AWS Security Blog
Tag: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Beyond IAM access keys: Modern authentication approaches for AWS
When it comes to AWS authentication, relying on long-term credentials, such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) access keys, introduces unnecessary risks; including potential credential exposure, unauthorized sharing, or theft. In this post, I present five common use cases where AWS customers traditionally use IAM access keys and present more secure alternatives that you […]
Implementing just-in-time privileged access to AWS with Microsoft Entra and AWS IAM Identity Center
June 19, 2025: We made a correction to the windows of access that a user could have when using this solution. Controlling access to your privileged and sensitive resources is critical for all AWS customers. Preventing direct human interaction with services and systems through automation is the primary means of accomplishing this. For those infrequent […]
Use AWS service reference information to automate policy management workflows
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides service reference information in JSON format to help you automate policy management workflows. With the service reference information, you can access available actions across AWS services from machine-readable files. The service reference information helps to address a key customer need: keeping up with the ever-growing list of services and actions […]
Four ways to grant cross-account access in AWS
As your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment grows, you might develop a need to grant cross-account access to resources. This could be for various reasons, such as enabling centralized operations across multiple AWS accounts, sharing resources across teams or projects within your organization, or integrating with third-party services. However, granting cross-account access requires careful consideration […]
Announcing upcoming changes to the AWS Security Token Service global endpoint
April 18, 2025: AWS has made changes to the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) global endpoint (sts.amazonaws.com) in Regions enabled by default to enhance its resiliency and performance. AWS STS requests to the global endpoint are automatically served in the same AWS Region as your workloads. These changes will not be deployed to opt-in […]
How to implement IAM policy checks with Visual Studio Code and IAM Access Analyzer
In a previous blog post, we introduced the IAM Access Analyzer custom policy check feature, which allows you to validate your policies against custom rules. Now we’re taking a step further and bringing these policy checks directly into your development environment with the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code (VS Code). In this blog post, […]
Customize the scope of IAM Access Analyzer unused access analysis
AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer simplifies inspecting unused access to guide you towards least privilege. You can use unused access findings to identify over-permissive access granted to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and users in your accounts or organization. From a delegated administrator account for IAM Access Analyzer, you can use the dashboard […]
Enforce resource configuration to control access to new features with AWS
Establishing and maintaining an effective security and governance posture has never been more important for enterprises. This post explains how you, as a security administrator, can use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enforce resource configurations in a manner that is designed to be secure, scalable, and primarily focused on feature gating. In this context, feature […]
Federated access to Amazon Athena using AWS IAM Identity Center
Managing Amazon Athena through identity federation allows you to manage authentication and authorization procedures centrally. Athena is a serverless, interactive analytics service that provides a simplified and flexible way to analyze petabytes of data. In this blog post, we show you how you can use the Athena JDBC driver (which includes a browser Security Assertion […]
Secure root user access for member accounts in AWS Organizations
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now supports centralized management of root access for member accounts in AWS Organizations. With this capability, you can remove unnecessary root user credentials for your member accounts and automate some routine tasks that previously required root user credentials, such as restoring access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) […]