AWS Security Blog

As you might have seen, AWS recently released Amazon Cognito, a user identity and data synchronization service that helps you securely manage and synchronize app data for your users across their mobile devices. If you develop mobile apps that call AWS services, you definitely want to check out Amazon Cognito. What is Amazon Cognito? Amazon […]

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 […]

AWS announced yesterday that Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) added support for federated users. If you use Amazon EMR, you can now enable users to administer Amazon EMR clusters who are signed in to your corporate network using their corporate credentials—you no longer need to create IAM users for access to EMR. Up to now, federated […]

As one of our most active customers, Netflix has hundreds of administrators who need access to AWS daily. Therefore, by eliminating their need to use AWS credentials via identity federation, they saved time, money, and administrative effort almost immediately. They were able to use SAML and OneLogin, their existing identity management provider, to federate users […]

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 […]

The Elastic Load Balancing team announced on May 13, 2014 that they’ve added support for resource-level permissions. Not only can you specify which ELB actions a user can perform, you can specify which resources the user can perform those actions on. For more information about the new ELB permissions, see Controlling Access to Your Load […]

The AWS SDK team recently added and documented some security-related features that we think you shouldn’t miss. Check these out! Updates for managing access keys in the .NET and Java SDKs. In Referencing Credentials using Profiles, blogger Norm Johanson describes how you can now put a credentials file in your user folder. This great security […]

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 […]