AWS Security Blog

Category: AWS IAM Access Analyzer

Screenshot of IAM Access Analyzer dashboard

Strategies for achieving least privilege at scale – Part 2

In this post, we continue with our recommendations for achieving least privilege at scale with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). In Part 1 of this two-part series, we described the first five of nine strategies for implementing least privilege in IAM at scale. We also looked at a few mental models that can assist […]

Least privilege is a journey

Strategies for achieving least privilege at scale – Part 1

Least privilege is an important security topic for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers. In previous blog posts, we’ve provided tactical advice on how to write least privilege policies, which we would encourage you to review. You might feel comfortable writing a few least privilege policies for yourself, but to scale this up to thousands of […]

iam access analyzer unused access findings

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 […]

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 […]

circuit board

Refine permissions for externally accessible roles using IAM Access Analyzer and IAM action last accessed

When you build on Amazon Web Services (AWS) across accounts, you might use an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to allow an authenticated identity from outside your account—such as an IAM entity or a user from an external identity provider—to access the resources in your account. IAM roles have two types of policies […]

How to visualize IAM Access Analyzer policy validation findings with QuickSight

In this blog post, we show you how to create an Amazon QuickSight dashboard to visualize the policy validation findings from AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer. You can use this dashboard to better understand your policies and how to achieve least privilege by periodically validating your IAM roles against IAM best practices. […]

IAM Access Analyzer makes it simpler to author and validate role trust policies

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer provides many tools to help you set, verify, and refine permissions. One part of IAM Access Analyzer—policy validation—helps you author secure and functional policies that grant the intended permissions. Now, I’m excited to announce that AWS has updated the IAM console experience for role trust policies to […]

Validate IAM policies in CloudFormation templates using IAM Access Analyzer

In this blog post, I introduce IAM Policy Validator for AWS CloudFormation (cfn-policy-validator), an open source tool that extracts AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies from an AWS CloudFormation template, and allows you to run existing IAM Access Analyzer policy validation APIs against the template. I also show you how to run the tool […]

Use IAM Access Analyzer to generate IAM policies based on access activity found in your organization trail

January 25, 2024: The path of the bucket was updated in this post. In April 2021, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer added policy generation to help you create fine-grained policies based on AWS CloudTrail activity stored within your account. Now, we’re extending policy generation to enable you to generate policies based on […]

Automate resolution for IAM Access Analyzer cross-account access findings on IAM roles

In this blog post, we show you how to automatically resolve AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer findings generated in response to unintended cross-account access for IAM roles. The solution automates the resolution by responding to the Amazon EventBridge event generated by IAM Access Analyzer for each active finding. You can use identity-based […]