AWS Security Blog
Tag: least privilege
Refine unused access using IAM Access Analyzer recommendations
As a security team lead, your goal is to manage security for your organization at scale and ensure that your team follows AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) security best practices, such as the principle of least privilege. As your developers build on AWS, you need visibility across your organization to make sure that teams […]
Refine permissions for externally accessible roles using IAM Access Analyzer and IAM action last accessed
When you build on Amazon Web Services (AWS) across accounts, you might use an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to allow an authenticated identity from outside your account—such as an IAM entity or a user from an external identity provider—to access the resources in your account. IAM roles have two types of policies […]
Two real-life examples of why limiting permissions works: Lessons from AWS CIRT
Welcome to another blog post from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT)! For this post, we’re looking at two events that the team was involved in from the viewpoint of a regularly discussed but sometimes misunderstood subject, least privilege. Specifically, we consider the idea that the benefit of reducing permissions in real-life use cases […]
Use IAM Access Analyzer policy generation to grant fine-grained permissions for your AWS CloudFormation service roles
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer provides tools to simplify permissions management by making it simpler for you to set, verify, and refine permissions. One such tool is IAM Access Analyzer policy generation, which creates fine-grained policies based on your AWS CloudTrail access activity—for example, the actions you use with Amazon Elastic Compute […]
IAM Access Analyzer makes it simpler to author and validate role trust policies
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer provides many tools to help you set, verify, and refine permissions. One part of IAM Access Analyzer—policy validation—helps you author secure and functional policies that grant the intended permissions. Now, I’m excited to announce that AWS has updated the IAM console experience for role trust policies to […]
Use IAM Access Analyzer to generate IAM policies based on access activity found in your organization trail
January 25, 2024: The path of the bucket was updated in this post. In April 2021, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer added policy generation to help you create fine-grained policies based on AWS CloudTrail activity stored within your account. Now, we’re extending policy generation to enable you to generate policies based on […]
IAM makes it easier for you to manage permissions for AWS services accessing your resources
November 24, 2023: This post has been updated to show the differences between accessing data by way of an AWS service over public endpoints and over AWS PrivateLink (data access pattern 2). July 7, 2023: This post had been updated to use Amazon S3 Replication as an example in Data access pattern 3b section. Amazon […]
Review last accessed information to identify unused EC2, IAM, and Lambda permissions and tighten access for your IAM roles
September 28, 2023: IAM is incrementally adding support for actions from more services. For a list of services that report action last accessed information, see IAM action last accessed information services and actions. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps customers analyze access and achieve least privilege. When you are working on new permissions for […]
IAM Access Analyzer makes it easier to implement least privilege permissions by generating IAM policies based on access activity
In 2019, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer was launched to help you remove unintended public and cross account access by analyzing your existing permissions. In March 2021, IAM Access Analyzer added policy validation to help you set secure and functional permissions during policy authoring. Now, IAM Access Analyzer takes that a step […]
How to implement the principle of least privilege with CloudFormation StackSets
March 24, 2021: We’ve corrected errors in the policy statements in steps 2 and 3 of the section “To create the IAM policy document.” AWS CloudFormation is a service that lets you create a collection of related Amazon Web Services and third-party resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion. A typical access […]