AWS IAM Anywhere: Bridging PKI and Cloud Access for Non-Human Identities
Heya,
A recent post from Cyber Hut, one of my recommended Substack follows, about AWS IAM Anywhere roles caught my attention. Having taught AWS certifications, I'm always interested in developments in cloud security architecture.
Understanding AWS IAM Anywhere
AWS IAM Anywhere offers a solution for organizations with existing public key infrastructure (PKI): it enables secure access to AWS resources from services running outside the AWS environment using certificate-based authentication rather than traditional access keys.
This approach is an acknowledgement that, while the cloud continues to grow, there’s a heck of a lot of code running on-prem.
For workloads running within AWS, role-based access through EC2 instances, Lambda functions, or other native services remains the recommended approach.
The PKI Challenge
However, the reality is that most individual users and smaller organizations don't implement PKI systems.
This complexity explains why client certificates never gained widespread browser adoption. Heck, I ran into an issue the other day where my printer’s self signed certificate expired after ten years, and some Googling revealed I wasn’t alone. Cert management is not for the faint of heart.
It’s also why RFC 8705 finds its primary use in business-to-business contexts rather than consumer applications. I see you, banking industry!
Certificate management represents a significant operational burden. Organizations often experience outages due to expired certificates—a problem so common that documented cases of certificate-related failures serve as cautionary tales.
Where This Approach Shines
Despite these challenges, AWS IAM Anywhere becomes particularly valuable in specific scenarios:
Organizations with robust, on-premises PKI infrastructure already in place
Business-to-business integrations requiring secure AWS service access
Environments where certificate-based authentication aligns with existing security policies
The CIAM Connection: Non-Human Identities
This development ties into a broader trend in Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM): the growing importance of non-human identities.
While traditional CIAM systems focus primarily on human customers, the landscape is shifting toward accommodating automated systems, APIs, and service-to-service communications. (Linked article by Heather Flanagan, who I interviewed a while ago.)
AWS IAM Anywhere is an approach to this challenge, leveraging existing PKI infrastructure to establish trust relationships for automated systems.
For organizations already invested in certificate-based security, this provides a pathway to extend their identity management framework into cloud environments, or at least AWS, while maintaining consistent security postures.
Looking Forward
As non-human interactions become increasingly central to digital business operations, solutions like AWS IAM Anywhere highlight the need for flexible, infrastructure-aware identity management approaches.
It’s not enough to have a great technology. You have to match the right solution to the organizational context—in this case acknowledging both the power and complexity of certificate-based authentication systems.
Cheers,
Dan