AWS Security Blog

Tag: Best Practices

A Safer Way to Distribute AWS Credentials to EC2

If you have applications running on EC2 that also access other AWS services like Amazon S3 or Amazon DynamoDB, then these applications require credentials out on the EC2 instance.  You can hard-code AWS access keys into your application, but you’re faced with the added responsibility of distributing them to the instance securely and then the […]

A Primer on RDS Resource-Level Permissions

Previously, we blogged about how to use resource-level permissions for Amazon EC2 to control access to specific EC2 instances.  Resource-level permissions can now also be applied to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).  This week’s guest blogger, Chris Checkwitch, Software Development Manager on the RDS team, will explain how to tackle the commonly requested use case of controlling access to […]

2013 PCI Compliance Package Available Now

We’re happy to announce the availability of the 2013 PCI Compliance Package. Along with the AWS PCI Attestation of Compliance, this package includes our independent assessor’s revised and expanded PCI Customer Responsibility Matrix, which describes the customer and AWS shared responsibility for each of the 200+ PCI Data Security Standard controls. This document will help […]

Resource-Level Permissions for EC2–Controlling Management Access on Specific Instances

Note: As of March 28, 2017,  Amazon EC2 supports tagging on creation, enforced tag usage, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resource-level permissions, and enforced volume encryption. See New – Tag EC2 Instances & EBS Volumes on Creation on the AWS Blog for more information. We are happy to announce that we launched resource-level permissions […]

Generating IAM Policies in Code

If you’ve worked with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, you know that they’re expressed as JSON documents. For example, here’s a policy that grants permission to perform some actions in our Amazon Glacier storage service: { “Version”: “2012-10-17”, “Statement”: [ { “Action”: [ “glacier:ListVaults”, “glacier:DescribeVault”, “glacier:GetVaultNotifications” ], “Effect”: “Allow”, “Resource”: “*” } ] } […]

Writing IAM Policies: Grant Access to User-Specific Folders in an Amazon S3 Bucket

Many of you have asked how to construct an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy with folder-level permissions for Amazon S3 buckets. This week’s guest blogger Elliot Yamaguchi, Technical Writer on the IAM team, will explain the basics of writing that type of policy. To show you how to create a policy with folder-level […]