How to automate access key rotation for IAM users

Question

Hello everyone,

I am trying to figure out a way to automate access key rotation for IAM users.  We have several users that have their own IAM programmatic access key and I am trying to figure out a way to force the user to rotate their access key after 90 days.  It would be nice to also have some sort of SNS topic that will inform the user.

I attempted to use the ASA Key Rotation document that AWS provided but kept on running into CloudFormation template errors which include Malformed Document and missing resources in the .PY files.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/patterns/automatically-rotate-iam-user-access-keys-at-scale-with-aws-organizations-and-aws-secrets-manager.html

Any guidance on this would be awesome.

Thank you!

Jeremy_S · Answer

If the credentials are for users, a best practice would be to use temporary credentials. Access keys are long-term credentials that you may not need.

- Here is a [blog](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-single-sign-on-now-enables-command-line-interface-access-for-aws-accounts-using-corporate-credentials/) that shows you how to get temporary credentials with AWS IAM Identity Center.

- You can also get temporary credentials with the AWS CLI and AWS IAM Identity center. Here is a [knowledge center article](https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/sso-temporary-credentials/).

If you still want to use the aws-iam-access-key-auto-rotation solution, it looks like the files are on the [GitHub repo](https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-iam-access-key-auto-rotation).

Shams · Answer

Here is an [alternative](https://jeremyritchie.com/posts/9/) that is well documented. I didn't try it but it should work. It uses AWS Secret Manager and Lambda, with SNS for notification as required.

kentrad · Answer

You might want to also consider transitioning these IAM Users to [IAM Roles Anywhere](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/extend-aws-iam-roles-to-workloads-outside-of-aws-with-iam-roles-anywhere/).

How to automate access key rotation for IAM users

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