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> AWS account ID is also safe to be public.

Not necessarily. An AWS account ID + the knowledge of a role name that by mistake has the "allow role assumption" allowlist too wide (say "*") is now enough to take over the account.

One might of course say "well then don't do that", but of course the more complex a system like IAM is the easier it is for unexperienced people to open the floodgates.



Well sure, but your account email isn't safe to be public if your password is "password".


Email providers have rate limits against specific user logins, IAM not.


How do you know that?


That's easy to find out: change the API credentials of a user, but forget to update the service. Notice only a few days later that you forgot the change, but you also never got any notification "something" is going wrong.

In contrast, every half-decent IdP will lock an account automatically after anything from 3-10 wrong attempts.


Turning what you said around, you're arguing you might want to keep an account ID secret for "security by obscurity" reasons. In my mind, even in a multi-layer security solution, even then the account ID should be considered as a public string whose knowledge (along with other bits like what misconfigurations it has) provides no additional vector of attack, because of defense in depth.




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