Security & Threat Intelligence · 25.07.2026, 15:29 UTC
Identify unused AWS KMS keys and prevent accidental key deletions
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Security & Threat Intelligence |
| Quelle | AWS Security Blog ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 25.07.2026 UTC |
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As you scale your use of Amazon Web Services (AWS), managing KMS keys becomes increasingly important. Whether you manage a handful of keys or thousands across multiple AWS accounts and AWS Regions, there’s often a need to audit key usage to help you meet compliance requirements, evaluate your risk posture, and optimize key management costs. However, determining which keys are actively in use and which have been sitting idle can be a time consuming and complex task. To help with this, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) has launched the GetKeyLastUsage API, a new feature that you can use to quickly determine when each key was last used for a cryptographic operation, significantly enhancing your audit capabilities and key lifecycle management. For more information, see Determine past usage of a KMS key. Before this launch, the primary way to audit key usage was through AWS CloudTrail logs. CloudTrail captures every cryptographic operation by default, so the data is available. The difficulty is turning that data into actionable insight. You need to identify which keys to examine, query the right logs, and repeat that process frequently enough to maintain an accurate view. For the most recent 90 days, CloudTrail event history makes this manageable. Beyond that, you need to create a dedicated trail to deliver logs to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for long-term retention, then query those logs using tools such as Amazon Athena to determine when a key was last used. Determine when a key was last used AWS KMS now provides a direct way to see when a key was last …