Tag: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Least privilege is an important security topic for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers. In previous blog posts, we’ve provided tactical advice on how to write least privilege policies, which we would encourage you to review. You might feel comfortable writing a few least privilege policies for yourself, but to scale this up to thousands of […]

According to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, lateral movement consists of techniques that threat actors use to enter and control remote systems on a network. In Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments, threat actors equipped with illegitimately obtained credentials could potentially use APIs to interact with infrastructures and services directly, and they might even be able to use […]

For businesses, particularly those in highly regulated industries, managing user accounts isn’t just a matter of security but also a compliance necessity. In sectors such as finance, healthcare, and government, where regulations often mandate strict control over user access, disabling stale user accounts is a key compliance activity. In this post, we show you a […]

This blog post provides recommendations that you can use to help improve resiliency in the unlikely event of disrupted availability of the global (now legacy) AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) endpoint. Although the global (legacy) AWS STS endpoint https://sts.amazonaws.com is highly available, it’s hosted in a single AWS Region—US East (N. Virginia)—and like other […]

May 20, 2024: This blog post has been updated with use case examples. The Optimize AWS administration with IAM paths blog post delves into the fundamental workings of the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) path feature. This post explores how you can use IAM paths to strike a balance between centralized IT and development […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer offers tools that help you set, verify, and refine permissions. You can use IAM Access Analyzer external access findings to continuously monitor your AWS Organizations organization and Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts for public and cross-account access to your resources, and verify that only intended external access […]

Several independent software vendors (ISVs) and software as a service (SaaS) providers need to access their customers’ Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, especially if the SaaS product accesses data from customer environments. SaaS providers have adopted multiple variations of this third-party access scenario. In some cases, the providers ask the customer for an access key […]

As organizations expand their Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment and migrate workloads to the cloud, they find themselves dealing with many AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and policies. These roles and policies multiply because IAM fills a crucial role in securing and controlling access to AWS resources. Imagine you have a team creating […]

July 12, 2024: AWS has extended custom policy checks to include a new check called Check No Public Access. This new check determines whether a resource policy grants public access to a specified resource type. In addition to this new check, there has been an update to the existing Check Access Not Granted check. The […]

iam:PassRole is an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permission that allows an IAM principal to delegate or pass permissions to an AWS service by configuring a resource such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance or AWS Lambda function with an IAM role. The service then uses that role to interact with […]