Tag: AWS IAM

Starting today, you can use AWS CloudTrail to track the activity of your federated users (web identity federation and Security Assertion Markup Language [SAML]). For example, you can now use CloudTrail to identify a SAML federated user who terminated an Amazon EC2 instance in your AWS account, or to identify a mobile application user who […]

Update: The video and slides from the webinar are now available. As part of the AWS Webinar Series, AWS will present Best Practices for Managing Security Operations in AWS on Wednesday, March 30. This webinar will start at 10:30 A.M. and end at 11:30 A.M. Pacific Time (UTC-7). AWS Security Solutions Architect Henrik Johansson will share […]

To celebrate 10 years of AWS, qwikLABS is offering 95 free online labs through the end of March 2016. Here are some of the labs related to security and compliance that you can take for free while the offer is live: Introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Introduction to AWS Key Management Service Performing […]

Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) is a common identity provider that many AWS customers use to give federated users access to the AWS Management Console. AD FS uses multiple certificates to ensure secure communication between servers and to act as authentication mechanisms. One such mechanism is called the token-signing certificate. When the token-signing certificate expires, […]

Back in September, I wrote about How to Help Lock Down a User’s Amazon EC2 Capabilities to a Single VPC. In that blog post, I highlighted what I have found to be an effective approach to the virtual private cloud (VPC) lockdown scenario. Since that time, I have worked on making the related information easier […]

November 1, 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. In case you missed any of the AWS Security Blog posts from January and February, […]

In my previous post, I introduced service last accessed data, a new feature of the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) console that helps you define policies that adhere better to the principle of least privilege. As part of that post, I walked through a sample use case demonstrating how you can use service last […]

Note from April 1, 2021: Before implementing the steps in this blog post, please request an EC2 limit increase for “rules per security group.” Ask for 220 rules per security group in the AWS Region where your security groups will be. Note from December 3, 2019: The features and services described in this post have […]

As a security best practice, AWS recommends writing AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies that adhere to the principle of least privilege, which means granting only the permissions required to perform a specific task. However, verifying which permissions an application or user actually needs can be a challenge. To help you determine which permissions […]

Many AWS customers keep their environments separated from each other: development resources do not interact with production, and vice versa. One way to achieve this separation is by using multiple AWS accounts. Though this approach does help with resource isolation, it can increase your user management because each AWS account can have its own AWS […]