Connect AWS Account to Aikido

Why connect my AWS cloud?

Securing your cloud infrastructure is crucial to protecting your user data. You can leverage Aikido's security checks to detect and address any misconfigurations in your infrastructure.

Aikido will surface critical cloud misconfigurations that allow hackers to get into your AWS cloud, such as the risk highlighted in this blog post. We focus on the risks that can have a truly big impact on your company's business and cut the noise.

To view the list of security checks performed by Aikido on your cloud environment, go to the 'checks' tab on the cloud overview page at. Filter to AWS to see specific checks performed on your connected AWS account.

Assuming you're using multiple AWS accounts via 'AWS Organizations' to separate staging from production, we recommend trying out Aikido on your staging account first, to get a feel for the process.

Features

After connecting, Aikido will perform the following monitoring:

• Perform a daily compliance scan on all checks listed here: https://app.aikido.dev/clouds/checks

• Monitor your Route 53 domains for subdomain takeover attacks.

Getting started

To get started, head to the cloud overview page on Aikido and click 'Connect cloud.' Follow the step-by-step setup wizard to connect your AWS account to Aikido.

Aikido will require the creation of new role in your AWS account. The permissions for this role enable us to do a security audit of your cloud, but not edit your cloud infrastructure. This works by giving the Aikido AWS account a trust relationship with the newly created role in your account

To view the exact CloudFormation template used to create this role, click here. Inside the wizard, Aikido can also generate an equivalent Terraform template for you.

After creation of the role, Aikido only needs the specific ARN to get started. No access keys or passwords are ever shared with Aikido.

Finally, you can name your connected project in Aikido and specify the environment it operates in. This information helps Aikido prioritize findings based on the severity and impact to your business.

Within 1-2 minutes after connecting your account, Aikido will report misconfigurations that could pose a threat.

Advanced Rules

Besides the checks mentioned above, Aikido offers a suit of complementary checks/rules that you can enable. We call these advanced cloud rules and you can find them here. After enabling any of these rules, you can expect to see the results (as new issues in the feed) within a few seconds.

Just like the standard checks, these are evaluated with each scan of your cloud environments. Moreover, they are mapped to the compliance reports. By default, the advanced rules will appear as disabled in the compliance reports, unless you activate them.

AWS Advanced Rules Changelog

Oct 6, 2025

Eight new AWS advanced rules are available. These focus on CloudWatch logs and metric alarms, and, for those customers with strict security rules, on permissions to S3/SQS without VPC endpoint restrictions.

Oct 2, 2025

We've added 47 new advanced rules for AWS, covering the following services/resources:

• IAM: password policy, users without MFA (Aikido already had a rule that checked highly-privileged users - this one checks all IAM users), and roles that can be assumed by anyone.

• Security groups: individual rules for sensitive ports, such as the ones for LDAP, databases, and SMB.

• Databases (RDS, Redshift).

• S3: bucket and account-level checks, versioning, replication.

Aug 14, 2025

6 more rules added, covering ELB/CF enforcing HTTPS, compute (EC2 and ECS), and CloudWatch.

Jun 25, 2025

The first 15 advanced AWS rules are available. These include rules for database deletion protection (RDS, Neptune, Dynamo DB), public access (EBS snapshots, SNS topics, etc.), and IAM-related ones.