Rotate your IAM Keys to be in compliance with security best practices. AWS talks about rotating your keys every 30, 45, or 90 days. But who has the time to make their own script and remember to do that? I did. And security is easier when its less than 3 lines that you need to copy + paste to be secure. Now it's easy to rotate your IAM credentials nightly and wake up with more security than the day before.

AWS Rotate IAM Keys is simple and powerful. There aren't too many features other than rotating keys for a single profile or multiple profiles. The power comes from scheduling daily jobs to rotate your access keys automatically.

AWS Rotate IAM Keys is designed to work with a single computer. Rotating keys on a desktop and a laptop for the same IAM user will lead to invalid keys. To use AWS Rotate IAM Keys with multiple computers you will need to find a way to synchronize your aws credentials across multiple computers. We've had success synchonzing credentials across multiple computers using both SpiderOak and Sync.com, but YMMV.

AWS Rotate IAM Keys also assumes you only have 1 access key at a time. This is normal practice for IAM users. The maximum number of keys is 2, and you need to be able to create a new key when rotating your access keys.

AWS Rotate IAM Keys is supported by all major platforms.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rhyeal/aws-rotate-iam-keys
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install aws-rotate-iam-keys

Requires Homebrew to install. I am hoping to be included in Homebrew Core soon!

brew tap rhyeal/aws-rotate-iam-keys https://github.com/rhyeal/aws-rotate-iam-keys
brew install aws-rotate-iam-keys

Note: this automatically installs/upgrades the awscli homebrew package and its dependent packages. You can skip this using brew install aws-rotate-iam-keys --without-awscli.

IMPORTANT: You must install your own scheduled job for automated key rotation. See Configuration.

wget -q https://github.com/rhyeal/aws-rotate-iam-keys/raw/master/aws-rotate-iam-keys.0.9.5.deb -O aws-rotate-iam-keys.deb
sudo dpkg -i aws-rotate-iam-keys.deb
sudo apt-get install -f
rm aws-rotate-iam-keys.deb # optional file clean up

git clone https://github.com/rhyeal/aws-rotate-iam-keys.git
sudo cp aws-rotate-iam-keys/src/bin/aws-rotate-iam-keys /usr/bin/
rm -rf aws-rotate-iam-keys

IMPORTANT: You must install your own cron job for automated key rotation. See Configuration.

Click here to download the executable PowerShell script.

Simply place this in any directory and then run it. It will install the Scheduled Task to rotate your keys nightly upon first run and will rotate your keys on each run thereafter.

The minimal needed permissions for the AWS user are:

{
	"Version": "2012-10-17",
	"Statement": [
		{
			"Effect": "Allow",
			"Action": [
				"iam:ListAccessKeys",
				"iam:CreateAccessKey",
				"iam:DeleteAccessKey"
			],
			"Resource": [
				"arn:aws:iam::*:user/${aws:username}"
			]
		}
	]
}

$ aws-rotate-iam-keys
Rotating keys for profiles: default
Verifying configuration
Verifying credentials
Creating new access key
Created new key AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
Updating profile: default
Deleting old access key
Deleted old key AKIARCPUMEZ3BEXAMPLE
Keys rotated

$ aws-rotate-iam-keys --profile myProfile
$ aws-rotate-iam-keys -p myProfile

$ aws-rotate-iam-keys --profiles myProfile,myOtherProfile

The result of the above script is that both myProfile and myOtherProfile will have the same access and secret keys in your ~/.aws/credentials file.

$ aws-rotate-iam-keys --profile myProfile
$ aws-rotate-iam-keys --profile myOtherProfile

The result of the above script is that myProfile and myOtherProfile will have different access and secret keys in your ~/.aws/credentials file.

For some operating systems, you need to install your own scheduled job as not all package managers allow programs to create their own scheduled jobs. Also, the scheduled job installed on Ubuntu, Debian and Windows only rotates keys for your default profile. If you need to rotate keys for other profiles you will need to edit the job or add more jobs.

A default job was added to your crontab during installation. This job rotates keys for your default profile. To rotate keys for other profiles you will need to edit your crontab and modify the configuration. Open your crontab by typing:

EDITOR=nano crontab -e

Look for a line like:

33 4 * * * /usr/bin/aws-rotate-iam-keys --profile default >/dev/null #rotate AWS keys daily

Edit the profile for the job if necessary. Add further jobs if you need to invoke aws-rotate-iam-keys multiple times to rotate multiple profiles.

Save your crontab with Ctrl + O and then press [Enter]. Exit and apply changes with Ctrl + X. That's it!

Launchd is the MacOS replacement for cron. Unlike cron, which on MacOS skips job invocations when the computer is asleep, launchd will start the job the next time the computer wakes up.

The Homebrew formula installs a launchd job which can be used to automatically rotate your IAM keys daily. Unfortunately, Homebrew forumlae cannot automatically start launchd jobs, so you must manually enable it:

brew services start aws-rotate-iam-keys

A default/global configuration file for the launchd job is installed to:

/usr/local/etc/aws-rotate-iam-keys

This default configuration rotates keys for your default AWS profile only. To customise the configuration, for example to rotate multiple keys, create a copy of this file named .aws-rotate-iam-keys in your home directory and edit it, e.g.

cp /usr/local/etc/aws-rotate-iam-keys ~/.aws-rotate-iam-keys
nano ~/.aws-rotate-iam-keys

The aws-rotate-iam-keys command is invoked once daily for each line in the configuration. Each line contains a single set of command line options. If you need to invoke the command multiple times to rotate your keys, you must add multiple lines to the configuration, e.g.

--profiles default,myProfile
--profile myOtherProfile

If you do customise the configuration, you can test that it works by restarting the service:

brew services restart aws-rotate-iam-keys

That's it. Your keys should have been rotated, and will now be rotated every day for you. You can use the AWS CLI to check that your access keys have been rotated as expected, e.g.

aws iam list-access-keys --profile default

If it hasn't worked, check the MacOS system log for error entries matching aws-rotate-iam-keys. If you can't find anything useful, the launchd job also writes output to a file in the /tmp directory matching the job name, e.g.

/tmp/homebrew.mxcl.aws-rotate-iam-keys.log

Add a cron job to run AWS Rotate IAM Keys nightly. Open your crontab by typing:

EDITOR=nano crontab -e

Copy and paste the following line into the end of the crontab file:

33 4 * * * /usr/bin/aws-rotate-iam-keys --profile default >/dev/null #rotate AWS keys daily

Edit the profile for the job if necessary. Add further jobs if you need to invoke aws-rotate-iam-keys multiple times to rotate multiple profiles.

Note: your version of cron might skip job invocations when the computer is asleep, so you may need to schedule the job to run at a time when your computer is likely to be awake.

Save your crontab with Ctrl + O and then press [Enter]. Exit and apply changes with Ctrl + X. That's it!

AWS Rotate IAM Keys is set up to automatically schedule a task for you upon first run. If you want to edit the profiles that are being updated, you need to modify the task using Task Scheduler. Look for a task named "AWS Rotate IAM Keys" and modify the -profile parameter from default to a comma-separated list of your profile names.

If you move the .ps1 script from the initial location where you first ran it, you will need to modify the path in the task to point to the correct script location.

Visit us on the web at aws-rotate-iam-keys.com for full installation instructions in a snazzy single-page UI. It's basically this README with some colors.

echo 3e735a9f2b62aa71432e663ef5c1018c aws-rotate-iam-keys.0.9.5.deb | md5sum --check -

Homebrew gets the release zip of the entire repo: SHA256 ccbd38ba4c8725438961b0e9a23a5c713b91568e9ebe6f3b687246140b82f89c

PowerShell script file: MD5 7b78cc773ac69f55dba4caca4de6b437 Windows/aws-rotate-iam-keys.ps1