AWS Identity Design

AWS Identity Design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from niels-emmer/myace. It costs 30 tokens per session (847 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to choosing AWS identity methods, such as IAM roles and identity federation, for people, applications, and deployment systems. AWS identity controls who or what may access cloud resources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing authentication for AWS services, service-to-service calls, CI/CD pipelines, external workloads, or human console and CLI access.
Why use it?
It helps avoid broadly shared permissions and long-lived access keys by matching each workload or user with a suitable access method.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Which agent this was written for is unclear — built for aider. Also seen: mentions Codex; built for aider; mentions OpenCode.

Good fit Use it when designing authentication for AWS services, service-to-service calls, CI/CD pipelines, external workloads, or human console and CLI access.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/niels-emmer/myace/aws-identity
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add niels-emmer/myace --skill aws-identity
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/niels-emmer/myace

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for AWS Identity Design

README.md
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Your own site
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Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for AWS Identity Design

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/niels-emmer/myace/aws-identity"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/niels-emmer/myace/aws-identity.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 30 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 847 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00030 $0.00847
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00424
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00169
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00085

Measured 12d ago against content hash aed815cfab0e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

AWS Identity Design scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

collections/additional/aws/skills/aws-identity/SKILL.md · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Purpose

Identity is the security boundary in AWS. This skill is the AWS-specific companion to iac-expert's "Managed Identity Over Long-Lived Secrets" rule: it explains the identity options AWS offers, when to use each, and how to design so that long-lived access keys are the exception, not the default.

When to use it

Any time you're designing or reviewing how an AWS workload authenticates — a new service, a service-to-service call, a CI/CD pipeline deploying to AWS, or a human accessing the console/CLI.

The identity options, and when to use each

IAM roles — the default for any AWS-hosted workload (EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, etc.). Attach an instance/task/execution role and AWS rotates the backing credentials automatically; your code just requests temporary credentials via the instance metadata/credentials endpoint. Use this for service-to-service access between AWS resources. Prefer a role with a narrowly-scoped trust policy over a shared role with broad permissions.

Identity federation — for non-AWS or external workloads (a GitHub Actions workflow, a Kubernetes cluster outside AWS, a third-party SaaS) that need to act as an AWS identity. Use OIDC federation (e.g. GitHub Actions OIDC) so the external workload's OIDC token is trusted directly — no access key exchanged. Use IAM Roles Anywhere for workloads outside AWS that can't do OIDC but still need temporary credentials. This is the modern replacement for long-lived access keys in CI/CD.

Long-lived access keys — the legacy option. Only acceptable when the target genuinely has no role or federation option. If you must use one: store the secret in Secrets Manager, reference it by ID, scope its IAM policy to least privilege, and rotate it on a short, documented cadence. Treat any new access key as a documented exception per iac-expert's exception-documentation skill.

Human access — IAM users with MFA, or (better) identity federation to a corporate IdP (SSO). No shared accounts, no standing root credentials in code or config. Use IAM Identity Center (SSO) for just-in-time access to roles rather than permanent standing credentials.

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 72 lines · 30 tokens per session scan A aed815cfab0e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

AWS Identity Design is a skill published in the GitHub repository niels-emmer/myace (1 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 30 tokens to every session and 847 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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