KSI-IAM-SNUSecuring Non-User Authentication

Strongest evidence for non-user auth is the absence of long-lived keys entirely (prefer IAM roles / temporary credentials). Where keys must exist, this rule proves rotation. Set maxAccessKeyAge to your policy (<=90d). The rule's verdict is only as strong as the maxAccessKeyAge an operator set, and the output does not carry the parameter — a human confirms it matches the SSP's rotation period. Root-user access keys are outside the rule by AWS's documented limitation. Filed under IA-05 base: key age tests IA-05 (g), not AC-02 (01).

AC-02 (02) asks for something narrower than it looks: not that temporary and emergency accounts are reviewed, but that they END on their own after a stated period. Most of that sentence is in this output. The period is the rule's maxCredentialUsageAge. The ending is the remediation configuration — Automatic true and TargetId AWSConfigRemediation-RevokeUnusedIAMUserCredentials, a runbook whose documented behaviour is to deactivate expired access keys and delete expired login profiles. That nothing has outlived the period is the empty NON_COMPLIANT set. A screenshot of a console page proves none of those; these four calls prove all of them. What they do not prove is the control's subject. The Config rule measures every IAM user in the account; nothing in this output says WHICH users are the temporary and emergency ones, and the control is about those. A human names that population — which is exactly why this recipe is partial and not full, and why the CreateDate assertion is written as a filter over your own tagging rather than as a claim over the account. Two scope edges to write into the assessment rather than discover during it. The rule sees IAM users, so an account whose privileges live in an assumed role or an IAM Identity Center permission set is out of its reach — those expire by session duration instead, which is a different artifact (see the IA-11 recipe). And the rule measures INACTIVITY, not age: a temporary account that is used every day is compliant no matter how long ago it should have been closed. The fourth call is what narrows that gap, by reading CreateDate against your own tagging of which accounts were meant to be temporary. That last check is only as complete as the tagging behind it, and no AWS Config rule can make it complete: REQUIRED_TAGS does not support AWS::IAM::User, so tag coverage over IAM users cannot be asserted from Config at all. Treat the tagging standard as a written control with a manual sample. Read the CreateDate assertion for what it is — a check over exactly the accounts your tagging labels, which passes without saying anything on an estate that labels none. The first remediation assertion is not redundant with the two that follow it. describe-remediation-configurations returns a list whose minimum length is zero, so a rule with NO remediation attached returns an empty array, and a clause of the form 'every entry is Automatic' is true over it. Testing that the first entry exists is what turns 'the revocation fires by itself' from a claim into a field. The 90 in the assertions is the AWS default, not a FedRAMP number. Replace it in both places with the period your SSP commits to, and keep the runbook's own MaxCredentialUsageAge parameter equal to the period of the rule that triggers it — AWS documents that discipline for the access-keys-rotated pairing (match MaxCredentialUsageAge to that rule's maxAccessKeyAge) rather than for this rule, but the failure it prevents is the same one: a mismatch means the detection window and the revocation window disagree silently. Re-evaluating the rule within 4 hours of its last evaluation returns the previous result, so collect on the rule's own cadence rather than on demand.