Amazon Cognito is a developer-centric and security-focused customer identity and access management (CIAM) service that simplifies the process of adding user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to your mobile and web applications. Cognito is a highly available service that supports a range of use cases, from managing user authentication …

Recently, passwordless authentication has gained popularity compared to traditional password-based authentication methods. Application owners can add user management to their applications while offloading most of the security heavy-lifting to Amazon Cognito. You can use Amazon Cognito to customize user authentication flow by implementing passwordless authentication. Amazon Cognito enhances the …

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 …

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 …

If you have a customer facing application, you might want to enable self-service sign-up, which allows potential customers on the internet to create an account and gain access to your applications. While it’s necessary to allow valid users to sign up to your application, self-service options can open …

Amazon Cognito is a customer identity and access management (CIAM) service that can scale to millions of users. Although the Cognito documentation details which multi-tenancy models are available, determining when to use each model can sometimes be challenging. In this blog post, we’ll provide guidance on when to …

When an identity provider (IdP) serves multiple service providers (SPs), IdP-initiated single sign-on provides a consistent sign-in experience that allows users to start the authentication process from one centralized portal or dashboard. It helps administrators have more control over the authentication process and simplifies the management. However, when you …

While traditional channels like email and SMS remain important, businesses are increasingly exploring alternative messaging services to reach their customers more effectively. In recent years, WhatsApp has emerged as a simple and effective way to engage with users. According to statista, as of 2024, WhatsApp is the most popular …

Externalizing authorization logic for application APIs can yield multiple benefits for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers. These benefits can include freeing up development teams to focus on application logic, simplifying application and resource access audits, and improving application security by using continual authorization. Amazon Verified Permissions is a scalable …

For businesses, particularly those in highly regulated industries, managing user accounts isn’t just a matter of security but also a compliance necessity. In sectors such as finance, healthcare, and government, where regulations often mandate strict control over user access, disabling stale user accounts is a key compliance activity …

Implementing authentication and authorization mechanisms in modern applications can be challenging, especially when dealing with various client types and use cases. As developers, we often struggle to choose the right authentication flow to balance security, user experience, and application requirements. This is where understanding the OAuth 2.0 grant …

With Amazon Cognito, you can implement customer identity and access management (CIAM) into your web and mobile applications. You can add user authentication and access control to your applications in minutes. In this post, I introduce you to the new access token customization feature for Amazon Cognito user pools …