Improving the security of the IAM layer
The IAM service is at the heart of the security management of AWS. By defining users, groups, and security policies, the IAM service lets you configure your different resources such that only the right individuals and services can access the right resources.
We will first look at user management.
Managing users in AWS
In Chapter 2, Deploying Your First Web Application, we created our first IAM user. We generated its access key and gave the user full access to the AWS account by assigning the Administrator access policy to that user.
This worked great as we managed to get through most of the book using that user but from a security standpoint, there are a number of concerns that this action caused:
- There is no policy around enforcing the use of a strong password.
- We didn't put our user in a group. On a small scale, that's fine but if you ever expect to have to manage a bigger pool of AWS users, having your users be a part of a group and granting the permissions...
