AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a keystone to accessing AWS accounts, but as companies grow, it can be difficult to understand and standardize, especially across many AWS accounts. To put some personality into the challenges of managing identity for multiple AWS resources and accounts, I’ll start with a short story about a fictional company that you might recognize as similar to the one you work in today! ACME Net is growing fast.

The SSH agent (ssh-agent) is an SSH key manager that stores the SSH key in a process memory so that users can log into SSH servers without having to type the key’s passphrase every time they authenticate with the server. In addition to the key management feature, SSH agent supports agent forwarding, which helps to authenticate with servers that sit behind a bastion or jump server.

Z3 is a satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solver developed by Microsoft Research. With a description like that, you’d expect it to be restricted to esoteric corners of the computerized mathematics world, but it has made impressive inroads addressing conventional software engineering needs: analyzing network ACLs and firewalls in Microsoft Azure, for example.

Lack of access accountability and unmonitored access create a considerable security risk for organizations, and the best way to mitigate this challenge is by implementing identity-based access.