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 …

With Amazon Cognito user pools, you can configure third-party SAML identity providers (IdPs) so that users can log in by using the IdP credentials. The Amazon Cognito user pool manages the federation and handling of tokens returned by a configured SAML IdP. It uses the public certificate of the …

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 IAM Identity Center) and associated changes to the user interface and workflow when setting up Google Workspace as an external identity provider for IAM Identity …

Are you looking for a simpler way to manage permissions across all your AWS accounts? Perhaps you federate your identity provider (IdP) to each account and divide permissions and authorization between cloud and identity teams, but want a simpler administrative model. Maybe you use AWS IAM Identity Center (successor …

Background AWS Control Tower offers a straightforward way to set up and govern an Amazon Web Services (AWS) multi-account environment, following prescriptive best practices. AWS Control Tower orchestrates the capabilities of several other AWS services, including AWS Organizations, AWS Service Catalog, and AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO), to build …

In this blog post, I show you how to configure AWS Single Sign-On to define attribute-based access control (ABAC) permissions to manage Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and AWS Systems Manager Session Manager for federated users. This combination allows you to control access to specific Amazon EC2 …

AWS Client VPN is a managed client-based VPN service that enables users to use an OpenVPN-based client to securely access their resources in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and in their on-premises network from any location. In this blog post, we show you how you can integrate Client VPN with …

It’s a common use case for customers to integrate identity providers (IdPs) with Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) to achieve single sign-on (SSO) with Kibana. This integration makes it possible for users to leverage their existing identity credentials and offers administrators a single source of truth for user …

This blog post discusses the benefits of using an attribute-based access control (ABAC) strategy and also describes how to use ABAC with AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) when you’re using Okta as an identity provider (IdP). Over the past two years, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has invested heavily …

Authorizing functionality of an application based on group membership is a best practice. If you’re building APIs with Amazon API Gateway and you need fine-grained access control for your users, you can use Amazon Cognito. Amazon Cognito allows you to use groups to create a collection of users …

In this blog post, I show how you can use AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) to delegate administration of user identities. Delegation is the process of providing your teams permissions to manage accounts and identities associated with their teams. You can achieve this by using the existing integration that …