---
title: "AWS IAM Best Practices [Cheat Sheet] - Cybr"
description: "Securing your AWS accounts and environments starts with implementing AWS IAM best practices. Get this right with our checklist."
url: https://cybr.com/cloud-security/aws-iam-best-practices-cheat-sheet/
---

# AWS IAM Best Practices \[Cheat Sheet\]

Securing your AWS accounts and environments starts with implementing AWS IAM best practices. Get this right and you will have a solid security foundation. Get…

Christophe

Published February 21, 2024 · Updated March 3, 2024

Securing your AWS accounts and environments starts with implementing AWS IAM best practices. Get this right and you will have a solid security foundation. Get this wrong and I don’t care if you spend $1m/year+ on the latest security tooling, you’re missing out on the basics.

So what are these IAM security best practices? Let’s take a look at 14 of them and refer to the cheat sheet for more details:

## 🪦 Say bye to long-term credentials and additional user management

✅ Require human users to use federation with an identity provider to access AWS using temporary credentials
✅ Require workloads to use temporary credentials with IAM roles to access AWS

## 🔒 Lock down users/root, and clean up unused long-term credentials

✅ Require multi-factor authentication (MFA)
✅ Update access keys when needed for use cases that require long-term credentials
✅ Follow best practices to protect your root user credentials

## 💪 Let’s get that least privilege

✅ Apply least privilege permissions
✅ Get started with AWS managed policies and move toward least-privilege permissions
✅ Use IAM Access Analyzer to generate least-privilege policies based on access activity
✅ Regularly review and remove unused users, roles, permissions, policies, and credentials
✅ Use conditions in IAM policies to further restrict access
✅ Verify public and cross-account access to resources with IAM Access Analyzer
✅ Use IAM Access Analyzer to validate your IAM policies to ensure secure and functional permissions
✅ Establish permissions guardrails across multiple accounts
✅ Use permissions boundaries to delegate permissions management within an account

## Main takeaway

You’ll notice that more than half of these have to do with achieving least privilege, and that’s because it’s a particularly difficult thing to do — especially at scale. In theory it sounds easy, in practice not so much.

Follow this checklist and you’ll get much closer to achieving that goal and having a very solid IAM foundation for single or multi-account setups.

## More info and resources

🔗 For more info: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/best-practices.html#bp-workloads-use-roles](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/best-practices.html#bp-workloads-use-roles)
🔗 For more AWS security cheat sheets and checklists: [https://cybr.com/aws-cheat-sheets](https://cybr.com/tag/aws-security-cheat-sheets/)

[![Best Practices for AWS IAM Security checklist cheat sheet](https://media.cybr.com/2024/02/iam-best-practices-checklist-858x1024.jpeg)](https://media.cybr.com/2024/02/iam-best-practices-checklist-scaled.jpeg)

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- [Cloud Security](https://cybr.com/cloud-security/)
- [AWS](https://cybr.com/tag/aws/)
- [AWS Security](https://cybr.com/tag/aws-security/)
- [AWS Security Cheat Sheets](https://cybr.com/tag/aws-security-cheat-sheets/)
- [Cheat Sheets](https://cybr.com/tag/cheat-sheets/)
- [Cloud Security](https://cybr.com/tag/cloud-security/)

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