Introduction to AWS IAM
Premium roomA Brief introduction to the importance of IAM and the IAM Module
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Understanding - ’s Identity and Access Management service - is critical to attacking or defending an AWS account. IAM is a highly complex service with multiple parts. In this module, you’ll learn about:
| IAM Principals | the people, applications, and AWS services that can act on your AWS account |
| IAM Policies | the definition of what a principal can do in your account |
| IAM Credentials | the numerous ways a principal can authenticate to the AWS control plane |
| Least Privilege | How to create a policy with minimally scoped permissions and how AWS makes that difficult for a developer |
Why is IAM so important? With traditional network-centric security, you’re dealing with two dimensions. You are either inside the or outside the firewall. With public clouds, like AWS, the network is Software Defined. I issue calls to AWS to control the network. All of these API calls introduce a third dimension. Suddenly you’re no longer defending castles from opposing armies; you’re defending castles from dragons.
IAM is how AWS manages access to the APIs that control your network - and all the other resources that exist in your account. With the right IAM permissions, I can change your firewalls, update routing tables of your network, and exfiltrate data from your NoSQL databases or object storage. AWS 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 IAM. As an attacker, you can leverage AWS IAM in a number of ways to compromise a target, move laterally, and exfiltrate data.
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