Articles tagged with "IAM"

When setting up a Jenkins build server on a physical machine, right-sizing can become a challenging task. Long idle times followed by high, irregular loads make it hard to predict the necessary hardware requirements. One solution to this problem is the deployment of a containerized Controller/Agent-based Jenkins setup and to offload workloads to dedicated, transient agents. This is the third post of a three-post series. In this series, I would like to show you how you can leverage AWS Fargate and Terraform to deploy a serverless as well as fault-tolerant, highly available, and scalable Jenkins Controller/Agent deployment pipeline.

Proper version control is an essential part of a fast-paced, agile development approach and the foundation of CI/CD. Even though databases are an important aspect of nearly every application, database migrations, and schema evolutions are often not versioned and not integrated into the automation process. In this blog post, I would like to show you how you can leverage Flyway on AWS to version control your schema changes and automate your database migrations.

When deploying AWS infrastructure via Terraform, the usage of long-term IAM credentials is often the go-to method. Even though convenient, long-term credentials and secrets can pose a serious security risk to your organization if leaked. This post will show you how you can leverage AWS IAM OpenID Connect identity providers in combination with GitHub Actions and identity federation to implement a secretless Terraform deployment pipeline…using Terraform.

We can use permissions boundaries to give developers and teams more freedom to create their own resources. For forcing them to provide specific tags during resource creation, we need a deeper understanding of how this can be achieved. We talk about the example of creating a security group.

There is a conflict between developer freedom and the requirements of security teams. In this post we’ll look at one approach to address this tension: permission boundaries. They’re an often overlooked part of IAM, but provide a valuable addition to our security toolkit.

During one of our recent AWS Security Reviews, I ran across an interesting technique that attackers can use to create a backdoor in AWS accounts. It works by using three S3 IAM actions, CloudFormation, and an administrator who is not careful enough. This vector is not new but still scary - and today, I will show you how to check your account for this risk and any previous compromises.

During some R&D for a new blog post, I experimented with IAM conditions in Trust Policies. Some small mistakes during this led to instances that have limited privileges according to the AWS Web Console and CLI. But in reality, they can work with administrative permissions for a few hours - unnoticed. Have I piqued your interest? Let’s see how to reproduce this effect then.

IAM Roles are a critical security feature in AWS. Handling them is not very intuitive in the beginning. In this blog post we take a look behind the curtain and explain what’s going on when you assume a role.