It's crappy design which bypasses important security mechanisms of the OS (lower privileged users) by allowing every application with network access to access such critical functionality. One sane approach would be passing this information to the OS through the hypervisor which then exposes it as a properly ACLed file system.

This is like an author of a website vulnerable to CSRF (because it relies on IP for auth) blaming browsers for allowing cross site requests instead of require proper authentication. Except that Amazon is powerful enough to get away with pushing all the effort onto developers and admins.