Authentication
Amazon SQS provides authentication procedures to allow for secure handling of data. Amazon uses its Amazon Web Services (AWS) identification to do this, requiring users to have an AWS enabled account with Amazon.com; this can be created at http://aws.amazon.com. AWS assigns a pair of related identifiers, your AWS access keys, to an AWS enabled account to perform identification. The first identifier is a public 20-character Access Key. This key is included in an AWS service request to identify the user. If the user is not using SOAP (protocol) with WS-Security, a digital signature is calculated using the Secret Access Key. The Secret Access Key is a 40-character private identifier. AWS uses the Access Key ID provided in a service request to look up an account's Secret Access Key. Amazon.com then calculates a digital signature with the key. If they match then the user is considered authentic, if not then the authentication fails and the request is not processed.
Read more about this topic: Amazon Simple Queue Service