Identify unused IAM roles and remove them confidently with the last used timestamp

February 19, 2024: You can now use IAM Access Analyzer to easily identify unused roles. Read this blog post to learn more.

November 25, 2019: We’ve corrected a documentation link.

As you build on AWS, you create AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles to enable teams and applications to use AWS services. As those teams and applications evolve, you might only rely on a sub-set of your original roles to meet your needs. This can leave unused roles in your AWS account. To help you identify these unused roles, IAM now reports the last-used timestamp that represents when a role was last used to make an AWS request. You or your security team can use this information to identify, analyze, and then confidently remove unused roles. This helps you improve the security posture of your AWS environments. Additionally, by removing unused roles, you can simplify your monitoring and auditing efforts by focusing only on roles that are in use. You can review when a role was last used to access your AWS environment in the IAM console, using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS SDK.

In this post, I demonstrate how to identify and remove roles that your team or applications don’t use by viewing the last-used timestamp in the IAM console.  Before I share an example, I’ll describe the existing IAM APIs where we now also report the last-used timestamp:

• Get-role: Returns role details, including the path, ARN (Amazon resource number), and trust policy. You can now use this API to retrieve the last-used timestamp.
• Get-account-authorization-details: Retrieves information about all the IAM users, groups, roles, and policies in your AWS account. You can now view the last-used timestamp along with the other role details.

How to use the AWS Management Console to view last-used information for roles

Imagine you’re a system administrator for Example Inc. and your development team is working on a new application. To enable them to get started with AWS quickly, you create roles for the team and their application. As the application goes through final review, you learn the team and application now rely on a smaller set of roles to access AWS services. This leaves unused roles in your AWS accounts that you might want to remove. You’re going to check the last time each role made a request to AWS and use this information to determine whether the team is using the role. If they aren’t, you plan to remove it knowing the team doesn’t need it for the application.

To view role-last-used information in the IAM Console, select Roles in the IAM navigation pane, then look for the Last activity column (see Figure 1 below). This displays the number of days that have passed since each role made an AWS service request. AWS records last-used information for the trailing 400 days. This is referred to as the tracking period. You can sort the column to identify the roles your team has not used recently.

In the case of Example Inc., let’s say you want to get rid of any roles that have been inactive for 90 days or more. From the information in Figure 1, you see that your team is using ApplicationEC2Access, TestRole, and CodeDeployRole. You also see they haven’t used AdminAccess, EC2FullAccess, and InfraSetupRole in the last 90 days. You can now delete these roles confidently. (Last activity “None”, as seen for the AdminAccess role, means that the role was not used within the trailing 400-day tracking period to make any service request.)
 

Figure 1: “Last activity” column in IAM console

While analyzing the last-used timestamp for each role, you notice that the MigrationRole role was last active two months ago. You want to gather more information about the role’s access patterns to determine whether you ought to delete it. To do this, select the name of the role. From the role detail page, navigate to the Access Advisor tab and investigate the list of accessed services and verify what the role was used for. Access advisor provides a report that displays a list of services and timestamps that indicate when the selected IAM principal last accessed each of the services that it has permissions to. Based on this report, you can decide to follow up with the development team to see if they still need this role. Thus, you have reduced the number of roles in your account from 9 to 6, making it easier to monitor active roles and restrict access to your AWS environments.
 

Figure 2: Access Advisor report

Summary

In this post, I showed you how to use role-last-used information to identify and remove unused roles. By removing unused roles, you can simplify monitoring and improve your security posture. To learn more about deleting roles, visit the deleting roles or instance profiles documentation.

If you have feedback about this blog post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this blog post, start a new thread on the IAM forum or contact AWS Support.

Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.