AWS IAM Best Practices

Review and harden IAM policies following AWS security best practices and least privilege principles.

Review scope and execution boundaries

Select the exact account/role, partition, regions and control/framework version before collecting evidence; verify identity with aws sts get-caller-identity. Read-only assessment is the default. Commands that create MFA devices, change policies/keys, enable services, rotate secrets or create alarms require an approved change scope and rollback plan. Keep evidence and secret material out of shared logs.

These are partial examples, not certification or complete benchmark implementations. Control numbers are illustrative historical mappings, not a pinned current benchmark. Record PASS/FAIL/UNKNOWN/NOT-APPLICABLE per control with evidence and coverage. AccessDenied, API errors, missing permissions, absent pages and unimplemented checks are UNKNOWN, never PASS. Use paginators for SDK listings and cover all selected regions/accounts; never infer completeness from no findings. Shell snippets require Bash/GNU date, AWS CLI, jq and error checking (set -euo pipefail in complete scripts). Generate the IAM credential report first, wait for COMPLETE and decode its base64 Content; parse CSV by header in production. Credential reports are sensitive.

When to Use

Use this skill when you need to review IAM policies, implement least privilege access, or harden IAM security.

Core Principles