Read all about the latest AWS security features, compliance updates, and hands-on resources in our new, monthly digest posts. You’ll find expert blog posts, new service capabilities, code samples, and workshops.

This month’s AWS Security Blog posts covered AI security, identity and access management, threat intelligence, data protection, and multicloud operations. Whether you’re securing agentic AI systems, upgrading to post-quantum cryptography, or streamlining forensic collection, these posts offer practical guidance across the security landscape.

Access control with IAM Identity Center session tags
Author: Rashmi Iyer | Published: April 28, 2026
Learn to combine AWS IAM Identity Center permission sets with session tags from Microsoft Entra ID to implement fine-grained attribute-based access control (ABAC) across multiple AWS accounts.

Can I do that with policy? Understanding the AWS Service Authorization Reference
Authors: Anshu Bathla, Prafful Gupta | Published: April 27, 2026
Learn to use the AWS Service Authorization Reference to determine what’s achievable with IAM policies, recognize scenarios needing alternative solutions, and build more effective security controls.

Secure AI agent access patterns to AWS resources using Model Context Protocol
Author: Riggs Goodman III | Published: April 14, 2026
Learn to secure AI agent access to AWS resources via MCP using three principles: least privilege, organizational role governance, and differentiating AI-driven from human-initiated actions.

Four security principles for agentic AI systems
Authors: Mark Ryland, Riggs Goodman III, Todd MacDermid | Published: April 2, 2026
Learn four security principles from AWS’s NIST response for securing agentic AI: secure development lifecycle, traditional controls, deterministic external enforcement, and earned autonomy through evaluation.

Designing trust and safety into Amazon Bedrock powered applications
Author: Victor Lungu | Published: April 29, 2026
Learn to integrate responsible AI concepts into Amazon Bedrock applications, including abuse detection, Amazon CloudWatch monitoring, Bedrock Guardrails configuration, and the abuse response process.

Building AI defenses at scale: before the threats emerge
Author: Amy Herzog | Published: April 7, 2026
AWS CISO announces Project Glasswing with Anthropic, introducing Claude Mythos Preview for vulnerability research, plus the general availability of AWS Security Agent for autonomous penetration testing.

Shift-Left Tag Compliance using AWS Organizations and Terraform
Authors: Welly Siauw, Sourav Kundu, Manu Chandrasekhar | Published: April 27, 2026
Learn to validate tag compliance during development using AWS Organizations tag policies, a reusable Terraform tagging module, and a test-driven approach that dynamically validates against live organizational policies.

What the March 2026 Threat Technique Catalog update means for your AWS environment
Authors: Shannon Brazil, Cydney Stude | Published: April 28, 2026
The AWS CIRT’s latest Threat Technique Catalog update covers Amazon Cognito refresh token abuse, AMI image deletion targeting recovery, and trust policy modifications for persistence and privilege escalation.

A framework for securely collecting forensic artifacts into S3 buckets
Authors: Jason Garman, Vaishnav Murthy | Published: April 8, 2026
Learn to securely collect forensic artifacts into Amazon S3 using time-limited, least-privilege credentials with AWS STS session policies and automated AWS Step Functions workflows.

Transform security logs into OCSF format using a configuration-driven ETL solution
Authors: Vivek Gautam, Arpit Gupta, Ryan Gomes | Published: April 17, 2026
Learn to transform custom security logs into OCSF format using an AWS ProServe configuration-driven ETL solution with AWS Step Functions, AWS Glue or Amazon EMR Serverless, and Amazon Security Lake integration.

A technical walkthrough of multicloud full-stack security using AWS Security Hub Extended
Authors: Matt Meck, Michael Fuller | Published: April 22, 2026
Learn how AWS Security Hub Extended simplifies multicloud security procurement and operations through curated partner solutions, unified billing, and OCSF-based findings consolidation.

Protecting your secrets from tomorrow’s quantum risks
Authors: Stéphanie Mbappe, Tobias Nickl | Published: April 24, 2026
Learn to upgrade AWS Secrets Manager clients to use hybrid post-quantum TLS with ML-KEM, protecting secrets against harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks, and verify connections via AWS CloudTrail.

How AWS KMS and AWS Encryption SDK overcome symmetric encryption bounds
Authors: Panos Kampanakis, Matthew Campagna, Patrick Palmer | Published: April 3, 2026
Learn how AWS Key Management Service and the AWS Encryption SDK use derived key methods to automatically handle AES-GCM encryption limits, eliminating the need to manually track bounds or rotate keys.

How to clone an AWS CloudHSM cluster across Regions
Authors: Desiree Brunner, Rickard Löfström | Published: April 20, 2026
Learn to clone an AWS CloudHSM cluster to another Region using CopyBackupToRegion, then synchronize keys—including non-exportable keys—across cloned clusters for disaster recovery.

Investigations of reported security vulnerabilities affecting Amazon and AWS services, software, and products.

• CVE-2026-7791 – Local Privilege Escalation via TOCTOU Race Condition in Amazon WorkSpaces Skylight Agent
• CVE-2026-7461 – OS Command Injection in Amazon ECS Agent via FSx Windows File Server Volume Credentials
• Issue with FreeRTOS-Plus-TCP – IPv6 Router Advertisement Memory Safety Issues
• CVE-2026-7424 – Integer Underflow in DHCPv6 Sub-Option Parser in FreeRTOS-Plus-TCP
• Issue with FreeRTOS-Plus-TCP – MAC Address Validation Bypass and ICMP Echo Reply Integer Underflow
• CVE-2026-7191- Arbitrary Code Execution via Sandbox Bypass in QnABot on AWS
• Issues in tough library and tuftool CLI utility
• Issue with AWS Ops Wheel (CVE-2026-6911 and CVE-2026-6912)
• CVE-2026-6550 – Key commitment policy bypass via shared key cache in AWS Encryption SDK for Python
• CVE-2026-6437 – Mount Option Injection in Amazon EFS CSI Driver
• CVE-2026-5747 – Out-of-bounds Write in Firecracker virtio-pci Transport
• Issues with AWS Research and Engineering Studio (RES)
• Issues with Amazon Athena ODBC Driver
• CVE-2026-5429 – Kiro IDE Webview Cross-Site Scripting via Workspace Color Theme

This month brings 16 new AWS samples spanning identity, governance, compliance, detection and incident response, AI Security, data protection, and infrastructure security. From beginner-friendly AI agent development on Amazon Bedrock to automated Control Tower re-registration at scale, these ready-to-deploy repositories help you implement security best practices across your AWS environment.

Amazon Cognito OAuth2 Token Proxy with Caching
Learn to deploy an Amazon API Gateway proxy for Cognito’s OAuth2 token endpoint with intelligent caching and AWS WAF protection, reducing M2M authentication costs by over 90%.

Cognito API Gateway Authorization Demo
Learn to implement user-specific data protection using Amazon Cognito, API Gateway, and an AWS Lambda authorizer that enforces JWT sub claim matching to prevent cross-user data access.

Securely Connecting On-Premises Data Systems to Amazon Redshift with IAM Roles Anywhere
Learn to deploy a fully private environment connecting on-premises workloads to Amazon Redshift using X.509 certificate authentication via IAM Roles Anywhere for short-lived credentials.

AWS IAM Access Key Lifecycle Management with Human Approval
Learn to automate organization-wide detection, disabling, and deletion of unused IAM access keys using Step Functions, IAM Access Analyzer, and a secure human-in-the-loop approval workflow.

Secrets Manager Audit
Learn to resolve and report who can access your AWS Secrets Manager secrets—across accounts, through Identity Center, and down to the human behind the IAM role—in a single command.

Control Tower Organization Re-Registration Automation
Learn to automate AWS Control Tower OU re-registration and account updates at scale using lifecycle events, Amazon EventBridge, and AWS Lambda to resolve mixed governance after landing zone changes.

Sample Agent Skills for Builders
A curated collection of installable agent skills that extend AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) with production-ready AWS, CDK, security scanning, and engineering workflows.

How to Stop AI Agent Hallucinations: 5 Techniques + Production on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
Learn to detect, prevent, and self-correct AI agent hallucinations using Graph-RAG, semantic tool selection, multi-agent validation, neurosymbolic guardrails, and agent steering with Strands Agents.

Compliance Lens
Learn to deploy a serverless solution that analyzes AWS Config snapshots across an AWS Organization, compares them against conformance pack rule sets, and visualizes compliance posture via Amazon QuickSight dashboards.

AWS Security Agent Terraform Configuration
Learn to provision AWS Security Agent resources using the AWSCC Terraform provider, automating agent space creation, IAM roles, target domain registration, and penetration test setup.

AWS Security Agent Demo Suite
Learn to use AWS Security Agent across three scenarios: automated design reviews, AI-generated infrastructure code review via GitHub, and penetration testing against intentionally vulnerable applications.

Agentic SOC Workshop — CDK Infrastructure
Learn to build an AI-powered Security Operations Center agent that investigates Amazon GuardDuty findings, queries CloudTrail logs, and takes automated containment actions using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.

Implementing Kerberos Authentication for Apache Spark Jobs on Amazon EMR on EKS to Access a Kerberos-Enabled Hive Metastore
Learn to configure Kerberos authentication for Spark jobs on Amazon EMR on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, connecting to a Kerberos-enabled Hive Metastore using Microsoft Active Directory as the KDC.

AWS Nitro Enclaves with Kubernetes – Hello World Example
Learn to deploy a Hello World application inside an AWS Nitro Enclave on Amazon EKS, covering cluster creation, device plugin setup, and enclave image building.

Multi-Tenant OpenClaw on Firecracker
Learn to deploy isolated, multi-tenant OpenClaw AI agents on AWS using Firecracker microVMs with per-tenant kernel/network isolation, auto-scaling, backup/restore, and a web management console.

Amazon Bedrock for Beginners – From First Prompt to AI Agent
Learn to build AI applications on Amazon Bedrock, from basic API calls to a full agent with RAG, guardrails, tool use, and the Strands Agents SDK.

April 2026 reinforces that securing AI workloads now requires the same rigor applied to traditional infrastructure. The posts and samples in this edition provide concrete patterns for enforcing least privilege on agentic systems, automating governance at organizational scale, and preparing cryptographic implementations for post-quantum requirements. The security bulletins address vulnerabilities across compute, networking, and developer tooling, reinforcing the need to apply patches consistently. Each resource includes deployment steps or runnable code so you can validate the approach in your own environment before adopting it. Subscribe to the AWS Security Blog RSS feed to receive updates as they publish, and revisit this digest monthly for a consolidated view of what changed and what to act on.

As AI agents, bots, and programmatic access become an increasingly significant portion of web traffic, organizations need better tools to understand, analyze, and manage this activity. Today, we’re excited to announce AI Traffic Analysis dashboards for AWS WAF protection packs—also known as web access control lists (web ACLs)—providing comprehensive visibility into AI bot and agent behavior across your applications.

The rapid proliferation of AI bots—from search engine crawlers to research agents—has fundamentally changed the nature of web traffic. Organizations across industries are discovering that AI agents now represent 30–60% of their total traffic, driving significant infrastructure costs without always generating business value.

Traditional bot management tools weren’t designed for the nuances of AI traffic. Teams need to answer critical questions such as: Which AI organizations are accessing our content? What are they trying to accomplish? Which endpoints are most frequently targeted? How has this activity changed over time? Most importantly, how can we turn this visibility into actionable business decisions?

The new AI Traffic Analysis dashboard provides specialized visibility into AI bot and agent activity, available directly within your AWS WAF protection pack (web ACL) console. With this launch, AWS WAF Bot Control expands its detection coverage to track more than 650 unique bots and agents, offering one of the most comprehensive AI bot detection catalogs available. A detection catalog that will keep growing and be updated to align with the pace of the industry’s changes.

This dashboard goes beyond standard security metrics to deliver AI-specific insights that help you understand and manage this critical traffic segment.

• Bot identification and verification: See which AI bots are accessing your applications, including bot names, owning organizations, and verification status. Quickly distinguish between legitimate AI agents from known organizations and potentially suspicious activity.
• Intent classification: Understand the purpose behind AI bot requests. The dashboard categorizes bot behavior patterns—whether crawling for search indexing, conducting research, gathering training data, or other activities—helping you align access policies with business objectives.
• Access pattern analysis: Identify your most frequently accessed URLs and endpoints by AI agents. This visibility helps you understand which content is most valuable to AI organizations and optimize your infrastructure accordingly.
• Temporal trends and historical analysis: Track AI bot activity patterns by time of day and analyze historical trends over the past 14 days. Detect anomalies, understand peak usage periods, and identify emerging patterns in AI traffic.
• Organization breakdown: View traffic volume segmented by bot owner organization, giving you clear visibility into which AI companies are accessing your content and at what scale.

AI Traffic Analysis dashboards integrate seamlessly with AWS WAF Bot Control for common bots using the same traffic evaluation engine while providing specialized analytics for AI-specific patterns. The dashboards display near real-time summaries based on Amazon CloudWatch metrics collected as AWS WAF evaluates your web traffic.

To access the AI Traffic Analysis dashboard:

1. Navigate to your protection pack (web ACL) in the AWS Management Console for AWS WAF.
2. Select the AI Traffic Analysis tab.
3. Apply filters for bot organization, intent type, or verification status as needed.
4. Analyze the comprehensive visualizations across bot identity, intent classification, access patterns, and temporal trends.

The dashboard populates automatically once your protection pack begins receiving AI bot traffic, so you have visibility exactly when you need it.

This new capability addresses a critical need as organizations navigate the evolving landscape of AI-driven web traffic. With detailed insights into AI bot behavior, you can:

• Make informed access decisions: Understand bot intent before implementing allow or block rules.
• Optimize infrastructure investment: Identify high-traffic endpoints and plan capacity accordingly. Know whether your infrastructure costs are supporting business value or used without programmatic compensation mechanism.
• Implement tiered access strategies: Serve different content or pricing based on AI agent verification and intent.
• Detect anomalies and emerging patterns: Spot unusual patterns that might indicate emerging threats or opportunities. Real-time visibility helps you respond quickly to changes in AI bot behavior.
• Support cross-organizational strategy: Provide data to stakeholders across security, product, and business teams for informed decisions about AI bot access policies and monetization opportunities.
• Customize as needed: AI Traffic analyses are emitted as CloudWatch metrics that an organization can use to customize CloudWatch or another supported observability product as needed. Moreover, by using CloudWatch metrics, an organization can build proactive measures such as alerts or business actions such as rate or limit changes.
• Monetize AI traffic at the edge: For a reference architecture that combines WAF Bot Control AI visibility, traffic control, and content monetization using the x402 payment protocol, see the sample-x402-content-monetization-with-cloudfront-and-waf project on GitHub. It demonstrates how to classify AI bot traffic, enforce per-path pricing policies, and settle payments at the edge using Amazon CloudFront and Lambda@Edge – with zero changes to your existing origins.
  

  Note: This AWS Samples solution is not a supported product in their own right, but educational examples to help our customers use our products for their applications. As our customer, any applications you integrate this example into should be thoroughly tested, secured, and optimized according to your business’s security standards & policies before deploying to production or handling production workloads. Deploying it will provision resources that incur additional AWS charges, so review costs before deploying and delete the stack when no longer needed.

In addition to the console dashboard, you can programmatically query AI bot traffic data using the GetTopPathStatisticsByTraffic action, available through the AWS WAF API, AWS SDKs, and AWS CLI. This action returns the top URI paths by bot traffic volume for a given web ACL and time window. Each path in the response includes request counts, traffic percentages, and the top bots accessing it. You can filter results by bot category (for example, ai), organization, or specific bot name, and use a URI path prefix (for example, /api/) to drill down into specific areas of your application. The following AWS CLI example shows how to query the top paths accessed by AI bots for a specific web ACL.

The following AWS CLI example shows how to query the top paths accessed by AI bots for a specific web ACL:

aws wafv2 get-top-path-statistics-by-traffic \
  --web-acl-arn "arn:aws:wafv2:us-east-1:123456789012:global/webacl/ExampleWebACL/a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab-cdef-EXAMPLE11111" \
  --scope "CLOUDFRONT" \
  --time-window StartTime=2026-02-25T00:00:00Z,EndTime=2026-02-26T00:00:00Z \
  --bot-category "ai" \
  --uri-path-prefix "/api/" \
  --limit 5 \
  --number-of-top-traffic-bots-per-path 3

A sample response:

{
  "TopPathStatistics": [
    {
      "Path": "/api/v1/products",
      "RequestCount": 145320,
      "TrafficPercentage": 32.4,
      "TopBots": [
        { "BotName": "ExampleBotA", "Organization": "ExampleOrgA", "RequestCount": 98210 },
        { "BotName": "ExampleBotB", "Organization": "ExampleOrgB", "RequestCount": 47110 },
        { "BotName": "ExampleBotC", "Organization": "ExampleOrgC", "RequestCount": 0 }
      ]
    },
    {
      "Path": "/api/v2/search",
      "RequestCount": 87650,
      "TrafficPercentage": 19.5,
      "TopBots": [
        { "BotName": "ExampleBotA", "Organization": "ExampleOrgA", "RequestCount": 52300 },
        { "BotName": "ExampleBotC", "Organization": "ExampleOrgC", "RequestCount": 35350 },
        { "BotName": "ExampleBotB", "Organization": "ExampleOrgB", "RequestCount": 0 }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "TimeWindow": {
    "StartTime": "2026-02-25T00:00:00Z",
    "EndTime": "2026-02-26T00:00:00Z"
  }
}

Programmatic access enables you to:

• Build custom dashboards or integrate AI traffic data into existing observability platforms.
• Automate alerting when specific paths see unusual bot traffic spikes.
• Feed traffic data into business intelligence pipelines for content monetization decisions.
• Investigate and debug AI bot activity within a specific timeframe to identify the root cause of traffic anomalies or incidents.

For detailed usage information, see the GetTopPathStatisticsByTraffic API reference and the AWS CLI command reference. This API pairs naturally with the CloudWatch metrics approach described above, giving you both real-time metric streams and on-demand path-level analytics for comprehensive AI traffic management.

For customers on flat-rate pricing plans, the AI Traffic Analysis dashboard is included with all paid plans. Read more about CloudFront flat-rate pricing in the launch blog post. For AWS WAF customers not subscribed to flat-rate plans, the AI traffic analysis dashboard is available at no additional cost. See AWS WAF pricing for details.

The AI Traffic Analysis dashboard represents a significant step forward in managing the intersection of AI and web security. As AI agents continue to grow as a percentage of overall web traffic, having the right visibility tools becomes essential for both security and business success.

To learn more about AWS WAF Bot Control and AI Traffic Analysis dashboards, visit the AWS WAF Developer Guide or explore the feature directly in your AWS WAF console.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.

Generative AI brings promising innovation, transforming how individuals and organizations approach everything from customer service to content creation and more. As AI continues to expand its capabilities, organizations are increasingly focused on how they can integrate the responsible AI concepts into the development lifecycle of their AI applications.

Research from Accenture and Amazon Web Services (AWS) reveals compelling evidence for the business value of responsible AI practices, both internally within their organizations and externally to their users. Organizations that communicate a mature approach to responsible AI see an 82% improvement in employee trust in AI adoption, which directly leads to increased innovation. Additionally, companies that offer responsible AI-enabled products and services experience a 25% increase in customer loyalty and satisfaction.

AWS identifies these key dimensions that form the backbone of responsible AI implementation:

• Safety focuses on preventing harmful system output and misuse. This dimension focuses on steering AI systems to prioritize user and system safety.
• Controllability focuses on mechanisms that monitor and steer AI system behavior. This dimension refers to the ability to manage, guide, and constrain AI systems to operate within specific parameters.
• Fairness considers the impacts of AI on different groups of users.
• Explainability focuses on understanding and evaluating system outputs.
• Security and privacy focuses on making sure that data and models are appropriately obtained, used, and protected.
• Veracity and robustness focuses on achieving correct system outputs, even with unexpected or adversarial inputs.
• Governance makes sure that development, deployment, and management of AI systems align with ethical standards, legal requirements, and societal values.
• Transparency focuses on understanding how AI systems make decisions, why the systems produce specific results, and what data the systems use.

It’s a best practice to review and apply all these dimensions to your AI implementation. For more information, see Considerations for addressing the core dimensions of responsible AI for Amazon Bedrock applications.

When you implement AI systems, you should build safety into every phase of the AWS responsible AI lifecycle. The responsible AI lifecycle consists of the following three phases, each with distinct responsibility considerations for the safety dimension:

1. In the design and development phases, thoroughly evaluate potential safety risks. Understand what you want your AI application to do, what you don’t want it to do, and what you want to prevent it from doing. You should build safety guardrails into your systems from the beginning and make sure that your development teams understand the capabilities and limits of your AI application.
2. In the deployment phase, theory meets reality. During this phase, you should implement robust safety measures through multiple layers, from comprehensive user training to proactive monitoring and review processes. Every application, product, and feature must include clear safety protocols and user guidelines. You must think beyond the launch of an application and consider how to launch a holistic safety framework. This framework—which can contain steps such as red team testing—must protect your brand, users, and stakeholders.
3. In the operations phase, it’s important to maintain vigilance. Safety, like security, isn’t something you set up once and then ignore. Safety requires continuous monitoring and adaptation. To catch potential safety issues early, you can implement real-time feedback mechanisms to conduct regular performance evaluations. You can also continuously monitor for shifts in how your application is used, or functions that could compromise safety. Because safety considerations and risks evolve as technology evolves, it’s crucial to understand that adjustments are necessary over time.

For more information, see the Responsible use of AI guide.

Foundation models in Amazon Bedrock are inherently designed with safety mechanisms to prevent harmful outputs. However, you can implement additional input safety systems in production environments to provide critical early detection capabilities to identify problematic content, users, or patterns.

Note: Amazon Bedrock might implement automated abuse detection mechanisms to identify potential violations of the AWS Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and Service Terms, including the Responsible AI Policy or a third-party model provider’s AUP.

See the Amazon Bedrock abuse detection document for more information.

To maintain trust in your AI services, preventative action is key, while also efficiently planning and managing development resources. Introduce observability and safety guardrails early in development to support long-term scalability and help identify potential issues before they affect your users. To begin this process, thoroughly scope your AI use case with the following actions:

• Understand your users
• Anticipate potential misuse scenarios
• Define your risk tolerance

This scope guides your development of a precise safety framework that addresses the specific risks of your AI implementation while you maintain expected performance. For this scope, you can use AWS specialized tools designed specifically to monitor and protect Amazon Bedrock applications.

Amazon CloudWatch provides essential visibility into AI system behavior and performance. When you configure comprehensive logging, you can capture important information across user segments and interaction types, such as the following:

• Request volumes
• Response latencies
• Rejection rates
• Content filtering triggers

You can use this information to identify potential abuse patterns or unexpected behaviors before they affect operations. CloudWatch dashboards visualize metrics according to monitoring priorities, and automated alerts provide prompt notification when you exceed thresholds. This infrastructure transforms interaction data into actionable insights and supports continuous safety improvement.

Note: By default, Amazon Bedrock logging is turned off. You must turn on logging for your application. To configure this, contact your account manager.

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails offers configurable protection mechanisms tailored to specific risk profiles and content policies. You can customize Bedrock Guardrails to match your application requirements, such as:

• Define domain-relevant undesirable topics
• Configure appropriate content filtering thresholds
• Configure sensitive information detection and redaction parameters aligned with data policies

Additionally, you can configure controls that prioritize accuracy and prevent hallucinations while maintaining creative flexibility based on your application needs. When you thoughtfully configure Guardrails, you can balance performance and safety according to your specific use case requirements and risk factors.

As AI safety evolves and new risks emerge, abuse might still occur even if you implement safety mechanisms. If you receive an abuse report from the AWS Trust & Safety team, then complete the following steps to help effectively address the issue:

1. Acknowledge receipt: Acknowledge the receipt of the abuse report within 24 hours. If your team is still conducting their investigation, then inform AWS that the investigation is ongoing. Provide the number of days expected to complete the investigation.
2. Investigate the issue: Thoroughly investigate the issue, including examining the logs (if enabled), reviewing Amazon Bedrock inputs, and checking for unauthorized access. While AWS abuse reports include a small sample of prompt IDs for you to investigate, investigate usage of your Amazon Bedrock application. Check for patterns to see if there’s a systemic issue that’s leading to abuse.
3. Take appropriate action: If appropriate, take action to implement fixes, update safeguards, address violating users, or redesign features. Consider if you need systemic or root-cause fixes, rather than addressing one abusive end user. An abuse incident by one user could indicate vulnerabilities in your safety mechanisms that can lead to continuous abuse.
4. Report back to AWS Trust & Safety: Following your investigation and implementation of fixes, provide an update to AWS Trust & Safety on your findings and remediation steps. Be transparent about what happened and how you addressed the issue. If you think that no violation occurred, then provide context on how you came to this conclusion. Include examples of the prompts and your business use case where possible.

To learn more about safety and responsible AI development, explore AWS resources, including the Responsible AI portal and machine learning best practices documentation. These resources provide additional tools and frameworks to build safe, effective AI systems that drive innovation and maintain safety standards.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce that the Winter 2025 System and Organization Controls (SOC) 1 report is now available. The report covers 184 services over the 12-month period from January 1, 2025 – December 31, 2025, giving customers a full year of assurance. This report demonstrates our continuous commitment to adhering to the heightened expectations of cloud service providers.

Customers can download the Winter 2025 SOC 1 report through AWS Artifact, a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact.

AWS strives to continuously bring services into the scope of its compliance programs to help customers meet their architectural and regulatory needs. You can view the current list of services in scope on our Services in Scope page. As an AWS customer, you can reach out to your AWS account team if you have any questions or feedback about SOC compliance.

To learn more about AWS compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.

In January 2026, we announced the general availability of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a new, independent cloud for Europe entirely located within the European Union (EU), and physically and logically separate from all other AWS Regions. The unique approach of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud provides the only fully featured, independently operated sovereign cloud backed by strong technical controls, sovereign assurances, and legal protections designed to meet the sensitive data needs of European governments and enterprises.

One of the foundational components of how AWS European Sovereign Cloud enables verifiable trust of technical controls and delivers assurance is through our compliance programs and assurance frameworks. These programs help customers understand the robust controls in place at AWS European Sovereign Cloud to maintain security and compliance of the cloud. To meet the needs of our customers, we committed that the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will maintain key certifications such as ISO/IEC 27001:2022, System and Organization Controls (SOC) reports, and Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalogue (C5) attestation, all validated regularly by independent auditors to assure our controls are designed appropriately, operate effectively, and can help customers satisfy their compliance obligations.

Today, AWS European Sovereign Cloud is pleased to announce that SOC 2 and C5 Type 1 attestation reports, along with seven key ISO certifications (ISO 27001:2022, 27017:2015, 27018:2019, 27701:2019, 22301:2019, 20000-1:2018, and 9001:2015) are now available. The attestation reports cover 69 AWS services operating within the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, while the certificates have integrated the AWS European Sovereign Cloud region into the global AWS Management Systems. This achievement marks a pivotal first step in our journey to establish the AWS European Sovereign Cloud as a trusted and compliant cloud for European organizations. By securing these foundational certifications and attestation reports early in our implementation, we are demonstrating our commitment to earning customer trust. AWS European Sovereign Cloud customers in Germany and across Europe can now run their applications with enhanced assurance and confidence that our infrastructure aligns with internationally recognized security standards and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud: Sovereign Reference Framework (ESC-SRF). These certifications and attestation reports provide independent validation of our security controls and operational practices, demonstrating our commitment to meeting the heightened expectations towards cloud service providers. Beyond compliance, these certifications and reports help customers meet regulatory requirements and innovate with confidence.

SOC reports are independent third-party examinations that show how AWS European Sovereign Cloud meets compliance controls and sovereignty objectives. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud SOC 2 report addresses three critical AICPA Trust Services Criteria: Security, Availability, and Confidentiality and includes internal controls mapped to the ESC-SRF. The ESC-SRF establishes sovereignty criteria across key domains including governance independence, operational control, data residency, and technical isolation. As part of the SOC 2 Type 1 attestation, independent third-party auditors have validated suitability of the design and implementation of our controls addressing measures such as independent European Union (EU) corporate structures, operation by EU-resident AWS personnel, strict residency requirements for Customer Content and Customer-Created Metadata, and separation from all other AWS Regions. The ESC-SRF controls in our SOC 2 report show customers how AWS delivers on its sovereignty commitments.

C5 is a German Government-backed attestation scheme introduced in Germany by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and represents one of the most comprehensive cloud security standards in Europe. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud C5 Type 1 report provides customers with independent third-party attestation on the suitability of the design and implementation of our controls to meet both C5 basic criteria and C5 additional criteria.

The basic criteria establish fundamental security requirements for cloud service providers, covering areas such as organization of information security, human resources security, asset management, access control, cryptography, physical security, operations security, communications security, system acquisition and development, supplier relationships, incident management, business continuity, and compliance. The additional criteria address enhanced requirements for handling sensitive data and critical applications, making this attestation particularly valuable for AWS European Sovereign Cloud customers with stringent data security and sovereignty requirements.

AWS European Sovereign Cloud region has achieved successful onboarding to seven key ISO certifications that collectively demonstrate comprehensive operational excellence:

• ISO 27001:2022 for information security management
• ISO 27017:2015 for cloud-specific security controls
• ISO 27018:2019 for personal data protection in cloud environments
• ISO 27701:2019 for privacy information management
• ISO 22301:2019 for business continuity and organizational resilience
• ISO 20000-1:2018 for IT service management
• ISO 9001:2015 for quality management

These certifications confirm that AWS European Sovereign Cloud region has been integrated into comprehensive frameworks for managing security, privacy, continuity, service delivery, and quality, helping to ensure sensitive information remains secure, services remain available, and operations meet the highest standards through systematic risk management processes and continuous improvement practices.

To access SOC 2, C5 reports and ISO certifications, customers should sign in to their AWS European Sovereign Cloud account and navigate to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console. AWS Artifact is a self-service portal that provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports and certifications.

We recognize that compliance is not a destination but a continuous journey, and these initial SOC 2, C5 reports and ISO certifications represent the beginning of our certification portfolio. They lay the essential groundwork upon which we will continue to build to meet AWS European Sovereign Cloud customers’ compliance needs as they continue to evolve. As we expand our compliance coverage in the months ahead, customers can be confident that security, transparency, and regulatory alignment have been part of the very DNA of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud design from day one. To learn more about our compliance and security programs, visit AWS European Sovereign Cloud Compliance, or reach out to your AWS European Sovereign Cloud account team.

Security and compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS European Sovereign Cloud and the customer. For more information, see the AWS Shared Security Responsibility Model.

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After talking with many customers, one thing is clear: the security challenge has not gotten easier. Enterprises today operate across a complex mix of environments, including on-premises infrastructure, private data centers, and multiple clouds, often with tools that were never designed to work together. The result is enterprise security teams spend more time managing tools than managing risk, making it harder to stay ahead of threats across an increasingly complex environment.

At Amazon Web Service (AWS), we believe security should be simple, integrated, and built for the way enterprises actually operate. This belief is what drove us to reimagine AWS Security Hub, delivering full-stack security through a single experience, and this vision is driving our next chapter.

We transformed Security Hub into a unified security operations solution by bringing together AWS security services, including Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, AWS Security Hub Cloud Security Posture Management (Security Hub CSPM), and Amazon Macie, into a single experience that automatically and continuously analyzes security signals across threats, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and sensitive data. Security Hub delivers a common foundation, bringing together findings from across your AWS environment so your security team spends less time translating signals and more time acting on them. Built on top of that foundation, a unified operations layer gives security teams near real-time risk analytics, automated analysis, and prioritized insights, helping them focus on what matters most, at scale.

We also introduced new capabilities (the Extended plan) that simplify how enterprises procure, deploy, and integrate a full-stack security solution across endpoint, identity, email, network, data, browser, cloud, AI, and security operations. Now, customers can use Security Hub to expand their security portfolio through a curated selection of AWS Partner solutions (at launch: 7AI, Britive, CrowdStrike, Cyera, Island, Noma, Okta, Oligo, Opti, Proofpoint, SailPoint, Splunk (a Cisco company), Upwind, and Zscaler), all through one unified experience. With AWS as the seller of record, you benefit from pay-as-you-go pricing, a single bill, and no long-term commitments. Our goal is simple: unified security, everywhere your enterprise operates.

At AWS, interoperability means giving customers the freedom to choose solutions that best suit their needs, and the ability to use them wherever their workloads run. But freedom to innovate across multicloud environments also means that it is critical to secure them consistently, and without adding operational complexity.

In the coming months, we are expanding Security Hub with new multicloud capabilities that extend unified security operations beyond AWS. The foundation of this expansion is a common data layer that unifies security signals from wherever your workloads run. On top of that, a unified policy and operations layer delivers consistent posture management, exposure analysis, and risk prioritization, so your security team operates from a single view of risk rather than a fragmented collection of consoles.

Security Hub will deliver unified risk analytics that surface critical risks across your multicloud estate. You’ll be able to manage cloud security posture with Security Hub CSPM checks that give you consistent posture visibility, and extend vulnerability management with expanded Amazon Inspector capabilities, including virtual machine scanning, container image scanning, and serverless scanning. Security Hub will also deliver external network scanning that enriches security findings with context about internet-facing exposure across your multicloud environment, including for resources not running in AWS.

The result is more comprehensive risk coverage across your enterprise. It’s about giving your security team a single, unified experience to detect and respond to risks, wherever you operate.

The security leaders I speak with aren’t just asking for better tools. They’re asking for a way to get ahead of risk, not just manage it. They want security that keeps pace with the business, not security that slows it down.

That’s the vision behind AWS Security Hub: unified security through a single, integrated security operations experience, built on a common data foundation, powered by intelligent analytics, and delivered through a consistent operations layer, to help reduce security risk, improve team productivity, and strengthen security operations across AWS and beyond.

Our multicloud expansion is underway, and we are just getting started.

You can learn more at aws.amazon.com/security-hub, or visit us at the AWS booth (S-0466) at RSA Conference, March 23–26 in San Francisco.

We’re excited to announce that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completed the annual Dubai Electronic Security Centre (DESC) certification audit to operate as a Tier 1 Cloud Service Provider (CSP) for the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region.

This alignment with DESC requirements demonstrates our continued commitment to adhere to the heightened expectations for CSPs. Government customers of AWS can run their applications in AWS Cloud-certified Regions with confidence.

The AWS compliance to the DESC Framework requirements were validated by an independent third-party auditor (BSI) prior to issuance of a renewed certificate by DESC. The updated DESC CSP certificate is available through AWS Artifact, and is valid for one year to January 22, 2027. AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact.

The certification includes the following 10 additional services in scope, for a total of 108 services:

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• AWS Managed Services
• AWS Resource Explorer
• Amazon Application Recovery Controller
• Amazon Bedrock (excludes Amazon Bedrock Marketplace)
• Amazon Inspector
• Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
• Amazon Quick Suite (formerly Amazon QuickSight)
• Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)
• Amazon Verified Permissions

This is a 10% increase in the number of services in the Middle East (UAE) Region that are in scope of the DESC CSP certification.

AWS strives to continuously bring services into the scope of its compliance programs to help you meet your architectural and regulatory needs. You can view the current list of services in scope on our Services in Scope page. You can also reach out to your AWS account team if you have any questions or feedback about DESC compliance.

To learn more about our compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) successfully completed the annual recertification audit with no findings for ISO 9001:2015, 27001:2022, 27017:2015, 27018:2019, 27701:2019, 20000-1:2018, 22301:2019, and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) STAR Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) v4.0. The objective of the audit was to enable AWS to expand their ISO and CSA STAR certifications to include one new AWS Region and one new AWS service to the scope. The ISO standards cover areas including quality management, information security, cloud security, privacy protection, service management, and business continuity. The certifications demonstrate the commitment of AWS to maintaining robust security controls and protecting customer data across our services.

As part of this recertification audit, one new Region [Asia Pacific (Taipei)] and one new service (AWS Deadline Cloud) were added into the scope since the last certification issued November 25, 2025.

• AWS Deadline Cloud

For a full list of AWS services that are certified under ISO and CSA Star, see the AWS
ISO and CSA STAR Certified page.
Customers can also access the certifications in the AWS Management Console through AWS Artifact.

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To help you troubleshoot access denied errors, we recently added the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the denying policy to access denied error messages. This builds on our 2021 enhancement that added the type of the policy denying the access to access denied error messages. The ARN of the denying policy is only provided in same-account and same-organization scenarios. This change is gradually rolling out across all AWS services in all AWS Regions.

We added the policy ARN to access denied error messages for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and AWS Organizations policies. Because of this change, you can now pinpoint the exact policy causing the denial. You don’t have to evaluate all the policies of the same type in your AWS environment to identify the culprit. The policy types covered in this update are service control policies (SCPs), resource control policies (RCPs), permissions boundaries policies, session policies, and identity-based policies.

For example, when a developer attempts to perform the ListRoles action in IAM and is denied because of an SCP:

Before:
An error occurred (AccessDenied) when calling the ListRoles operation: User: arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/Matt is not authorized to perform: iam:ListRoles on resource: arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/* with an explicit deny in a service control policy

Enhanced:
An error occurred (AccessDenied) when calling the ListRoles operation: User: arn:aws:iam::123456789012:user/Matt is not authorized to perform: iam:ListRoles on resource: arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/* with an explicit deny in a service control policy: arn:aws:organizations::987654321098:policy/o-qv5af4abcd/service_control_policy/p-2kgnabcd

This enhancement is designed with three principles:

• Limited scope – Same account and same organization only: Policy ARNs are only included when the request originates from either the same AWS account or the same organization as the policy. This limits the scope of the flow of information.
• Additional context in the form of ARN only and not policy content: The additional context covers only the policy ARN, which is a resource identifier, not the policy document itself. It does not reveal the policy’s permissions or conditions that you would have to update to grant access. Users would still need appropriate permissions to read the policy content or take actions.
• No change to authorization logic: This enhancement only affects the error message displayed, not the authorization decision-making process. The same policies deny or allow access as before, and we are not changing how the decision is made.

This accelerates troubleshooting across your organization. Previously, when you received an access denied error from a policy, for example an SCP, you had to review all SCPs in your organization, determine which applied to the account, and evaluate each one—a process that could take time. Now, with the specific SCP ARN included in the error message, whoever has the necessary permission can review the identified SCP and more quickly resolve the issue. This precision reduces the investigative burden. Clear error messages with policy ARNs also improve communication between teams who need access and teams who troubleshoot issues by providing a common reference point, eliminating ambiguity and reducing back-and-forth communication. Lastly, when validating security controls, the policy ARN in access denied errors provides immediate confirmation of which policy is enforcing the restriction, enabling customers to quickly verify their policies are correctly denying access.

Let’s say you’re trying to describe your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) snapshots in the us-east-2 Region by calling this API:
aws rds describe-db-snapshots --region us-east-2

Unfortunately you get an access denied error. The error message shows:
An error occurred (AccessDenied) when calling the DescribeDBSnapshots operation: User: arn:aws:sts::123456789012:assumed-role/ReadOnly/ReadOnlySession is not authorized to perform: rds:DescribeDBSnapshots on resource: arn:aws:rds:us-east-2:123456789012:snapshot:* with an explicit deny in a service control policy: arn:aws:organizations::987654321098:policy/o-qv5af4abcd/service_control_policy/p-lvi9abcd

You can see the context to understand what happens:

• It’s an explicit deny. This means there’s a policy that denies this action for a specific context
• The deny comes from the SCP with this ARN: arn:aws:organizations::987654321098:policy/o-qv5af4abcd/service_control_policy/p-lvi9abcd

Here’s how you can troubleshoot this error:

1. Ensure you have necessary permission to view the SCP. If you don’t, contact your administrator and provide the message that includes the policy ARN.
2. If you have the necessary permission, go to the AWS Management Console for AWS Organizations to access the SCP.
3. Check for a Deny statement for the action. In the preceding example, the action is rds:DescribeDBSnapshots.
4. You can alter the statement to remove the Deny if it’s no longer applicable. For more information, see Update a service control policy (SCP).
5. Re-try your operation. Repeat the troubleshooting process if you get other access denied errors due to different reasons or policies.

This update is gradually rolling out across all AWS services in all AWS Regions, beginning early 2026.

If you have any questions or issues, contact AWS Support or your Technical Account Manager (TAM).

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce the issuance of the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) Type II attestation report with 183 services in scope.

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has published several requirements and guidelines about engaging with outsourced services for the regulated financial services customers in Switzerland.

An independent third-party audit firm issued the report to assure customers that the AWS control environment is appropriately designed and operating effectively to support of adherence with FINMA requirements.

The latest report covers the 12-month period from October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2025 for the following circulars:

• 2018/03 Outsourcing – banks, insurance companies and selected financial institutions under FinIA
• 2023/01 Operational risks and resilience – banks
• Business Continuity Management (BCM) minimum standards proposed by the Swiss Insurance Association.

AWS has added the following five services to the current FINMA scope:

• Amazon Verified Permissions
• AWS B2B Data Interchange
• AWS Resource Explorer
• AWS Security Incident Response
• AWS Transform

Customers can find the FINMA ISAE 3000 report on AWS Artifact. AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact.
Security and compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. When customers move their computer systems and data to the cloud, security responsibilities are shared between the customer and the cloud service provider. For more information, see the AWS Shared Security Responsibility Model.

To learn more about our compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce the issuance of the Criteria to Assess the Information Security of Cloud Services (PiTuKri) Type II attestation report with 183 services in scope.

The Finnish Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom) Cyber Security Centre published PiTuKri, which consists of 52 criteria that provide guidance across 11 domains for assessing the security of cloud service providers.

An independent third-party audit firm issued the report to assure customers that the AWS control environment is appropriately designed and operating effectively to demonstrate adherence with PiTuKri requirements. This attestation demonstrates the AWS commitment to meet security expectations for cloud service providers set by Traficom.

The latest report covers a 12-month period from October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2025. AWS has added the following five services to the current PiTuKri scope:

• Amazon Verified Permissions
• AWS B2B Data Interchange
• AWS Resource Explorer
• AWS Security Incident Response
• AWS Transform

Customers can find the PiTuKri ISAE 3000 report on AWS Artifact. AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact.

Security and compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and the customer. When customers move their computer systems and data to the cloud, security responsibilities are shared between the customer and the cloud service provider. For more information, see the AWS Shared Security Responsibility Model.

To learn more about our compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below

In November 2024, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first major cloud service provider to announce the ISO/IEC 42001 accredited certification for AI services, covering: Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q Business, Amazon Textract, and Amazon Transcribe.

In November 2025, AWS successfully completed its first surveillance audit for ISO 42001:2023, Artificial Intelligence Management System with no findings.

This demonstrates the continual commitment of AWS to responsible AI practices. With this independent validation, our customers can gain further assurances around the AWS commitment to responsible AI and their ability to build and operate AI applications responsibly using AWS services.

For a full list of AWS services that are certified under ISO and CSA STAR, see the AWS ISO and CSA STAR Certified page. Customers can also access the certifications in the AWS Management Console through AWS Artifact.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce the successful completion of Payment Card Industry Personal Identification Number (PCI PIN) audit for the AWS CloudHSM service.

With CloudHSM, you can manage and access your keys on FIPS 140-3 Level 3 validated hardware, protected with customer-owned, single-tenant hardware security module (HSM) instances that run in your own virtual private cloud (VPC). This PCI PIN attestation gives you the flexibility to deploy your regulated workloads with reduced compliance overhead. CloudHSM might be suitable when operations supported by the service are integrated into a broader solution that requires PCI-PIN compliance. For payment operations, such as PIN translation, we encourage you to consider AWS Payment Cryptography as a fully managed alternative for PCI-PIN compliance.

The PCI PIN compliance report package for AWS CloudHSM includes two key components:

• PCI PIN Attestation of Compliance (AOC) – demonstrating that AWS CloudHSM was successfully validated against the PCI PIN standard with zero findings
• PCI PIN Responsibility Summary – provides guidance to help AWS customers understand their responsibilities in developing and operating a highly secure environment for handling PIN-based transactions

AWS was evaluated by Coalfire, a third-party Qualified Security Assessor (QSA). Customers can access the PCI PIN Attestation of Compliance (AOC) and PCI PIN Responsibility Summary reports through AWS Artifact.

To learn more about our PCI program and other compliance and security programs, see the AWS Compliance Programs page. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce the successful completion of Payment Card Industry Personal Identification Number (PCI PIN) audit for the AWS Payment Cryptography service.

With AWS Payment Cryptography, your payment processing applications can use payment hardware security modules (HSMs) that are PCI PIN Transaction Security (PTS) HSM certified and fully managed by AWS, with PCI PIN-compliant key management. This attestation gives you the flexibility to deploy your regulated workloads with reduced compliance overhead.

The PCI PIN compliance report package for AWS Payment Cryptography includes two key components:

• PCI PIN Attestation of Compliance (AOC) – demonstrating that AWS Payment Cryptography was successfully validated against the PCI PIN standard with zero findings
• PCI PIN Responsibility Summary – provides guidance to help AWS customers understand their responsibilities in developing and operating a highly secure environment for handling PIN-based transactions

AWS was evaluated by Coalfire, a third-party Qualified Security Assessor (QSA). Customers can access the PCI PIN Attestation of Compliance (AOC) and PCI PIN Responsibility Summary reports through AWS Artifact.

To learn more about our PCI programs and other compliance and security programs, visit the AWS Compliance Programs page. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Compliance Support page.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.