Amazon Web Service (AWS) recently announced that AWS Organizations now offers full AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy language support for service control policies (SCPs). With this feature, you can use conditions, individual resource Amazon Resource Names (ARNs), and the NotAction element with Allow statements. Additionally, you can …

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 …

Join us at AWS re:Inforce 2025 from June 16 to 18 as we dive deep into identity and access management, where we’ll explore how organizations are securing identities at scale. As the traditional security perimeter continues to dissolve in our hybrid and multi-cloud world, this year’s …

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 times when automation is not yet possible or implemented, providing a secure method for temporary …

Many AWS Organizations customers begin by creating and manually applying service control policies (SCPs) and resource control policies (RCPs) through the AWS Management Console or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) when they first set up their environments. However, as the organization grows and the number of policies increases …

IAM Roles Anywhere is a feature of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) that enables you to use X.509 certificates from your public key infrastructure (PKI) to request temporary Amazon Web Services (AWS) security credentials. By using IAM Roles Anywhere, your workloads, applications, containers, or devices that run …

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 …

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 …

February 14, 2025: This post was updated with the recommendation to restrict S3 bucket access to an IAM role by using the aws:PrincipalArn condition key instead of the aws:userid condition key. April 2, 2021: In the section “Granting cross-account bucket access to a specific IAM role,” we …

AWS launched AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) in August 2011 with a single global endpoint (https://sts.amazonaws.com), hosted in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region. To reduce dependency on a single Region, STS launched AWS STS Regional endpoints (https://sts.{Region_identifier}.{partition_domain}) in February 2015 …

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 …

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 …