Cloud Identity · November 7, 2026
Reviewed
AWS Credential Reviews: From Report to Owned Remediation
Build an evidence-based identity review with report timestamps, credential owners, explicit thresholds, and verification steps.
AWS Credential Reviews: From Report to Owned Remediation
Reviewed: 2026-11-07
An identity review should end with an owner, an explanation, and a verification step. A spreadsheet full of dates is only the starting evidence. Before collecting it, record the account, profile, collection time, and the decision you need to make.
Interpret missing evidence carefully
The IAM credential report summarizes specified IAM-managed credential fields. Its coverage is narrower than an account’s complete identity surface, and a recently requested report can still be a cached report. Keep its generation timestamp and separately inventory role sessions, federation, and credentials outside its coverage.
An unavailable last-use timestamp does not establish that a key has never been used. A disabled key has a different exposure state from an active one. Root identities without console credentials also require different interpretation from password-enabled identities without MFA.
Make the review policy explicit
The credential review lab supplies a local CSV parser and eight executable regression cases. Its age threshold is an adjustable organizational review rule. It does not silently turn that threshold into an AWS-wide compliance requirement or disable credentials automatically.
| Observation | Decision record |
|---|---|
| Active long-lived key | Owner, workload dependency, replacement option, change window |
| Incomplete usage evidence | Additional inventory or telemetry needed |
| Password-enabled identity without MFA | Intended sign-in path and authentication remediation |
| Apparently unused credential | Corroboration, retirement approval, and rollback plan |
Verify the migration, not only the removal
AWS IAM guidance favors temporary credentials for workforce and workload access where applicable. A migration is complete when the replacement identity works with the intended permissions and the old access path has been intentionally retired.
Treat the output as a review queue. Track the dependency owner and retain before/after evidence. Continue with deployment-role delegation: removing old keys alone does not fix an overpowered deployment identity.