AWS Security Blog
How to BYOK (bring your own key) to AWS KMS for less than $15.00 a year using AWS CloudHSM
February 26, 2024: We’ve updated this post to replace the key_mgmt_util with cloudhsm-cli, which is part of the newer SDK 5. August 31, 2021:AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations […]
AWS Organizations now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions for central governance and management of AWS accounts
October 2, 2024: This post was republished to update the terminology for management accounts. AWS Organizations is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, enabling you to centrally govern and manage your AWS GovCloud (US) accounts. AWS Organizations helps you to centrally manage billing; control access, compliance, and security; and share resources across your […]
Trimming AWS WAF logs with Amazon Kinesis Firehose transformations
In an earlier post, Enabling serverless security analytics using AWS WAF full logs, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight, published on March 28, 2019, the authors showed you how to stream WAF logs with Amazon Kinesis Firehose for visualization using QuickSight. This approach used no filtering of the logs so that you could visualize the full […]
AWS Security Profiles: CJ Moses, Deputy CISO and VP of Security Engineering
We recently sat down with CJ Moses, Deputy, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), to learn about his day-to-day as a cybersecurity executive. He also shared more about his passion for racecar driving and why AWS is partnering with the SRO GT World Challenge America series this year. How long have you been with AWS, and […]
Enabling serverless security analytics using AWS WAF full logs, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight
September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. Traditionally, analyzing data logs required you to extract, transform, and load your data before using a number of data warehouse and business intelligence tools to derive business intelligence from that data—on top of maintaining the servers that ran behind these […]
How to use service control policies to set permission guardrails across accounts in your AWS Organization
September 19, 2025: This post was updated to reflect that AWS Organizations now offers full IAM policy language support for service control policies (SCPs). Details of this new feature are outlined in this post. AWS Organizations provides central governance and management for multiple accounts. Central security administrators use service control policies (SCPs) with AWS Organizations […]
Setting permissions to enable accounts for upcoming AWS Regions
Update on April 9, 2019: We added some text to clarify that the session token size is going to increase. The AWS Cloud spans 61 Availability Zones within 20 geographic regions around the world, and has announced plans to expand to 12 more Availability Zones and four more Regions: Hong Kong, Bahrain, Cape Town, and […]
How to rotate Amazon DocumentDB and Amazon Redshift credentials in AWS Secrets Manager
November 1, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. Using temporary credentials is an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practice. Even Dilbert […]
How to visualize Amazon GuardDuty findings: serverless edition
September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. July 20, 2020:This post has been updated to reflect the new Amazon GuardDuty support for exporting findings to an S3 bucket. July 12, 2019: Due to a feature name change, we’ve updated some examples throughout the post. Note: This blog […]
Guidelines for protecting your AWS account while using programmatic access
One of the most important things you can do as a customer to ensure the security of your resources is to maintain careful control over who has access to them. This is especially true if any of your AWS users have programmatic access. Programmatic access allows you to invoke actions on your AWS resources either […]









