AWS Security Blog

Tag: MFA

AWS Releases Preview of SMS MFA for IAM Users

Today, AWS introduced the preview of Short Message Service (SMS) support for multi-factor authentication (MFA), making it easier for you to implement a security best practice. Until now, you could enable MFA for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users only with hardware or virtual MFA tokens, but this new feature enables you to use […]

How to Delegate Management of Multi-Factor Authentication to AWS IAM Users

Note from September 20, 2017: Based on customer feedback, we have moved the process outlined in this post to the official AWS documentation. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has a list of best practices that you are encouraged to use. One of those best practices is to enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your AWS root […]

Make a New Year Resolution: Adhere to IAM Best Practices

As another new year begins, we want to encourage you to be familiar with recommended AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices. Following these best practices can help you maintain the security of your AWS account. You can learn more by watching the IAM Best Practices presentation that was given by Anders Samuelsson at […]

Want Help with Securing Your AWS Account? Here Are Some Resources

Some customers have asked how they should be using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help limit their exposure to problems like those that have recently been in the news. In general, AWS recommends that you enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your AWS account and for IAM users who are allowed to perform sensitive […]

How Do I Protect Cross-Account Access Using MFA?

Today AWS announced support for adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) for cross-account access. In this blog post, I will walk you through a common use case, including a code sample, which demonstrates how to create policies that enforce MFA when IAM users from one AWS account make programmatic requests for resources in a different account. Many […]

Important Notification About Your AWS Virtual MFA Device

** Update:  the Google Autenticator application for iOS has been updated and now available from Apple’s App Store.  It no longer has an issue of potentially losing existing AWS MFA tokens as reported in this post. Do you use Google Authenticator for iOS for AWS MFA? If so, then read this! If you use Google […]

Securing Access to AWS Using MFA–Part 2

In part I of our series on multi-factor authentication (MFA), we mentioned that the next topic would be securing access to AWS APIs with MFA. This week’s guest blogger Kai Zhao, Product Manager on our AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, will give a brief overview of AWS MFA-protected API access. Introduction MFA-protected API […]