AWS

Amazon Simple Queue Service Developer Guide
Viewing Your AWS Identifiers
AWS or Amazon.com. No one who legitimately represents Amazon will ever ask you for your
Secret Access Key.
The Access Key ID is associated with your AWS account. You include it in AWS service requests to
identify yourself as the sender of the request.
The Access Key ID is not a secret, and anyone could use your Access Key ID in requests to AWS. To
provide proof that you truly are the sender of the request, you must also include a digital signature. For
all requests, you calculate the signature using your Secret Access Key. AWS uses the Access Key ID in
the request to look up your Secret Access Key and then calculates a digital signature with the key. If the
signature AWS calculates matches the signature you sent, the request is considered authentic. Otherwise,
the request fails authentication and is not processed.
Related Topics
• HMAC-SHA Signatures (p. 19)
• Query Request Authentication (p. 23)
Viewing Your AWS Identifiers
Your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key are displayed to you when you create your AWS account.
They are not e-mailed to you. If you need to see them again, you can view them at any time from your
AWS account.
To view your AWS access identifiers
1. Log in to the AWS security credentials web site.
2. Scroll down to the Access Credentials section and select the Access Keys tab.
3. Locate an active Access Key in the Your Access Keys list.
4. To display the Secret Access Key, click Show in the Secret Access Key column.
Related Topics
• Your AWS Account (p. 18)
• Your AWS Identifiers (p. 18)
HMAC-SHA Signatures
Topics
• Required Authentication Information (p. 20)
• Basic Authentication Process (p. 20)
• About the String to Sign (p. 22)
• About the Time Stamp (p. 22)
• Java Sample Code for Base64 Encoding (p. 22)
• Java Sample Code for Calculating HMAC-SHA1 Signatures (p. 22)
The topics in this section describe how Amazon SQS uses HMAC-SHA signatures to authenticate Query
requests.
API Version 2009-02-01
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