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AWS IAM

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is Amazon Web Services' service for managing users, roles, and policies controlling access to AWS resources.

Known aliases

  • Amazon Web Services IAM
  • AWS IAM
  • AWS Identity and Access Management
  • AWS Security Token Service
  • AWS STS
  • Customer Managed Policies
  • IAM
  • Identity and Access Management

Current stories

securityConfirmed4 publishers

Leaked AWS keys keep working: 526 root, 242 admin, and a rotation rate of 13.7 percent

Truffle Security retested 10,616 publicly leaked AWS credentials and 88 percent still authenticated. The median key was about five years old and had no successor.

Publishers:bleepingcomputer.com infosecurity-magazine.com scworld.com trufflesecurity.com

Perspective Coverage

4 publishers
Builder
Builder 38%
Operator
Operator 52%
Investor
Investor 10%

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+12
Incentives65
Confidence60
buildOne report1 publisher

Three managed IAM policies decide who launches HyperPod Spaces from SageMaker Studio

AWS now lets SageMaker Studio users launch JupyterLab and Code Editor Spaces on HyperPod EKS clusters from the browser, with no kubectl step. On a shared GPU cluster, who may launch them comes down to three managed IAM policies and a per-user identity setting that older Studio domains must switch on.

Publishers:aws.amazon.com

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+10
Incentives70
Confidence60
buildOne report1 publisher

An SCP deny outranks the admin role a coding agent borrows in AWS member accounts

One SCP deny line blocked an AdministratorAccess session in a scratch AWS account, according to a dev.to guide to sandboxing coding agents. Its three gaps, the management account, service-linked roles and outside principals admitted by resource policies, set where an agent can run.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap0
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence40
buildOne report1 publisher

A Z3 solver found an AWS deny policy covered four of nine compute-launch privesc paths

Bala Paranj ran a 2022 AWS privilege-escalation case through a Z3 solver and found its six-action deny policy blocked four of nine compute-launch vectors. Expanding the list to all nine leaves a residual, because each new compute service AWS ships opens a fresh bypass path.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+35
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
buildOne report1 publisher

Revoking one leaked S3 presigned URL takes down every URL its credential signed

AWS lets an S3 presigned URL live up to seven days, and anyone holding a leaked one can use it until it expires or its signer is revoked. Revoking the signer kills every URL it made, so short expiries and a bucket-level cap on signature age are the practical defence.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+5
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
buildOne report1 publisher

AWS's new getting-started path pauses a project when it hits its spend limit

Signing up now takes a Google, GitHub or Apple identity and, for most new customers, no card, with $100 in credits. Each project is a real AWS account carrying a monthly ceiling from $20 that AWS enforces by stopping the work.

Publishers:aws.amazon.com

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives85
Confidence55
buildOne report1 publisher

CloudFormation's ALB provider calls an EC2 lookup that a template-derived role denies

A dev.to account of two AccessDenied failures shows CloudFormation resource providers making supporting calls into adjacent services, so an execution role scoped to the template's service namespaces is incomplete by construction.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence34
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+12
Incentives18
Confidence45
securityOne report1 publisher

Scoped identity with iam:PassRole could potentially run as prod-admin via a Lambda function it creates, if unblocked by policy controls

Permission-by-permission review scores iam:PassRole, lambda:CreateFunction and lambda:InvokeFunction as controlled access, while path analysis sees one route to whatever the passed role holds. Three policy layers decide whether that route is live.

Publishers:scworld.com

Reality

Evidence60
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+8
Incentives50
Confidence55
buildOne report1 publisher

DevOps Agent declined ec2:RunInstances after a tester granted it to the elevated role

A tester gave AWS DevOps Agent a broad elevated role and found its temporary session policy admits only supported actions, while an SSM document that accepts arbitrary package names still installed tmux after one approval.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence52
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap−12
Incentives32
Confidence44
securityOne report1 publisher

AWS automatically quarantines leaked IAM keys and opens a support case for the affected user

Unit 42 traced AWSCompromisedKeyQuarantine through three versions since August 2020 and documented the GitHub secret scanning integration that lets AWS attach the policy to an exposed IAM user automatically, with the owner notified afterwards.

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption58
Hype gap+8
Incentives68
Confidence55
buildOne report1 publisher

A DynamoDB outbox pushes the deduplication work into the consumer's transaction

miruky's console walkthrough puts an order and its outbox event in one DynamoDB transaction, then fails the consumer on purpose to show why redelivery is the consumer's problem. The whole exercise is priced under $5 in us-east-1.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap−10
Incentives22
Confidence60
buildOne report1 publisher

Fleet provisioning with CSR swaps a per-unit private key for one shared claim key in the image

The ESP32-S3 example generates the device key on the chip and sends only a CSR to AWS IoT Core. The credential that gets it there is a claim certificate and private key copied into the SPIFFS image every unit shares.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+22
Incentives30
Confidence55
buildOne report1 publisher

The App Runner exit starts with two IAM roles you write yourself

A dev.to walkthrough says AWS App Runner no longer accepts new services, and the Amazon ECS Express Mode path it demonstrates opens with an execution role, an infrastructure role, and a public container image.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption12
Hype gap+25
Incentives22
Confidence48
buildOne report1 publisher

A 15-minute IAM token replaces the password Lambda keeps in its environment variables

Taking the password out of a Lambda's environment variables costs five console steps and one inline rds-db:connect policy, and buys a database credential that expires fifteen minutes after boto3 mints it.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence44
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+26
Incentives28
Confidence54
securityOne report1 publisher

AWS lets coding agents write the first access rules in a new account

New AWS sign-ups federate to a Google, GitHub or Apple login and arrive as a project whose resource permissions are set by the console and by whatever coding agent the owner pastes AWS's setup text into. The rollout covers new customers only.

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption18
Hype gap+10
Incentives72
Confidence52
buildOne report1 publisher

Every cross-account role in an AWS landing zone stops at the aws-eusc partition line

AWS's landing zone guidance for the European Sovereign Cloud starts at the partition boundary. Credentials in aws-eusc cannot reach resources in aws, so the centralisation an operator already runs gets built a second time inside the new partition.

Publishers:aws.amazon.com

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+15
Incentives78
Confidence66
buildOne report1 publisher

A WAF role with account-wide S3 access turned one SSRF into 106 million records

Trust Boundary's walkthrough of the 2019 Capital One breach puts the weight on the IAM role attached to the firewall instance, and says the OCC consent order that followed does not mention server-side request forgery at all.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption55
Hype gap+10
Incentives35
Confidence66
buildOne report1 publisher

A console fix to an over-broad IAM role reverts on the owning team's next deployment

IAM Access Analyzer already names the unused permissions and writes the tightened policy. A new AWS pattern sorts each finding by how the role was created and files the fix as a pull request or an issue.

Publishers:aws.amazon.com

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+12
Incentives65
Confidence55
buildOne report1 publisher

AgentCore's Consent portal absorbs the five pieces of session binding you used to host

AgentCore Identity now hosts the redirect leg and keeps the tokens, and what you configure in exchange is an OIDC application in your corporate IdP, a service role, and AWS's callback URL inside your GitHub and Slack apps.

Publishers:aws.amazon.com

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption12
Hype gap+8
Incentives88
Confidence55
buildOne report1 publisher

Paying $7 per 1,000 queries keeps web search inside an AWS account you already reviewed

Google's Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers and stops working on January 1, 2027. One builder replaced it with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Web Search and paid a 40 percent premium to keep the tool under IAM.

Publishers:dev.to

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption24
Hype gap−10
Incentives45
Confidence52

Earlier coverage