Tag: Best Practices

We have a new resource available to help you meet a requirement for physically-separated infrastructure using logical separation in the AWS cloud. Our latest guide, Logical Separation: An Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Defense Cloud Security Requirements for Sensitive Workloads outlines how AWS meets the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) stringent physical separation requirement by […]

July 24, 2020: The number 9 item in this list, the Auditing Security Checklist, has been replaced by a Cloud Audit Academy course. The following list includes the ten most downloaded AWS security and compliance documents in 2017. Using this list, you can learn about what other AWS customers found most interesting about security and […]

AWS has the longest running, most effective, and most customer-obsessed compliance program in the cloud market. We have always centered our program around customers, obtaining the certifications needed to provide our customers with the proper level of validated transparency in order to enable them to certify their own AWS workloads [download .pdf of AWS certifications]. […]

Today, we are happy to announce the release of a new whitepaper: AWS Key Management Service Best Practices. This whitepaper takes knowledge learned from some of the largest adopters of AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and makes it available to all AWS customers. AWS KMS is a managed service that makes it easy for […]

Here on the AWS Security Blog we’ve published several posts that recommend IAM best practices. We’re pleased to find that third-party bloggers are adding their own voices. Codeship, a company that provides a continuous code deployment and testing service, just published a great post about how to secure your AWS account using Identity and Access […]

Updated on April 27, 2023: Amazon S3 now automatically enables S3 Block Public Access and disables S3 access control lists (ACLs) for all new S3 buckets in all AWS Regions. Updated on January 8, 2019: Based on customer feedback, we updated the third paragraph in the “What about S3 ACLs?” section to clarify permission management. […]

November 3, 2020: This blog is out of date. Please refer to this post for updated info: Introducing the AWS Best Practices for Security, Identity, & Compliance Webpage and Customer Polling Feature We have just published an updated version of our AWS Security Best Practices whitepaper. You wanted us to provide a holistic and familiar […]

I often get asked when to use different AWS accounts to enforce separation of duties versus using IAM users and groups within a single account. While the complete answer depends on what AWS services you use, the general guidelines in this post will point you in the right direction. As context for the guidelines, consider […]

Changing access keys (which consist of an access key ID and a secret access key) on a regular schedule is a well-known security best practice because it shortens the period an access key is active and therefore reduces the business impact if they are compromised. Having an established process that is run regularly also ensures […]

Last week’s blog post explained how to distribute AWS credentials to EC2 instances using IAM roles.  Will Kruse, Security Engineer on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, is back again this week to discuss how roles can also be used to distribute arbitrary secrets to EC2 instances. As we discussed last week, Amazon EC2 Roles for Instances […]