Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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 of this term. More info. Typically, when you protect data in HAQM Simple Storage Service (HAQM S3), you use a combination […]

In my earlier post Simplify granting access to your AWS resources by using tags on AWS IAM users and roles, I explained how to implement attribute-based access control (ABAC) in AWS to simplify permissions management at scale. In that scenario, I talked about relying on attributes on your IAM users and roles for access control […]

June 19, 2020: The Prerequisites section of this post has been updated to include the prerequisite to enable Sts:tagSession to the role trust policy. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) allows customers to provide granular access control to resources in AWS. One approach to granting access to resources is to use attribute-based access control (ABAC) […]

Like the infrastructure your applications are built on, security infrastructure can be handled using infrastructure as code (IAC) and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). In this post, I’ll show you how to build a CI/CD pipeline using AWS Developer Tools and HashiCorp’s Terraform platform as an IAC tool for AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) deployments. AWS […]

September 19, 2023: This post has been update to correct an explanation of multivalued condition keys. You can now reference Organizational Units (OUs), which are groups of AWS accounts in AWS Organizations, in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, making it easier to define access for your IAM principals (users and roles) to the […]

February 19, 2024: You can now use IAM Access Analyzer to easily identify unused roles. Read this blog post to learn more. January 6, 2021: We updated this post to fix a bug related to allow listing noncompliant roles. January 6, 2020: We updated this post to reflect a valid STS session duration if configured […]

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 […]

February 11, 2021: We updated the tag and instance creation policies for HAQM EC2 to reflect network interface support for attribute-based access control (ABAC). We also added a link to additional sample policies for launching an EC2 instance, and we corrected a condition key “aws:RequestTag/access-zone” to “aws:RequestTag/access-environment”. HAQM ElastiCache now supports names up to 50 […]

As a security best practice, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) recommends that you use temporary security credentials from AWS Security Token Service (STS) when you access your AWS resources. Temporary credentials are short-term credentials generated dynamically and provided to the user upon request. Today, one of the most widely used mechanisms for requesting temporary […]

To keep pace with AWS innovation, many customers allow their application teams to experiment with AWS services in sandbox environments as they move toward production-ready architecture. These teams need timely access to various sets of AWS services and resources, which means they also need a mechanism to help ensure least privilege is granted. In other […]