Security practices for the IAM serviceAt some point, we have all heard a term related to the cloud and its multiple applications in public, private and educational organizations.
Currently there are multiple cloud providers, such as: AWS, Azure, Google, etc. But is it really safe to use any of these cloud providers? The answer is yes. Today we can create robust, secure and fail-safe infrastructures.
Today we will talk about security best practices for the IAM service that can be implemented in our AWS console. These security best practices for the IAM service will help keep our data safe, manage identities, resources, and permissions.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a tool that helps us manage user access to AWS resources. To learn more about the security operation for the IAM service, we must first understand the following concepts such as users, groups, roles, and policies.
1. Security for the IAM Service (Users)
IAM users are not separate accounts, but rather are users that are hosted by the AWS account. Users can have their access through their own password with which they will have access to the AWS management console or they can generate an access key, which is a code with which requests can be made via command line to AWS account resources.
2.IAM groups
For managing multiple users within your AWS account, generating groups is recommended. These groups can be generated with specific permissions which can be assigned to the generated users in the administration console. This configuration is recommended for small or medium-sized organizations.
3. IAM Roles
They have similarities to the groups AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) although instead of providing permissions to users, roles are used to grant permissions to instances as soon as they are created. In this way, applications running on an instance can use these credentials to sign requests, for example, an application that needs to access an S3 bucket.
4. IAM Policies
The politics AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) are a set of rules that specify which operations are allowed and which are denied in the AWS Management Console. There are 4 ways in which permissions can be granted using policies, these policies are:
- Managed Policies, Amazon generates a list of predefined policies.
- Online Policy, these are manually created policies with custom permissions.
- Adding users to a group that contains policies.
- Command permissions of a user.
Best Practices for the IAM Service
Listed below are several recommendations that can be applied in the AWS Management Console. These recommendations will help us strengthen the security of the users that we generate in our console.
- Avoid using root user.
- Create alert that is monitoring the root user.
- Multi-Factor Authentication.
- Set minimum permissions on each user group.
- Creation of roles to delegate permissions.
- Configuration of password policies.
- Rotation of access keys.
- Enable the AWS CloudTrail service to audit AWS API calls and logs.
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