[copumpkin]

Some points & questions:

1. It's pretty easy to add iptables rules to 169.254.169.254 by uid and gid, achieving roughly the same restriction as file-based access. Not the case on Mac OS (although you can do something similar with pf) but almost nobody ever uses a Mac in a multi-user setting anyway.

2. Doing anything to the IAM role behind the instance profile will definitely affect the credentials on the system (they won't retain permissions that are no longer valid in the current role policy). I haven't tried removing the role from the instance profile while it's running. Are you saying that that doesn't work? That's disappointing.

3. You can iptables blackhole it, but you're right that root can still recover access to it. Hasn't really affected me in practice though.

4. Can you elaborate on this a bit? They're definitely traceable through CloudTrail (you see who issued the credentials and what session identifier they use is branded into the ARN), although you'll never see the actual random token material. I haven't had a need to do that though. Is that what you mean?

5. Hologram simulates it on other systems, and works quite well.