Tag: AWS IAM

Seamlessly joining Windows EC2 instances in AWS to a Microsoft Active Directory domain is a common scenario, especially for enterprises building a hybrid cloud architecture. With AWS Directory Service, you can target an Active Directory domain managed on-premises or within AWS. How to Connect Your On-Premises Active Directory to AWS Using AD Connector takes you […]

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. With the recent release of Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES), you now can build applications without setting up and maintaining your own search cluster on Amazon EC2. One of the key benefits of using Amazon ES is that you can […]

March 10, 2020: This blog post is out of date. Please refer to this post for updated info: How to set up federated single sign-on to AWS using Google Workspace The AWS Security Blog has covered a variety of solutions for federating single sign-on (SSO) to the AWS Management Console. For example, How to Connect […]

Update on October 24, 2018: Note that if you do not author the Lambda function correctly, this setup can create an infinite loop (in this case, a rule that is fired repeatedly, which can impact your AWS resources and cause higher than expected charges to your account). The example Lambda function I provide in Step […]

Starting today, you can use AWS CloudTrail to track the activity of your federated users (web identity federation and Security Assertion Markup Language [SAML]). For example, you can now use CloudTrail to identify a SAML federated user who terminated an Amazon EC2 instance in your AWS account, or to identify a mobile application user who […]

Update: The video and slides from the webinar are now available. As part of the AWS Webinar Series, AWS will present Best Practices for Managing Security Operations in AWS on Wednesday, March 30. This webinar will start at 10:30 A.M. and end at 11:30 A.M. Pacific Time (UTC-7). AWS Security Solutions Architect Henrik Johansson will share […]

To celebrate 10 years of AWS, qwikLABS is offering 95 free online labs through the end of March 2016. Here are some of the labs related to security and compliance that you can take for free while the offer is live: Introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Introduction to AWS Key Management Service Performing […]

Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) is a common identity provider that many AWS customers use to give federated users access to the AWS Management Console. AD FS uses multiple certificates to ensure secure communication between servers and to act as authentication mechanisms. One such mechanism is called the token-signing certificate. When the token-signing certificate expires, […]

Back in September, I wrote about How to Help Lock Down a User’s Amazon EC2 Capabilities to a Single VPC. In that blog post, I highlighted what I have found to be an effective approach to the virtual private cloud (VPC) lockdown scenario. Since that time, I have worked on making the related information easier […]

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. In case you missed any of the AWS Security Blog posts from January and February, […]