AWS IAM Access Key Rotation Reminder Automation Workflow

Watch the demo video below:

Who’s it for

• DevOps/SRE teams responsible for AWS account security.
• Security/compliance officers ensuring key rotation policies are followed.
• Any AWS account owner who wants automatic detection of stale access keys.

How it works / What it does

1. Weekly Scheduler — triggers the workflow on a recurring basis.
2. Get Many Users — fetches all IAM users in the AWS account.
3. Get User Access Key(s) — retrieves the access keys associated with each user.
4. Filter Out Inactive Keys — removes keys that are not active (e.g., status Inactive).
5. Access Key Older Than 365 Days — checks the key creation date and flags keys older than one year.
6. Send Slack Message — notifies a Slack channel with details of the outdated key(s) for review and action.
7. No Operation — safely ends the workflow if no keys match the condition.

How to set up

• Configure the Weekly Scheduler to run at your desired cadence (e.g., every Monday).
• Use Get Many Users to list all IAM users.
• For each user, call ListAccessKeys (Get User Access Key(s)) to fetch their key metadata.
• Apply a filter to keep only keys with status Active.
• Add a condition to compare CreateDate against today - 365 days.
• Send results to Slack using the Slack Post Message node.

Requirements

• n8n (latest version).
• AWS credential in n8n configured for us-east-1 (IAM requires signing with this region).
• IAM permissions:
  • iam:ListUsers
  • iam:ListAccessKeys
• Slack bot credentials with permission to post messages in the desired channel.

How to customize the workflow

• Change threshold — adjust the 365 days condition to 90, 180, or any other rotation policy.
• Escalation — mention @security or create a Jira/Ticket when old keys are found.
• Logging — push flagged results into a Google Sheet, database, or log management system for audit.
• Automation — instead of only notifying, add a step to automatically deactivate keys older than the threshold (after approval).
• Multi-account support — duplicate or loop across multiple AWS credentials if you manage several AWS accounts.