AWS Security Blog
Tag: IAM
IAM Access Analyzer simplifies inspection of unused access in your organization
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer offers tools that help you set, verify, and refine permissions. You can use IAM Access Analyzer external access findings to continuously monitor your AWS Organizations organization and Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts for public and cross-account access to your resources, and verify that only intended external access […]
Security at multiple layers for web-administered apps
In this post, I will show you how to apply security at multiple layers of a web application hosted on AWS. Apply security at all layers is a design principle of the Security pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It encourages you to apply security at the network edge, virtual private cloud (VPC), load balancer, […]
Introducing IAM Access Analyzer custom policy checks
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer was launched in late 2019. Access Analyzer guides customers toward least-privilege permissions across Amazon Web Services (AWS) by using analysis techniques, such as automated reasoning, to make it simpler for customers to set, verify, and refine IAM permissions. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability […]
Writing IAM Policies: Grant Access to User-Specific Folders in an Amazon S3 Bucket
Mar 25, 2024: We have fixed the JSON code examples which caused errors by replacing the curly quotes with straight quotes. November 14, 2023: We’ve updated this post to use IAM Identity Center and follow updated IAM best practices. In this post, we discuss the concept of folders in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) […]
Get the full benefits of IMDSv2 and disable IMDSv1 across your AWS infrastructure
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) helps customers build secure and scalable applications. IMDS solves a security challenge for cloud users by providing access to temporary and frequently-rotated credentials, and by removing the need to hardcode or distribute sensitive credentials to instances manually or programmatically. The Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) […]
Validate IAM policies by using IAM Policy Validator for AWS CloudFormation and GitHub Actions
In this blog post, I’ll show you how to automate the validation of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies by using a combination of the IAM Policy Validator for AWS CloudFormation (cfn-policy-validator) and GitHub Actions. Policy validation is an approach that is designed to minimize the deployment of unwanted IAM identity-based and resource-based policies […]
How to receive alerts when your IAM configuration changes
August 21, 2023: This post had been updated to change from wildcard pattern matching to using “prefixes” for EventBridge pattern rules. July 27, 2023: This post was originally published February 5, 2015, and received a major update July 31, 2023. As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) administrator, it’s crucial for you to implement robust protective […]
IAM Policies and Bucket Policies and ACLs! Oh, My! (Controlling Access to S3 Resources)
September 11, 2023: This post has been updated. Updated on July 6, 2023: This post has been updated to reflect the current guidance around the usage of S3 ACL and to include S3 Access Points and the Block Public Access for accounts and S3 buckets. Updated on April 27, 2023: Amazon S3 now automatically enables […]
Use IAM roles to connect GitHub Actions to actions in AWS
May 22, 2023: We updated the post to reflect case sensitivity in the IDP entered: https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com. The IDP created in this post should be entered in lowercase through the post. Have you ever wanted to initiate change in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account after you update a GitHub repository, or deploy updates in an […]
How to use Google Workspace as an external identity provider for AWS IAM Identity Center
January 25, 2024: This post is no longer current. Please see this tutorial for the updated info. March 21, 2023: We modified the description of a permission set in the Introduction. March 8, 2023: We updated the post to reflect some name changes (G Suite is now Google Workspace; AWS Single Sign-On is now AWS […]