AWS Security Blog

Category: Advanced (300)

AWS STS simplifies session token size limits and adds session token size monitoring

AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) has simplified session token size limits, giving you more room for your session policies and session tags. STS has replaced the packed policy size and the overall session token size limits with a single token size limit of 4,096 bytes. STS now reports session token size in API responses, […]

Architecting resilient authentication with Amazon Cognito multi-Region replication

Your consumer identity and access management (CIAM) system is the foundation of your customer experience. It’s how users sign in, access services, and engage with your applications. As your business scales across geographies, ensuring authentication is always available becomes a core architectural requirement. However, building multi-Region authentication has traditionally required complex custom replication solutions that […]

The state of AI for security: Measuring what matters most for building trust

Security teams are starting to actively use AI for security work, including vulnerability triage, penetration testing, threat modeling, incident response, and code review. The promise is speed, but a security tool that moves fast and raises too many false alarms doesn’t save time. Engineers spend time on false alarms, on-call is noisier, and teams distrust […]

Incident response guide for AWS CloudTrail investigations – Part 2

In Part 1 of this guide, we examined two common incident scenarios: cross-account Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data deletion with ransomware implications, and cryptocurrency mining deployed through AWS CloudFormation using exposed AWS Management Console credentials. We also introduced key incident response terminology and investigative frameworks for analyzing AWS CloudTrail events. In this second […]

Incident response guide for AWS CloudTrail investigations – Part 1

AWS CloudTrail logs contain the evidence you need when investigating suspicious activity in your AWS environment, but knowing which fields matter and how to interpret them can mean the difference between surface-level analysis and uncovering the full scope of an incident. This guide walks you through real-world scenarios, showing you how to analyze CloudTrail events […]

Managing identity source transition for AWS IAM Identity Center

September 2, 2026: This post was republished to include Active Directory migration strategies and automation for permission sets. AWS IAM Identity Center manages user access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources, including both AWS accounts and applications. You can use IAM Identity Center to create and manage user identities within the Identity Center identity store […]

Automate IAM Identity Center governance with continuous discovery and reporting

AWS IAM Identity Center integrates with external identity provider (IdP) to provide customers with a centralized authentication and authorization solution for AWS resources across AWS Organizations. AWS continues to invest into IAM Identity Center with a growing number of AWS services that natively integrate with IAM Identity Center. As your AWS organization scales, maintaining visibility […]

Extend your data perimeter to the AWS Management Console with Private Access

Organizations in regulated industries such as financial services, government, defense, and healthcare restrict their sensitive workloads to isolated network environments with no access to the public internet. Until now, customers could restrict AWS Management Console access to authorized AWS accounts and corporate networks, but the console itself required internet connectivity. This was creating tension between […]

Detecting multi-stage attacks on AWS: A guide to cross-service signal correlation

A single alert from one security service tells you something happened. Read that signal alongside activity from other services and your own business context, and you will know whether what happened is part of a multi-stage attack. Consider a short sequence. An identity calls GetCallerIdentity from a source address it hasn’t previously used. Within minutes, […]

Propagate user authorization context in AI agents with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Many teams now deploy AI agents that pull from Amazon DynamoDB tables, document repositories, software as a service (SaaS) platforms, and internal knowledge bases to answer questions and automate workflows. A key risk in these deployments is that the agent has no awareness of who’s asking, so it might return data the user shouldn’t see. […]