Enforcing access control with AWS IAM

Understand the root user in AWS IAM, its unrestricted access, and why to limit use. Secure it with MFA, create an administrator user, and enable billing access for IAM.

Define and manage IAM user groups to apply permissions across users with shared responsibilities. Create groups like administrators, auditors, and finance to attach admin, security audit, and billing policies, respectively.

Create and manage IAM users representing people or apps, assign them to groups such as finance or editors, and follow best practices like unique credentials and MFA.

Examine IAM roles in AWS, granting temporary credentials via a trust policy and permissions policy. Explore service roles, service linked roles, cross-account access, and best-practice security.

Apply the principle of least privilege in AWS IAM to grant minimum access rights to every entity, human or machine, reducing blast radius, insider risk, and boosting productivity.

Learn the concept of accountability in identity security, identify who is responsible for actions, enable intrusion detection and deterrence, and ensure non-repudiation through unique identifiers.

Examine how separation of duties prevents any single person from controlling critical tasks, using the two-person rule as a dynamic separation of duty example in IT.

Single sign on lets users access multiple applications with one set of credentials, reducing password fatigue and helpdesk requests, and it supports Kerberos, SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect.

Explain the AAA security framework and its three parts—authentication, authorization, and auditing—as the foundation of identity and access management in AWS IAM.

Define authentication as identity. Explain authentication factors and how AWS IAM uses credentials, account ID or alias, username, password, access key, and secret key for API or AWS CLI access.

Enable console or programmatic access in AWS IAM, issuing a username and password for the console or an access key and secret access key for CLI, SDK, or Postman.

Compare permanent and temporary access keys in AWS IAM to design a robust authentication strategy for programmatic access. Learn the key distinctions to guide your AWS cloud decisions.

Understand permanent credentials in AWS IAM, including access key pairs stored in credentials file and config file via named profiles, and assess rotation and security risks.

Use AWS STS to obtain temporary credentials, including an access key, secret key, and session token. Export them as environment variables for the AWS CLI to perform requests securely.

Explore credential precedence in the AWS CLI, where multiple sources determine the credential store, and learn to identify and fix the active source using debug output.

Configure a custom AWS IAM password policy with 12-character minimum, 60-day expiration, admin reset on expiry, password strength enforcement, and no password reuse for up to ten passwords.

Learn how multi-factor authentication (MFA) strengthens AWS IAM security by requiring multiple factors. Explore authenticator apps, security keys, and hardware tokens, plus best practices for managing MFA.

Authorization defines what actions an authenticated entity can perform in AWS, enforced by policies attached to identities or resources. AWS evaluates these policies to control access.

Explore how an AWS IAM policy uses a JSON document with version, statement, action, and resource. Note the seed and condition elements and the 2012 1017 version for policy variables.

Explore the five AWS IAM policy types, including identity based policies, resource based policies, permissions boundaries, organization service control policies, and session policies, and how they enable flexible access control.

Explore identity-based policies, comparing inline policies with managed policies, and learn how AWS and customer managed policies support reuse, versioning, tagging, and cross-account sharing via RAM, under least privilege.

Describe resource-based policies attached directly to AWS resources as inline policies, including principal, action, resource, and condition elements, and show cross-account and service access workflows with CloudTrail, EventBridge, and SNS.

Learn how permissions boundaries cap an IAM entity’s access by intersecting identity-based policies with a boundary, enabling delegated, least-privilege control for apps, roles, and users.

Master service control policies (SAPs) to enforce scalable access across AWS organizations. Use deny-list or allow-list strategies, manage inheritance, and protect the root user.

Session policies are programmatically deployed guardrails that limit IAM role permissions by intersecting with identity-based policies during assume role or federation. They enable per-user session restrictions and enforce least privilege.

Reveal how AWS IAM condition keys govern policy applicability, differentiating global and service specific keys, operators, and single or multi-valued values, with best practices and no wildcards.

Audit logs capture who, what, when, and outcomes to enable accountability in AWS. Auditing supports threat hunting, incident investigation, billing analysis, access reviews, and regulatory compliance.

Explore how AWS CloudTrail acts as the primary source of truth for auditing, monitoring, logging, and retaining API calls and user activity across your account.

Explore the Access Advisor in AWS IAM to view last access information, including services, actions, regions, and who accessed each service, with a tracking period of 400 days and filters.

Explore the credentials report in AWS IAM to enforce key rotation and identify unused credentials, enable MFA, and support compliance and governance.

Discover unintended access with IAM Access Analyzer by scanning resource policies within a zone of trust, review and archive intended findings, or remediate by updating policies.

Learn how AWS IAM evaluates policies through the request context—principal, action, resource, and environment data—and see inline policies govern access, demonstrated via CloudTrail logs.

Explore how policy evaluation logic in AWS IAM evaluates policies, applies explicit denies, then allows, or falls to implicit deny.

Follow the single-account policy evaluation flow within an account, guided by the AWS enforcement code, starting with implicit deny. Assess policies: identity-based, resource-based, IAM permissions, boundaries, and session policies.

Federation is a system of trust between an identity provider and AWS to authenticate users and convey authorization information, enabling single sign-on without creating thousands of IAM users.

Explore how SAML 2.0 enables federation and single sign-on, detailing the roles of IDP, SP, and browser, and the metadata exchange and IDP-initiated flow supported by AWS IAM.

Learn to configure saml based federation between two aws accounts using iam identity center as idp and an sp, exchange metadata, map attributes, and grant s3 access.

Classify AWS IAM errors as authentication or authorization, then inspect components such as credentials, config, and policies, noting implicit deny and explicit deny.

Troubleshoot permanent credential errors in the aws cli by checking the credentials file, correcting typos, and using environment variables precedence to verify identity with sts get caller identity.

Troubleshoot temporary credentials when assuming an IAM role by using regional STS endpoints, unsetting environment variables, and validating access with get caller identity and describe instances across regions.

Learn to troubleshoot AWS IAM authorization errors by inspecting bucket and identity policies, permissions boundaries, and session policies, then iteratively adjust policies to succeed in object uploads.

Use the IAM policy simulator to diagnose why an administrator cannot create an S3 bucket by identifying the explicit deny in a long policy, then adjust the policy and re-test.

Understand eventual consistency in AWS IAM, where updates propagate across regions, may delay visibility; troubleshoot, and apply exponential backoff retries for reliable changes.

Explore access control methods outside IAM across AWS services such as RDS, EC2, Workspaces, and Workdocs, including access control lists, VPC endpoint policies, and tagging policies.

Explore how AWS IAM enforces access control through users, groups, and roles with least privilege and authentication. Audit with CloudTrail, Access Analyzer, Credential Reports, and federation via SAML.