Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

May 20, 2024: This blog post has been updated with use case examples. The Optimize AWS administration with IAM paths blog post delves into the fundamental workings of the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) path feature. This post explores how you can use IAM paths to strike a balance between centralized IT and development […]

Several independent software vendors (ISVs) and software as a service (SaaS) providers need to access their customers’ Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, especially if the SaaS product accesses data from customer environments. SaaS providers have adopted multiple variations of this third-party access scenario. In some cases, the providers ask the customer for an access key […]