Tag: IAM

Amazon GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behavior to help you protect your AWS accounts and workloads. Given the many log types that Amazon GuardDuty analyzes (Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail, and DNS logs), you never know what it might discover in your […]

January 12, 2023: This post was updated to remove some instructions that are no longer needed on recent versions of Mac OSX and when run would result in an error. August 31, 2021: AWS IoT Core Credential Provider enables customers to request temporary, limited-privilege security tokens that are valid up to 12 hours and use […]

January 20, 2020: Based on customer feedback, we rephrased the fourth goal in the “An example structure with nested OUs and SCPs” section to try to improve clarity. With AWS Organizations, you can centrally manage policies across multiple AWS accounts without having to use custom scripts and manual processes. For example, you can apply service […]

Identity federation enables your enterprise users (such as Active Directory users) to access the AWS Management Console via single sign-on (SSO) by using their existing credentials. In Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, RelayState is an optional parameter that identifies a specified destination URL your users will access after signing in with SSO. When using […]

In December, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) released service last accessed data, which shows the time when an IAM entity (a user, group, or role) last accessed an AWS service. This provided a powerful tool to help you grant least privilege permissions. Starting today, it’s easier to identify where you can reduce permissions based […]

AWS Config recently added the ability to record changes to the configuration of your AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, groups, and roles (collectively referred to as IAM entities) and the policies associated with them. Using this feature, you can record configuration details for these IAM entities, including details about which policies are associated […]

Deleting unused resources can help to improve the security of your AWS account and make your account easier to manage. However, if you have ever been unsure of whether an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user or role was being used actively, you probably erred on the side of caution and kept it. Starting […]

As another new year begins, we encourage you to review our recommended AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices. Following these best practices can help you maintain the security of your AWS resources. You can learn more by watching the IAM Best Practices to Live By presentation that Anders Samuelsson gave at AWS re:Invent […]

AWS supports Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, an open standard for identity federation used by many identity providers (IdPs). SAML enables federated single sign-on (SSO), which enables your users to sign in to the AWS Management Console or to make programmatic calls to AWS APIs by using assertions from a SAML-compliant IdP. Many of […]

My previous blog post on November 11, 2015, reported that we were preparing to activate AWS Security Token Service (STS) by default in all AWS regions. As of today, AWS STS is active by default in all AWS regions, for all customers. This means that your applications and services can immediately take advantage of reduced […]