AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Resources

Best practices with IAM

Follow these IAM best practices to help secure your AWS resources using IAM. You can specify who can access which AWS services and resources, and under which conditions.

Best practices with IAM

Documentation

IAM user guide

This guide introduces you to IAM by explaining IAM features that help you apply fine-grained permissions in AWS. The guide shows you how to grant access by defining and applying IAM policies to roles and resources. Additionally, this guide explains how IAM works and how you can use IAM to control access for your users and workloads. 

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IAM Access Analyzer user guide

This guide provides conceptual overviews on how to use IAM Access Anaylzer to identify resources shared with an external entity, validate IAM policies, and generate IAM policies based on access activity.

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IAM Roles Anywhere user guide

This guide provides conceptual overviews of IAM Roles Anywhere and explains how to use it to obtain temporary security credentials in IAM for workloads such as servers, containers, and applications that run outside of AWS.  

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References

AWS STS API Reference

This AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) documentation describes the API operations for you to programmatically assume roles in AWS. The documentation also provides sample requests, responses, and errors for the supported web service protocols.


This AWS STS section of the AWS CLI Command Reference documentation describes the AWS CLI commands that you can use to generate temporary security credentials. The section also provides syntax, options, and usage examples for each command.

This IAM section of the AWS CLI Command Reference describes the AWS CLI commands you can use to administer IAM. The section also provides syntax, options, and usage examples for each command.

The IAM API Reference describes in detail all the API operations for IAM. This documentation also provides sample requests, responses, and errors for the supported web services protocols.

Other resources

Videos

IAM policy power hour – AWS re:Inforce 2024 (51:33)
AWS re:Inforce 2022 - Security best practices with AWS IAM (IAM201)
AWS re:Inforce 2022 - How to achieve least privilege (IAM303)
Managing hybrid workloads with IAM Roles Anywhere, featuring Hertz (45:03)
Accessing AWS services from workloads running outside of AWS (43:41)
AWS re:Invent 2022 - Harness IAM policies & rein in permissions with IAM Access Analyzer (SEC313)
AWS re:Invent 2022 - Running services without access to data (SEC327)
AWS re:Invent 2022 - A day in the life of a billion requests (SEC404)
AWS re:Invent 2022 - How AWS uses math to prove security (SEC310)

Featured blog posts

Blog posts

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We could not find any IAM blog posts at this time. See the AWS Blog for additional content.

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