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Showing posts from February, 2014

When the doors are locked too tightly...

Or, Letting Power users change their password   This is a short post, venting some frustration with a silly AWS default, with the hopes of sparing someone else the joys.   Best security practices call for frequently changing your passwords, that's just common sense. AWS Identity and Access Management goes to the extent of providing some really cool tools to ensure that happens. IAM Roles  provide a mechanism to allow software running on designated EC2 instances to retrieve "frequently" rotated access credentials. Seems like a well thought out solution to a common problem - how to let your software in EC2 securely access AWS resources, without embedding credentials in your AMI or code.   That said, allowing users to change their console password, even users whose policy is Power User. True, you should probably not really use the console... there's an API, but the default Power User template prevents all and any IAM calls, with this policy statement: Reading