AWS Security Blog

Tag: AWS IAM

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Secure by Design: AWS enhances centralized security controls as MFA requirements expand

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we’ve built our services with secure by design principles from day one, including features that set a high bar for our customers’ default security posture. Strong authentication is a foundational component in overall account security, and the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the simplest and most effective […]

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 […]

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 […]

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Passkeys enhance security and usability as AWS expands MFA requirements

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is designed to be the most secure place for customers to run their workloads. From day one, we pioneered secure by design and secure by default practices in the cloud. Today, we’re taking another step to enhance our customers’ options for strong authentication by launching support for FIDO2 passkeys as a […]

iam access analyzer unused access findings

IAM Access Analyzer simplifies inspection of unused access in your organization

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer offers tools that help you set, verify, and refine permissions. You can use IAM Access Analyzer external access findings to continuously monitor your AWS Organizations organization and Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts for public and cross-account access to your resources, and verify that only intended external access […]

Security at multiple layers for web-administered apps

In this post, I will show you how to apply security at multiple layers of a web application hosted on AWS. Apply security at all layers is a design principle of the Security pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It encourages you to apply security at the network edge, virtual private cloud (VPC), load balancer, […]

Introducing IAM Access Analyzer custom policy checks

July 12, 2024: AWS has extended custom policy checks to include a new check called Check No Public Access. This new check determines whether a resource policy grants public access to a specified resource type. In addition to this new check, there has been an update to the existing Check Access Not Granted check. The […]

AWS Identity and Access Management

How to use the PassRole permission with IAM roles

iam:PassRole is an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permission that allows an IAM principal to delegate or pass permissions to an AWS service by configuring a resource such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance or AWS Lambda function with an IAM role. The service then uses that role to interact with […]