AWS Security Blog
Category: How-To
Coming Soon! An Important Change to How You Manage Your AWS Account’s Access Keys
As part of our ongoing efforts to help keep your resources secure, on April 21, 2014, AWS removed the ability to retrieve existing secret access keys for your AWS (root) account. See the updated blog post Where’s My Secret Access Key? for more information about access keys and secret access keys. -Kai
High-Availability IAM Design Patterns
Today Will Kruse, Senior Security Engineer on the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) team, provides a tutorial on how to enable resiliency against authentication and authorization failures in an application deployed on Amazon EC2 using a high availability design pattern based on IAM roles. Background Many of you invest significant effort to ensure that a […]
Analyzing OS-Related Security Events on EC2 with SplunkStorm
September 3, 2021: This blog post was updated to clarify that the S3 bucket name DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET is a placeholder name that readers should replace with their own S3 bucket name. An important objective of analyzing OS-generated data is to detect, correlate, and report on potential security events. Several partner solutions available in AWS Marketplace provide this functionality, […]
Enabling Federation to AWS Using Windows Active Directory, ADFS, and SAML 2.0
Update from September 7, 2022: This post had been updated to correct the reference to the CloudFormation template. Update from January 17, 2018: The techniques demonstrated in this blog post relate to traditional SAML federation for AWS. These techniques are still valid and useful. However, AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) provides analogous capabilities by way of […]
How to Rotate Access Keys for IAM Users
Changing access keys (which consist of an access key ID and a secret access key) on a regular schedule is a well-known security best practice because it shortens the period an access key is active and therefore reduces the business impact if they are compromised. Having an established process that is run regularly also ensures […]
Writing IAM Policies: How to Grant Access to an Amazon S3 Bucket
February 20, 2025: This post was republished to reflect the updated least privilege permissions necessary for read-write access to Amazon S3. In this post, we’ll address a common question about how to write an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy to grant read-write access to an Amazon S3 bucket. Doing so helps you control who can access […]