Identity Federation with Amazon Cognito

As we build applications that store personal data or offer gated functionality, authentication and authorization become critical. Amazon Cognito provides a managed identity solution that helps us securely verify who our users are and control what they can access, whether they are logging in with email, a social provider like Google, or a corporate identity through SAML.

Cognito integrates smoothly with AWS services and handles identity management tasks, allowing us to focus on building application features without worrying about token validation, credential storage, or permission scoping.

Introduction to Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito is a managed identity and access management service designed specifically for applications. It allows us to add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to web and mobile apps without building authentication systems from scratch. Cognito supports authentication through usernames and passwords, third-party identity providers like Google and Facebook, as well as enterprise identity systems via SAML or OpenID Connect (OIDC). It also integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and AWS Security Token Service (STS) to enable fine-grained authorization using temporary credentials.

By using Cognito, we offload the complexity of managing user directories, tokens, and secure integration with AWS services, giving us a scalable, secure, and standards-compliant identity layer.

How Amazon Cognito works

In Amazon Cognito, we can create two types of pools: user and identity pools.

1. User pools

User pools serve as fully managed user directories that handle sign-up, sign-in, and user profile management. They support multi-factor authentication (MFA), password policies, and federation with social or enterprise identity providers.

The illustration below shows how Amazon Cognito user ...