Service Bearer Tokens
Learn to use short-lived bearer tokens for secure, identity-based service authentication across AWS and third-party systems, ensuring proper validation and safe handling.
Bearer tokens are temporary credentials commonly used for authenticating service-to-service communication. In AWS, bearer tokens play a central role in enabling secure access to services without relying on long-lived IAM credentials. They’re included in requests using an Authorization header, and any entity in possession of the token is granted access to the specified resource, therefore, the term “bearer.”
Bearer tokens work on the principle of possession, whoever holds the token can access the associated resource. Because of this, systems must enforce HTTPS and strict token handling policies.
These tokens are commonly issued by identity providers like Amazon Cognito or external OAuth providers and include claims such as the issuer (iss), audience (aud), subject (sub), and expiration (exp). These claims help validate and scope the token.
How AWS services implement bearer tokens
AWS services integrate bearer tokens in different ways depending on the context of use. Here are some of the most common implementations:
Amazon Cognito issues JWTs (ID, access, and refresh tokens) during user authentication. These JWTs are bearer tokens that allow access to APIs or to AWS services like API Gateway.
Amazon EKS uses IAM roles for service accounts (IRSA) to grant pods access to AWS ...