AWS Security Blog

Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

AWS IAM logo

Secure root user access for member accounts in AWS Organizations

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now supports centralized management of root access for member accounts in AWS Organizations. With this capability, you can remove unnecessary root user credentials for your member accounts and automate some routine tasks that previously required root user credentials, such as restoring access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) […]

Improve security incident response times by using AWS Service Catalog to decentralize security notifications

Many organizations continuously receive security-related findings that highlight resources that aren’t configured according to the organization’s security policies. The findings can come from threat detection services like Amazon GuardDuty, or from cloud security posture management (CSPM) services like AWS Security Hub, or other sources. An important question to ask is: How, and how soon, are […]

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 […]

Using Amazon Detective for IAM investigations

Uncovering  AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles potentially involved in a security event can be a complex task, requiring security analysts to gather and analyze data from various sources, and determine the full scope of affected resources. Amazon Detective includes Detective Investigation, a feature that you can use to investigate IAM users […]

AWS IAM logo

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management in AWS

Customers use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to securely build, deploy, and scale their applications. As your organization grows, you want to streamline permissions management towards least privilege for your identities and resources. At AWS, we see two customer personas working towards least privilege permissions: security teams and developers. Security teams want to centrally inspect permissions […]

Screenshot of IAM Access Analyzer dashboard

Strategies for achieving least privilege at scale – Part 2

In this post, we continue with our recommendations for achieving least privilege at scale with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). In Part 1 of this two-part series, we described the first five of nine strategies for implementing least privilege in IAM at scale. We also looked at a few mental models that can assist […]

Least privilege is a journey

Strategies for achieving least privilege at scale – Part 1

Least privilege is an important security topic for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers. In previous blog posts, we’ve provided tactical advice on how to write least privilege policies, which we would encourage you to review. You might feel comfortable writing a few least privilege policies for yourself, but to scale this up to thousands of […]

Investigating lateral movements with Amazon Detective investigation and Security Lake integration

According to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, lateral movement consists of techniques that threat actors use to enter and control remote systems on a network. In Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments, threat actors equipped with illegitimately obtained credentials could potentially use APIs to interact with infrastructures and services directly, and they might even be able to use […]

Cognito Architecture

Detecting and remediating inactive user accounts with Amazon Cognito

For businesses, particularly those in highly regulated industries, managing user accounts isn’t just a matter of security but also a compliance necessity. In sectors such as finance, healthcare, and government, where regulations often mandate strict control over user access, disabling stale user accounts is a key compliance activity. In this post, we show you a […]

How to use Regional AWS STS endpoints

This blog post provides recommendations that you can use to help improve resiliency in the unlikely event of disrupted availability of the global (now legacy) AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) endpoint. Although the global (legacy) AWS STS endpoint https://sts.amazonaws.com is highly available, it’s hosted in a single AWS Region—US East (N. Virginia)—and like other […]