AWS Security Blog

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 […]

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 […]

May is the month of security oriented webinars at AWS. We’re presenting three webinars that touch on different identity and access management (IAM) technologies and use cases. The first webinar highlights AWS CloudTrail, APN (AWS Partner Network) partner Splunk, and FINRA. The webinar begins with an overview of CloudTrail, followed by a discussion of how […]