Unused KMS Key
A customer-managed key is billed per month for as long as it exists, independent of how many times it is used, and one with no aliases or grants is not protecting anything.
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AWS
Found, explained, fixed.
Findings with a dollar figure attached, idle, oversized, orphaned, unscheduled and undiscounted spend.
Detect
ZopNight checks this automatically across AWS, with read-only access to the account.
Explain
Every finding says exactly what to change: Schedule deletion of unused KMS key. Where the saving can be proven it is priced; where it cannot, the finding says so.
Fix
After a guided review, where you confirm the change, ZopNight deletes the resource, then checks the change took.
- Applies to
- KMS Keys on AWS
- The fix, by hand
- KMS → Customer managed keys → the resource. Confirm State = Enabled and verify rotation / alias.
- CloudTrail → filter resources.ARN = this key ARN, eventName = Encrypt / Decrypt / GenerateDataKey, 90-day window. Confirm zero hits.
- Grep IaC repos + Secrets Manager + RDS / EBS / S3 bucket configs for the key ARN / alias.
- Actions → Key actions → Schedule key deletion → set waiting period 7-30 days (30 is safest).
- Monitor application logs through the full waiting period; cancel deletion if anything 403s.
- KMS keys cost ~$1/month each. Meaningful only when you have many.
ZopNight does this for you after a guided review.
- Category
- Orphaned resources. Resources no longer attached to anything that needs them, such as unattached volumes and unassigned IPs.
- Where it appears
- The Savings tab of Recommendations, with every affected resource listed.
- Rule ID
RC-058- Full reference
Related checks
See the orphaned resources in your account.
Connect a read-only role and the first pass runs on your own estate. This check, and the rest of the catalogue, with it.
Prefer to talk it through first? Book 20 minutes with the team.
- $30M+annualised cloud spend under management
- 550K+resources tracked since launch
- 20-60%off the bill in the first month
- SOC 2Type II report, plus ISO 27001
Figures published on zop.dev.