A sneak peek at the identity and access management sessions for AWS re:Inforce 2023

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AWS re:Inforce 2023 is fast approaching, and this post can help you plan your agenda with a look at the sessions in the identity and access management track. AWS re:Inforce is a learning conference where you can learn more about cloud security, compliance, identity, and privacy. You have access to hundreds of technical and non-technical sessions, an AWS Partner expo featuring security partners with AWS Security Competencies, and keynote and leadership sessions featuring AWS Security leadership. AWS re:Inforce 2023 will take place in-person in Anaheim, California, on June 13 and 14. re:Inforce 2023 features content in the following six areas:

• Identity and access management
• Data protection
• Application security
• Governance, risk, and compliance
• Network and infrastructure security
• Threat detection and incident response

The identity and access management track will share recommended practices and learnings for identity management and governance in AWS environments. You will hear from other AWS customers about how they are building customer identity and access management (CIAM) patterns for great customer experiences and new approaches for managing standard, elevated, and privileged workforce access. You will also hear from AWS leaders about accelerating the journey to least privilege with access insights and the role of identity within a Zero Trust architecture.

This post highlights some of the identity and access management sessions that you can sign up for, including breakout sessions, chalk talks, code talks, lightning talks, builders’ sessions, and workshops. For the full catalog, see the AWS re:Inforce catalog preview.

Breakout sessions

Lecture-style presentations that cover topics at all levels and delivered by AWS experts, builders, customers, and partners. Breakout sessions typically include 10–15 minutes of Q&A at the end.

IAM201: A first-principles approach: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Learning how to build effectively and securely on AWS starts with a strong working knowledge of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). In this session aimed at engineers who build on AWS, explore a no-jargon, first-principles approach to IAM. Learn the fundamental concepts of IAM authentication and authorization policies as well as concrete techniques that you can immediately apply to the workloads you run on AWS.

IAM301: Establishing a data perimeter on AWS, featuring USAA
In this session, dive deep into the data perimeter controls that help you manage your trusted identities and their access to trusted resources from expected networks. USAA shares how they use automation to embed security and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) baselines to empower a self-service mindset. Learn how they use data perimeters to support decentralization without compromising on security. Also, discover how USAA uses a threat-based approach to prioritize implementation of specific data perimeters.

IAM302: Create enterprise-wide preventive guardrails, featuring Inter & Co.
In this session, learn how to establish permissions guardrails within your multi-account environment with AWS Organizations and service control policies (SCPs). Explore how effective use of SCPs can help your builders innovate on AWS while maintaining a high bar on security. Learn about the strategies to incorporate SCPs at different levels within your organization. In addition, Inter & Co. share their strategies for implementing enterprise-wide guardrails at scale within their multi-account environments. Discover how they use code repositories and CI/CD pipelines to manage approvals and deployments of SCPs.

IAM303: Balance least privilege & agile development, feat. Fidelity & Merck
Finding a proper balance between securing multiple AWS accounts and enabling agile development to accelerate business innovation has been key to the cloud adoption journey for AWS customers. In this session, learn how Fidelity and Merck empowered their business stakeholders to quickly develop solutions while still conforming to security standards and operating within the guardrails at scale.

IAM304: Migrating to Amazon Cognito, featuring approaches from Fandango
Digital transformation of customer-facing applications often involves changes to identity and access management to help improve security and user experience. This process can benefit from fast-growing technologies and open standards and may involve migration to a modern customer identity and access management solution, such as Amazon Cognito, that offers the security and scale your business requires. There are several ways to approach migrating users to Amazon Cognito. In this session, learn about options and best practices, as well as lessons learned from Fandango’s migration to Amazon Cognito.

IAM305: Scaling access with AWS IAM Identity Center, feat. Allegiant Airlines
In this session, learn how to scale assignment of permission sets to users and groups by automating federated role-based access to any AWS accounts in your organization. As a highlight of this session, hear Allegiant Airlines’ success story of how this automation has benefited Allegiant by centralizing management of federated access for their organization of more than 5,000 employees. Additionally, explore how to build this automation in your environment using infrastructure as code tools like Terraform and AWS CloudFormation using a CI/CD pipeline.

IAM306: Managing hybrid workloads with IAM Roles Anywhere, featuring Hertz
A key element of using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Roles Anywhere is managing how identities are assigned to your workloads. In this session, learn how you can define and manage identities for your workloads, how to use those identities to control access to an AWS resource via attribute-based access control (ABAC), and how to monitor and audit activities performed by those identities. Discover key concepts, best practices, and troubleshooting tips. Hertz describes how they used IAM Roles Anywhere to secure access to AWS services from Salesforce and how it has improved their overall security posture.

IAM307: Steps towards a Zero Trust architecture on AWS
Modern workplaces have evolved beyond traditional network boundaries as they have expanded to hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Identity has taken center stage for information security teams. The need for fine-grained, identity-based authorization, flexible identity-aware networks, and the removal of unneeded pathways to data has accelerated the adoption of Zero Trust principles and architecture. In this session, learn about different architecture patterns and security mechanisms available from AWS that you can apply to secure standard, sensitive, and privileged access to your critical data and workloads.

Builders’ sessions

Small-group sessions led by an AWS expert who guides you as you build the service or product on your own laptop. Use your laptop to experiment and build along with the AWS expert.

IAM351: Sharing resources across accounts with least-privilege permissions
Are you looking to manage your resource access control permissions? Learn how you can author customer managed permissions to provide least-privilege access to your resources shared using AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM). Explore how to use customer managed permissions with use cases ranging from managing incident response with AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager to enhancing your IP security posture with Amazon VPC IP Address Manager.

IAM352: Cedar policy language in action
Cedar is a language for defining permissions as policies that describe who should have access to what. Amazon Verified Permissions and AWS Verified Access use Cedar to define fine-grained permissions for applications and end users. In this builders’ session, come learn by building Cedar policies for access control.

IAM355: Using passwordless authentication with Amazon Cognito and WebAuthn
In recent years, passwordless authentication has been on the rise. The FIDO Alliance, a first-mover for enabling passwordless in 2009, is an open industry association whose stated mission is to develop and promote authentication standards that “help reduce the world’s over-reliance on passwords.” This builders’ session allows participants to learn about and follow the steps to implement a passwordless authentication experience on a web or mobile application using Amazon Cognito.

IAM356: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies troubleshooting
In this builders’ session, walk through practical examples that can help you build, test, and troubleshoot AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. Utilize a workflow that can help you create fine-grained access policies with the help of the IAM API, the AWS Management Console, and AWS CloudTrail. Also review key concepts of IAM policy evaluation logic.

Chalk talks

Highly interactive sessions with a small audience. Experts lead you through problems and solutions on a digital whiteboard as the discussion unfolds.

IAM231: Lessons learned from AWS IAM Identity Center migrations
In this chalk talk, discover best practices and tips to migrate your workforce users’ access from IAM users to AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On). Learn how to create preventive guardrails, gain visibility into the usage of IAM users across an organization, and apply authentication solutions for common use cases.

IAM331: Leaving IAM access keys behind: A modern path forward
Static credentials have been used for a long time to secure multiple types of access, including access keys for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, command line tools, secure shell access, application API keys, and pre-shared keys for VPN access. However, best practice recommends replacing static credentials with short-term credentials. In this chalk talk, learn how to identify static access keys in your environment, quantify the risk, and then apply multiple available methods to replace them with short-term credentials. The talk also covers prescriptive guidance and best practice advice for improving your overall management of IAM access keys.

IAM332: Practical identity and access management: The basics of IAM on AWS
Learn from prescriptive guidance on how to build an Identity and Access Management strategy on AWS. We provide guidance on human access versus machine access using services like IAM Identity Center. You will also learn about the different IAM policy types, where each policy type is useful, and how you should incorporate each policy type in your AWS environment. This session will walk you through what you need to know to build an effective identity and access management baseline.

IAM431: A tour of the world of IAM policy evaluation
This session takes you beyond the basics of IAM policy evaluation and focuses on how policy evaluation works with advanced AWS features. Hear about how policies are evaluated alongside AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key grants, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) access points, Amazon VPC Lattice, and more. You’ll leave this session with prescriptive guidance on what to do and what to avoid when designing authorization schemes.

Code talks

Engaging, code-focused sessions with a small audience. AWS experts lead an interactive discussion featuring live coding and/or code samples as they explain the “why” behind AWS solutions.

IAM341: Cedar: Fast, safe, and fine-grained access for your applications
Cedar is a new policy language that helps you write fine-grained permissions in your applications. With Cedar, you can customize authorization and you can define and enforce who can access what. This code talk explains the design of Cedar, how it was built to a high standard of assurance, and its benefits. Learn what makes Cedar ergonomic, fast, and analyzable: simple syntax for expressing common authorization use cases, policy structure that allows for scalable real-time evaluation, and comprehensive auditing based on automated reasoning. Also find out how Cedar’s implementation was made safer through formal verification and differential testing.

IAM441: Enable new Amazon Cognito use cases with OAuth2.0 flows
Delegated authorization without user interaction on a consumer device and reinforced passwordless authentication for higher identity assurance are advanced authentication flows achievable with Amazon Cognito. In this code talk, you can discover new OAuth2.0 flow diagrams, code snippets, and long and short demos that offer different approaches to these authentication use cases. Gain confidence using AWS Lambda triggers with Amazon Cognito, native APIs, and OAuth2.0 endpoints to help ensure greater success in customer identity and access management strategy.

Lightning talks

Short and focused theater presentations that are dedicated to either a specific customer story, service demo, or partner offering (sponsored).

IAM221: Accelerate your business with AWS Directory Service
In this lightning talk, explore AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory and discover a number of use cases that provide flexibility, empower agile application development, and integrate securely with other identity stores. Join the talk to discover how you can take advantage of this managed service and focus on what really matters to your customers.

IAM321: Move toward least privilege with IAM Access Analyzer
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer provides tools that simplify permissions management by making it easy for organizations to set, verify, and refine permissions. In this lightning talk, dive into how you can detect resources shared with an external entity across one or multiple AWS accounts with IAM Access Analyzer. Find out how you can activate and use this feature and how it integrates with AWS Security Hub.

Workshops

Interactive learning sessions where you work in small teams to solve problems using AWS Cloud security services. Come prepared with your laptop and a willingness to learn!

IAM371: Building a Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solution
How do your customers access your application? Get a head start on customer identity and access management (CIAM) by using Amazon Cognito. Join this workshop to learn how to build CIAM solutions on AWS using Amazon Cognito, Amazon Verified Permissions, and several other AWS services. Start from the basic building blocks of CIAM and build up to advanced user identity and access management use cases in customer-facing applications.

IAM372: Consuming AWS Resources from everywhere with IAM Roles Anywhere
If your workload already lives on AWS, then there is a high chance that some temporary AWS credentials have been securely distributed to perform needed tasks. But what happens when your workload is on premises? In this workshop, learn how to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Roles Anywhere. Start from the basics and create the necessary steps to learn how to use your applications outside of AWS in a safe way using IAM Roles Anywhere in practice.

IAM373: Building a data perimeter to allow access to authorized users
In this workshop, learn how to create a data perimeter by building controls that allow access to data only from expected network locations and by trusted identities. The workshop consists of five modules, each designed to illustrate a different AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) principle or network control. Learn where and how to implement the appropriate controls based on different risk scenarios.

If these sessions look interesting to you, join us in Anaheim by registering for AWS re:Inforce 2023. We look forward to seeing you there!

 
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