The Complete AWS IAM Security Audit Checklist for 2025

Regular IAM security audits are essential for maintaining a secure AWS environment, but they're often treated as painful, time-consuming exercises that teams dread. The reality is that manual IAM audits don't scale with modern AWS environments. By the time you finish auditing hundreds of roles and thousands of policies, your findings are already outdated.

The challenge is complexity and scale. A typical enterprise AWS environment contains thousands of IAM entities across multiple accounts, with complex relationships and dependencies that are difficult to understand manually. Traditional audit approaches—spreadsheets, manual policy reviews, and periodic assessments—simply can't keep pace with the dynamic nature of cloud environments.

This comprehensive checklist will help you systematically review your IAM configurations and identify potential security risks. More importantly, we'll show you how to automate these processes to make IAM auditing a continuous, manageable part of your security operations.

Pre-Audit Preparation

Inventory Collection

• [ ] Export all IAM users, roles, and policies
• [ ] Document all AWS accounts in your organization
• [ ] Gather CloudTrail logs for the past 90 days
• [ ] Collect AWS Config compliance reports
• [ ] Review AWS Security Hub findings

Tool Setup

• [ ] Configure AWS CLI with appropriate permissions
• [ ] Set up IAM Access Analyzer
• [ ] Enable AWS Config rules for IAM compliance
• [ ] Install policy analysis tools (e.g., Parliament, PolicySentry)

User Account Security

User Account Review

• [ ] Identify all IAM users (should be minimal in modern architectures)
• [ ] Check for users without recent activity (>90 days)
• [ ] Verify all users have unique usernames
• [ ] Confirm no shared accounts exist
• [ ] Review user tags and metadata

Authentication Security

• [ ] Ensure MFA is enabled for all users
• [ ] Verify MFA devices are properly registered
• [ ] Check for users with multiple access keys
• [ ] Identify unused access keys (>90 days inactive)
• [ ] Review password policy compliance
• [ ] Confirm no hardcoded credentials in code repositories

# Check for users without MFA
aws iam get-account-summary --query 'SummaryMap.UsersQuota'
aws iam list-users --query 'Users[?!MfaDevices].[UserName]' --output table

Role-Based Access Control

Role Configuration Review

• [ ] Document all IAM roles and their purposes
• [ ] Verify roles follow naming conventions
• [ ] Check for overly permissive roles
• [ ] Review role session duration settings
• [ ] Identify unused roles (no AssumeRole activity)

Trust Policy Analysis

• [ ] Review all cross-account trust relationships
• [ ] Verify external ID usage where appropriate
• [ ] Check for overly broad principal specifications
• [ ] Confirm condition keys are properly implemented
• [ ] Validate service-linked role configurations

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::ACCOUNT-ID:role/SPECIFIC-ROLE"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "sts:ExternalId": "UNIQUE-EXTERNAL-ID"
        },
        "Bool": {
          "aws:MultiFactorAuthPresent": "true"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Policy Security Assessment

Managed Policy Review

• [ ] Inventory all customer-managed policies
• [ ] Check for policies with overly broad permissions
• [ ] Identify policies using wildcard (*) actions or resources
• [ ] Review policy versioning and rollback capabilities
• [ ] Verify policy attachment scope

Inline Policy Analysis

• [ ] Document all inline policies (should be minimal)
• [ ] Check for policy duplication across entities
• [ ] Review inline policies for security violations
• [ ] Consider converting inline policies to managed policies

Permission Boundary Evaluation

• [ ] Verify permission boundaries are used where required
• [ ] Check boundary policy effectiveness
• [ ] Ensure boundaries align with organizational policies
• [ ] Review boundary policy conditions

Privilege Escalation Prevention

High-Risk Permission Combinations

• [ ] Check for IAM administrative permissions
• [ ] Review PassRole permissions and their scope
• [ ] Identify policies allowing policy modification
• [ ] Check for unrestricted AssumeRole permissions
• [ ] Review service-specific escalation vectors

# Find policies with dangerous permissions
aws iam list-policies --scope Local --query 'Policies[*].Arn' | \
xargs -I {} aws iam get-policy-version --policy-arn {} --version-id v1 | \
grep -E "(iam:\*|sts:AssumeRole|iam:AttachUserPolicy)"

Service-Specific Risks

• [ ] Lambda function execution roles
• [ ] EC2 instance profiles
• [ ] ECS task roles
• [ ] CodeBuild service roles
• [ ] CloudFormation execution roles

Cross-Account Security

Trust Relationship Audit

• [ ] Map all cross-account relationships
• [ ] Verify business justification for each relationship
• [ ] Check for reciprocal trust relationships
• [ ] Review condition key usage
• [ ] Validate external ID implementation

Resource Sharing Analysis

• [ ] Review S3 bucket policies for cross-account access
• [ ] Check KMS key policies for external access
• [ ] Analyze SNS topic policies
• [ ] Review SQS queue policies
• [ ] Examine Lambda function resource policies

Compliance and Governance

Policy Standardization

• [ ] Verify compliance with organizational standards
• [ ] Check for required tags on IAM resources
• [ ] Review naming convention adherence
• [ ] Confirm approval processes are followed
• [ ] Validate documentation requirements

Regulatory Compliance

• [ ] SOC 2 compliance requirements
• [ ] PCI DSS requirements (if applicable)
• [ ] HIPAA requirements (if applicable)
• [ ] GDPR data access controls
• [ ] Industry-specific regulations

Monitoring and Logging

CloudTrail Configuration

• [ ] Verify CloudTrail is enabled in all regions
• [ ] Check log file integrity validation
• [ ] Review log retention policies
• [ ] Confirm multi-region trail configuration
• [ ] Validate log encryption settings

Access Monitoring

• [ ] Review recent AssumeRole activities
• [ ] Check for unusual access patterns
• [ ] Identify failed authentication attempts
• [ ] Monitor policy changes
• [ ] Review access key usage patterns

# Query CloudTrail for recent AssumeRole events
aws logs filter-log-events \
  --log-group-name CloudTrail/IAMEvents \
  --filter-pattern "{ $.eventName = AssumeRole }" \
  --start-time $(date -d '7 days ago' +%s)000

Automated Security Tools

AWS Native Tools

• [ ] Configure IAM Access Analyzer
• [ ] Set up AWS Config IAM rules
• [ ] Enable Security Hub IAM findings
• [ ] Use AWS Well-Architected Tool
• [ ] Implement AWS Systems Manager compliance

Third-Party Tools

• [ ] Policy analysis tools (Parliament, PolicySentry)
• [ ] Privilege escalation scanners
• [ ] Compliance monitoring solutions
• [ ] Identity governance platforms
• [ ] Security information and event management (SIEM)

Remediation Planning

Risk Prioritization

• [ ] Categorize findings by severity
• [ ] Assess business impact of each issue
• [ ] Determine remediation complexity
• [ ] Create timeline for fixes
• [ ] Assign ownership for each item

Implementation Strategy

• [ ] Plan for zero-downtime changes
• [ ] Prepare rollback procedures
• [ ] Schedule maintenance windows
• [ ] Communicate changes to stakeholders
• [ ] Document all modifications

Post-Audit Activities

Documentation Updates

• [ ] Update IAM documentation
• [ ] Revise security procedures
• [ ] Update incident response plans
• [ ] Refresh training materials
• [ ] Document lessons learned

Continuous Improvement

• [ ] Schedule regular audit cycles
• [ ] Implement automated monitoring
• [ ] Establish security metrics
• [ ] Create feedback loops
• [ ] Plan security awareness training

Conclusion

This comprehensive IAM security audit checklist provides a systematic approach to reviewing your AWS IAM configurations. Regular audits help ensure your environment remains secure as it evolves and grows.

Remember that security is an ongoing process, not a one-time activity. Use this checklist as part of a broader security program that includes continuous monitoring, regular training, and proactive threat detection.

The key to successful IAM security is maintaining the principle of least privilege while enabling business functionality. Regular audits help you strike this balance effectively.

Automating Your IAM Security Audits

While this checklist provides a comprehensive framework for IAM security audits, manually executing these checks across a large AWS environment is time-consuming and error-prone. This is where AccessLens transforms the audit process from a periodic manual exercise into continuous, automated monitoring.

AccessLens automates many of the audit checks we've covered:

• Comprehensive IAM inventory across all your AWS accounts
• Automated policy analysis that identifies overpermissive configurations
• Trust relationship mapping that reveals complex cross-account access patterns
• Compliance monitoring that tracks adherence to your security standards
• Executive reporting that communicates audit results in business terms

Instead of spending weeks manually collecting and analyzing IAM data, AccessLens provides continuous visibility into your IAM security posture with automated analysis and actionable recommendations.

Transform your IAM audit process with AccessLens and move from periodic manual audits to continuous automated monitoring.

Don't let manual audit processes become the bottleneck in your security program. Get the automated IAM analysis capabilities you need to maintain security at scale.