Setting Up 2FA

In this lesson, you’ll learn to set up two-factor authentication (2FA, also sometimes called multi-factor Authentication [MFA]) for the root account. This is a very important step to secure your AWS account and prevent unauthorized access.

Please note that you need a smartphone to set up 2FA in the way we will do in this lesson. We’ll use the most common way of setting up 2FA by using a Virtual MFA device.

Virtual MFA devices are apps that you install on your smartphone and that provide the authentication code. There are multiple to choose from. Some examples are Authy, Aegis (open source), and Google Authenticator. You’ll need to pick one of them to follow this tutorial, so please install one before continuing. We’ll refer to it as the 2FA app in this lesson.

Logging into the root account

Please log in to the AWS Console with your AWS root account. This will be the email address you used when signing up for AWS.

Steps:

1. Select “Root user” on the AWS login page.
2. Enter the email address that you used to create the AWS account.
3. Click the “Next” button.
4. Enter your password.
5. Click the “Sign in” button.

You should now see the AWS home page.