All checks
Medium RDS · regional

IAM authentication should be configured for RDS clusters

Checks that RDS DB clusters have IAM database authentication enabled, so clients can sign in with short-lived IAM tokens instead of stored passwords. The flag alone moves no one off passwords: each client also needs a database user mapped to IAM and an IAM policy granting rds-db:connect.

service
RDS
severity
Medium
scope
evaluated in every region

How to fix it

In the console

RDS → Databases → the DB cluster → Modify

With the AWS CLI

aws rds modify-db-cluster --db-cluster-identifier <db-cluster-id> --enable-iam-database-authentication --region <region>

With Terraform

resource "aws_rds_cluster" "this" {
  engine                              = var.engine
  iam_database_authentication_enabled = true
}

See which of your accounts this check is failing on.

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