWS Key Management Service (KMS). […]

When accessing AWS resources in an organization, we recommend that you have a standard and repeatable authentication method for purposes of security, auditability, compliance, and the capability to support role and account separation. As part of my AWS Professional Services engagements, I have helped AWS customers establish such an authentication mechanism via federated access to […]