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Introduction to AWS IAM

Premium room

A Brief introduction to the importance of IAM and the IAM Module

easy

15 min

668

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Understanding - ’s Identity and Access Management service - is critical to attacking or defending an account. is a highly complex service with multiple parts. In this module, you’ll learn about:

Principals
the people, applications, and services that can act on your account
Policies
the definition of what a principal can do in your account
Credentials
the numerous ways a principal can authenticate to the control plane
Least Privilege
How to create a policy with minimally scoped permissions and how makes that difficult for a developer

Why is so important? With traditional network-centric security, you’re dealing with two dimensions. You are either inside the or outside the . With public clouds, like , the network is Software Defined. I issue calls to to control the network. All of these calls introduce a third dimension. Suddenly you’re no longer defending castles from opposing armies; you’re defending castles from dragons.Effectiveness of Castle Walls against a Dragon

is how manages access to the APIs that control your network - and all the other resources that exist in your account. With the right permissions, I can change your firewalls, update routing tables of your network, and exfiltrate data from your NoSQL databases or object storage. even has several system management tools that efficiently allow you to pop shells on a machine. 

As a defender, you need to understand how to defend your cloud accounts and resources against attacks that leverage . As an attacker, you can leverage in a number of ways to compromise a target, move laterally, and exfiltrate data. 

Answer the questions below
I understand IAM is important and I'm ready to move on.