Category: Amazon Cognito

Modern web applications require robust security controls to protect user data and application resources. Authentication and authorization are two fundamental pillars of application security that answer critical questions: Who are you? and What are you allowed to do? Implementing these controls correctly can be challenging for developers, especially when building data-intensive applications with frameworks like […]

Amazon Cognito recently introduced high-throughput performance for demanding workloads, customer-managed keys for full control over data encryption at rest, and multi- Region replication for business continuity improvement. These capabilities were made possible through a next-generation storage infrastructure designed for extensibility and scale. To deliver this, we migrated hundreds of millions of user profiles, and you […]

You can use Amazon Cognito user pools to add sign-up and sign-in functionality to your web and mobile applications. You can authenticate users directly with Amazon Cognito managed accounts using passwords, passwordless flows, or custom authentication flows, or let users federate in through external identity providers (IdP) using SAML, OpenID Connect, or social providers such […]

The AWS Customer Incident Response Team (AWS CIRT) regularly encounters patterns that repeat across their engagements when helping customers respond to security incidents. We’re passionate about making sure that information is widely accessible so that everyone can improve their security posture and their organization’s resilience to disruption. The primary method we use to share this […]

October 8, 2025: This blog post has been updated to include the Amazon Cognito managed login experience. The managed login experience has an updated look, additional features, and enhanced customization options. September 8, 2023: It’s important to know that if you activate user sign-up in your user pool, anyone on the internet can sign up […]

Amazon Cognito is a managed customer identity and access management (CIAM) service that enables seamless user sign-up and sign-in for web and mobile applications. Through user pools, Amazon Cognito provides a user directory with strong authentication features, including passkeys, federation to external identity providers (IdPs), and OAuth 2.0 flows for secure machine-to-machine (M2M) authorization. Amazon […]

September 4, 2025:The Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights query in this blog has been updated to reflect the current AWS CloudTrail log for an Amazon Cognito M2M token issue event. This CloudTrail event now includes the client ID for all M2M token requests by default. Amazon Cognito is a developer-centric and security-focused customer identity and access […]

January 28, 2025: The following blog post highlights how to add threat detection to your custom authentication flows by using Amazon Cognito. With the introduction of new Cognito feature tiers, threat protection features are now included as default features for Plus tier customers. Customers using advanced security features (ASF) in Amazon Cognito should consider switching […]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently released AWS IAM Identity Center trusted identity propagation to create identity-enhanced IAM role sessions when requesting access to AWS services as well as to trusted token issuers. These two features can help customers build custom applications on top of AWS, which requires fine-grained access to data analytics-focused AWS services such […]

Externalized authorization for custom applications is a security approach where access control decisions are managed outside of the application logic. Instead of embedding authorization rules within the application’s code, these rules are defined as policies, which are evaluated by a separate system to make an authorization decision. This separation enhances an application’s security posture by […]