Data protection in Amazon Identity and Access Management - Amazon Identity and Access Management
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Data protection in Amazon Identity and Access Management

The Amazon shared responsibility model applies to data protection in Amazon Identity and Access Management. As described in this model, Amazon is responsible for protecting the global infrastructure that runs all of the Amazon Web Services Cloud. You are responsible for maintaining control over your content that is hosted on this infrastructure. You are also responsible for the security configuration and management tasks for the Amazon Web Services that you use. For more information about data privacy, see the Data Privacy FAQ.

For data protection purposes, we recommend that you protect Amazon Web Services account credentials and set up individual users with Amazon IAM Identity Center or Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM). That way, each user is given only the permissions necessary to fulfill their job duties. We also recommend that you secure your data in the following ways:

  • Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) with each account.

  • Use SSL/TLS to communicate with Amazon resources. We require TLS 1.2 and recommend TLS 1.3.

  • Set up API and user activity logging with Amazon CloudTrail.

  • Use Amazon encryption solutions, along with all default security controls within Amazon Web Services.

  • Use advanced managed security services such as Amazon Macie, which assists in discovering and securing sensitive data that is stored in Amazon S3.

  • If you require FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic modules when accessing Amazon through a command line interface or an API, use a FIPS endpoint. For more information about the available FIPS endpoints, see Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2.

We strongly recommend that you never put confidential or sensitive information, such as your customers' email addresses, into tags or free-form text fields such as a Name field. This includes when you work with IAM or other Amazon Web Services using the console, API, Amazon CLI, or Amazon SDKs. Any data that you enter into tags or free-form text fields used for names may be used for billing or diagnostic logs. If you provide a URL to an external server, we strongly recommend that you do not include credentials information in the URL to validate your request to that server.

Data encryption in IAM and Amazon STS

Data encryption typically falls into two categories: encryption at rest and encryption in transit.

Encryption at rest

Data that is collected and stored by IAM is encrypted at rest.

  • IAM – Data collected and stored within IAM includes IP addresses, customer account metadata, and customer identifying data that includes passwords. Customer account metadata and customer identifying data are encrypted at rest using AES 256 or is hashed using SHA 256.

  • Amazon STS – Amazon STS does not collect customer content except for service logs that log successful, erroneous, and faulty requests to the service.

Encryption in transit

Customer identifying data, including passwords, is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.2 and 1.3. All Amazon STS endpoints support HTTPS for encrypting data in transit. For a list of Amazon STS endpoints, see Regions and endpoints.

Key management in IAM and Amazon STS

You can't manage encryption keys using IAM or Amazon STS. For more information about encryption keys, see What is Amazon KMS? in the Amazon Key Management Service Developer Guide

Internetwork traffic privacy in IAM and Amazon STS

Requests to IAM must be made using Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS). You can secure connections to the Amazon STS service by using VPC endpoints. To learn more, see Interface VPC endpoints.