AWS Security Blog
Tag: MFA
Adhere to IAM Best Practices in 2016
As another new year begins, we encourage you to review our recommended AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices. Following these best practices can help you maintain the security of your AWS resources. You can learn more by watching the IAM Best Practices to Live By presentation that Anders Samuelsson gave at AWS re:Invent […]
AWS Releases Preview of SMS MFA for IAM Users
Today, AWS introduced the preview of Short Message Service (SMS) support for multi-factor authentication (MFA), making it easier for you to implement a security best practice. Until now, you could enable MFA for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users only with hardware or virtual MFA tokens, but this new feature enables you to use […]
How to Delegate Management of Multi-Factor Authentication to AWS IAM Users
Note from September 20, 2017: Based on customer feedback, we have moved the process outlined in this post to the official AWS documentation. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has a list of best practices that you are encouraged to use. One of those best practices is to enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your AWS root […]
Make a New Year Resolution: Adhere to IAM Best Practices
As another new year begins, we want to encourage you to be familiar with recommended AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices. Following these best practices can help you maintain the security of your AWS account. You can learn more by watching the IAM Best Practices presentation that was given by Anders Samuelsson at […]
Want Help with Securing Your AWS Account? Here Are Some Resources
Some customers have asked how they should be using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help limit their exposure to problems like those that have recently been in the news. In general, AWS recommends that you enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your AWS account and for IAM users who are allowed to perform sensitive […]
A Convenient New Hardware MFA Form Factor
Is your key chain too full for yet another key fob? Ever find yourself locked out of AWS because you didn’t have your key chain on hand? Gemalto, a third-party provider, has just released a new multi-factor authentication (MFA) device in a convenient “credit card” form factor that fits comfortably into a wallet. It works […]
How Do I Protect Cross-Account Access Using MFA?
Today AWS announced support for adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) for cross-account access. In this blog post, I will walk you through a common use case, including a code sample, which demonstrates how to create policies that enforce MFA when IAM users from one AWS account make programmatic requests for resources in a different account. Many […]
Important Notification About Your AWS Virtual MFA Device
** Update: the Google Autenticator application for iOS has been updated and now available from Apple’s App Store. It no longer has an issue of potentially losing existing AWS MFA tokens as reported in this post. Do you use Google Authenticator for iOS for AWS MFA? If so, then read this! If you use Google […]
Improve the Security of Your AWS Account in Less Than 5 Minutes
If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you probably know that AWS recommends as a security best practice that you set up one or more AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users for interaction with AWS services, rather than use your root account. Why? The credentials for your AWS root account provide full access […]
Securing Access to AWS Using MFA – Part 3
In Part 1 (configuring MFA for sign-in) and Part 2 (MFA-protected API access) of this series, we discussed various ways in which AWS Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) can improve the security of your account. This week’s topic will be a brief overview of how you can use MFA in conjunction with Amazon S3 Versioning. What is […]