Security and Compliance

Shared Responsibility Model

In the public cloud, there is shared security responsibility between you and AWS.

• AWS responsibility: Security of the Cloud

• Your responsibility: Security in the Cloud

Security of the Cloud

AWS is responsible for protecting and securing its infrastructure.

• AWS Global Infrastructure: AWS is responsible for its global infrastructure elements: Regions, edge locations, and Availability Zones.

• Building Security: AWS controls access to its data centers where your data resides.

• Networking Components: AWS maintains networking components: generators, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems, computer rooms, air conditioning (CRAC) units, fire suppression systems, and more.

• Software: AWS is responsible for any managed service like RDS, S3, ECS, or Lambda, patching of host operating systems, and data access endpoints.

Security in the Cloud

You are responsible for implementing the services and managing your application data.

• Application Data: You are responsible for managing your application data, which includes encryption options.

• Security Configuration: You are responsible for securing your account and API calls, rotating credentials, restricting internet access from your VPCs, and more.

• Patching: You are responsible for the guest operating system (OS), which includes updates and security patches.

• Identity and Access Management: You are responsible for application security and identity and access management.

• Network Traffic: You are responsible for network traffic protection, which includes security group firewall configuration.

• Installed Software: You are responsible for your application code, installed software, and more. It would help if you frequently scan for and patch code vulnerabilities.

EC2 Shared Responsibility Model

Your responsibility	AWS responsibility
Installed applications	EC2 service
Patching the guest operating system	Patching the host operating system
Security controls	Security of the physical server

Lambda Shared Responsibility Model

Your responsibility	AWS responsibility
Security of the code	Lambda service
Storage of sensitive data	Upgrading Lambda languages
IAM for permissions	Lambda endpoints
	Operaing system
	Underlying infrastructure
	Software dependencies

Which security responsibilities are shared?

	Your responsibility	AWS responsibility
Patch Management	Patching guest OS and applications	Patching infrastructure
Configuration Management	Configuring databases and applications	Configure infrastructure devices
Awareness and Training	Your employees	AWS employees

Well-Architected Framework

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a collection of best practices and guidelines for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud.

Six pillars of AWS Well-Architected Framework

1. Operational Excellence

This pillar focuses on creating applications that effectively support production workloads.

• Plans for and anticipate failure

• Deploy smaller, reversible changes

• Script operations as code

• Learn from failure and refine

2. Security

This pillar focuses on putting mechanisms in place that help protect your systems and data.

• Automate security tasks

• Encrypt data in transit and at rest

• Assign only the least privileges required

• Track who did what and when

• Ensure security at all application layers

3. Reliability

This pillar focuses on designing systems that work consistently and recover quickly.

• Recover from failure automatically

• Scale horizontally for resilience

• Stop guessing capacity

• Manage change through automation

• Test recovery procedures

4. Performance Efficiency

This pillar focuses on the effective use of computing resources to meet system and business requirements while removing bottlenecks.

• Use serverless architectures first

• Use multi-region deployments

• Delegate tasks to a cloud vendor

• Experiment with virtual resources

5. Cost Optimization

This pillar focuses on delivering optimum and resilient solutions at the least cost to the user.

• Utilize consumption-based pricing

• Implement Cloud Financial Management

• Measure overall efficiency

• Pay only for resources your application requires

6. Sustainability

This pillar focuses on environmental impacts, especially energy consumption and efficiency.

• Understand your impact

• Establish sustainability goals

• Maximize utilization

• Use managed services

• Reduce downstream impact

6 Pillars in the Real World

1. Operational Excellence (CodeCommit): You can use AWS CodeCommit for version control to enable tracking of code changes and to version-control CloadFormation templates of your infrastructure.

2. Security (CloudTrail): You can configure central logging of all actions performed in your account using CloudTrail.

3. Reliability (RDS): You can use Multi-AZ deployments for enhanced availability and reliability of RDS databases.

4. Performance Efficiency (Lambda): You can use AWS Lambda to run code with zero administration.

5. Cost Optimization (S3): You can use S3 Intelligent-Tiering to automatically move your data between access tiers based on usage patterns.

6. Sustainability (Auto Scaling): You can use EC2 Auto Scaling to ensure you are maximizing utilization.

IAM Users

Identify and Access Management (IAM)

IAM allows you to control access to your AWS services and resources.

• Helps you secure your cloud resources

• You define who has access

• You define what they can do

• A free global service

Identities vs. Access

Identities

Who can access your resources

• Root user

• Individual users

• Groups

• Roles

Access

What resources they can access

• Policies

• AWS managed policies

• Customer managed policies

• Permissions boundaries

Authentication (Who) vs. Authorization (What)

• Authentication: Authentication is where you present your identify (username) and provide verification (password).

• Authorization: Authorization determines which services and resources the authenticated identity has access to.

Users

Users are entities you create in IAM to represent the person or application needing to access your AWS resources.

ROOT User

The root user is created when you first open your AWS account.

What can only the root user do?

• Close your account

• Change email address

• Modify your support plan

Individual Users

Individual users are created in IAM and are used for everyday tasks.

What can individual users do?

• Perform administrative tasks

• Access application code

• Launch EC2 instances

• Configure databases

Applications

You’ll create a user in IAM so you can generate access keys for an application running on-premises that needs access to your cloud resources.

Users in the Real World

• Create access keys for an IAM user that needs access to the AWS CLI: The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) allows you to access resources in your AWS account through a terminal or command window. Access keys are needed when using the CLI and can be generated using IAM.

Groups

A group is a collection of IAM users that helps you apply common access control to all group members.

• Used to group users that perform similar tasks

• Access permissions apply to all members of the group.

• Access is assigned using policies and roles.

Do not confuse security groups for EC2 with IAM groups. EC2 security groups act as firewalls, while IAM groups are collections of users.

• Administrators: Administrators perform administrative tasks such as creating new users.

• Developers: Developers use computing and database services to build applications.

• Analysts: Analysts run to budget and usage reports.

Groups in the Real World

• Apply the same access control to a large set of users: Groups save you time by allowing you to apply the same access permissions to more than one user at once. When a user no longer needs access, they can be removed from the group.

IAM Permissions

Roles

Roles define access permissions and are temporarily assumed by an IAM user or service.

• You assume a role to perform a task in a single session.

• Assumed by any user or service that needs it.

• Access is assigned using policies.

• You grant users in one AWS account access to resources in another AWS account.

Examples:

• User with “DevOps-Engineer Role”: Create code branch in CodeCommit, List pipelines in CodePipeline

• Lambda with “Lambda-Execution Role”: List contents of S3 bucket, Query DynamoDB

Roles in the Real World

• Attach a role to an EC2 instance for access to S3: You can attach a role to an instance that provides privileges (e.g. uploading files to S3) to applications running on the instance. Roles help you avoid sharing long-term credentials like access keys and protect your instances from unauthorized access.

Policies

You manage permissions for IAM users, groups, and roles by creating a policy document in JSON format and attaching it.

Sample JSON Policy

{
  "Version": …,
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Action": rds.*,
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Resource": […]
    }
  ]
}

Policies in the Real World

• You can limit access to an Amazon S3 bucket to specific users: You can add a bucket access policy to an Amazon S3 bucket to grant IAM users access permissions for the bucket and the objects in it.

IAM Best Practices

There are several recommended best practices for IAM.

1. Enable MFA for privileged users: You should enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for the root user and other administrative users.

2. Implement strong password policies: You should require IAM users to change their password after a specified period of time, prevent users from reusing previous passwords, and rotate security credentials regularly.

3. Create individual users instead of using root: You shouldn’t use the root user for daily tasks.

4. Use roles for Amazon EC2 instances: You should use roles for applications that run on EC2 instances instead of long-term credentials like access keys.

IAM Credential Report

The IAM credential report lists all users in your account and the status of their various credentials.

• List all users and the status of passwords, access keys, and MFA devices

• Used for auditing and compliance

Security

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

WAF helps protect your web applications against common web attacks.

• Protects apps against common attack patterns

• Protects against SQL injection

• Protects against cross-site scripting

WAF in the Real World

• Protect your web application from cross-site scripting attacks: You can deploy a web application directly to an EC2 instance and protect it from cross-site scripting attacks using WAF. You can even deploy WAF on CloudFront as part of your CDN solution to block malicious traffic.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

A DDoS attack causes a traffic jam on a website or web application in an attempt to cause it to crash.

Shield

Shield is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service.

• Always-on detection

• Shield Standard is free

• Shield Advanced is a paid service

1. Shield Standard: Provides free protection against common and frequently occurring attacks

2. Shield Advanced: Provides enhanced protections and 24/7 access to AWS experts for a fee

DDoS protection via Shield Advanced is supported on several services.

1. CloudFront

2. Route 53

3. Elastic Load Balancing

4. AWS Global Accelerator

Shield in the Real World

• Receive real-time notifications of suspected DDoS incidents and assistance from AWS during the attack: Shield Advanced will give you notifications of DDoS attacks via CloudWatch metrics. Additionally, with Shield Advanced, you have 24/7 access to AWS experts to assist during an attack.

Macie

Macie helps you discover and protect sensitive data.

• Use machine learning

• Evaluates S3 environment

• Uncovers personally identifiable information (PII)

Macie in the Real World

• Discover passport numbers stored on S3: Macie can be used to find sensitive data like passport numbers, social security numbers, and credit card numbers on S3.

Config

Config allows you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your resources.

• Track configuration changes over time

• Delivers configuration history file to S3

• Notifications via Simple Notification Service (SNS) of every configuration change

Config in the Real World

• Identify system-level configuration changes made to your EC2 instances: Config allows you to record configuration changes within your EC2 instances. You can view network, software, and operating system (OS) configuration changes, system-level updates, and more.

GuardDuty

GuardDuty is an intelligent threat detection system that uncovers unauthorized behavior.

• Use machine learning

• Built-in detection for EC2, S3, and IAM

• Reviews CloudTrail, VPC, Flow Logs, and DNS logs

GuardDuty in the Real World

• Detect unusual API calls in your account: GuardDuty’s anomaly detection feature evaluates all API requests in your account and identifies events that are associated with common techniques used by attackers.

Inspector

Inspector works with EC2 instances to uncover and report vulnerabilities,

• Agent installed on EC2 instance

• Reports vulnerabilities found

• Checks access from the internet, remote root login, vulnerable software version, etc.

Inspector in the Real World

• Identify unintended network access to an EC2 instance via a detailed report of security findings: Inspector has several built-in rules to access your EC2 instances to find vulnerabilities and report them prioritized by level of security.

Artifact

Artifact offers on-demand access to AWS security and compliance reports.

• Central repository for compliance reports from third-party auditors

• Service Organization Controls (SOC) reports

• Payment Card Industry (PCI) reports

Artifact in the Real World

• You need to access AWS certification for ISO compliance: Artifact provides a central repository for AWS security and compliance repots via a self-service portal.

Cognito

Cognito helps you control access to mobile and web applications.

• Provides authentication and authorization

• Helps you manage users

• Assists with user sign-up and sign-in

Cognito in the Real World

• You need to add a social media sign-in to your web application: Cognito provides functionality that allows your users to sign in to your application through social media accounts like Facebook and Google.

Encryption and Secret Management

Understand the difference between data in flight vs. data at rest

• Data in Flight: Data that is moving from one location to another

• Data at Rest: Data that is inactive or stored for later use

Key Management Service (KMS)

KMS allows you to generate and store encryption keys.

• Key generator

• Store and control keys

• AWS manages encryption keys

• Automatically enabled for certain services

KMS in the Real World

• Create encrypted Amazon EBS volumes: When you create an encrypted Amazon EBS volume, you’re able to specify a KMS customer master key.

CloudHSM

CloudHSM is a hardware security module (HSM) used to generate encryption keys.

• Dedicated hardware for security

• Generate and manage your own encryption keys

• AWS does not have access to your keys

CloudHSM in the Real World

• Meet compliance requirements for data security by using dedicated hardware: CloudHSM allows you to meet corporate, contractual, and regulatory compliance requirements for data security by using dedicated hardware in the cloud.

Secret Manager

Secret Manager allows you to manage and retrieve secrets (passwords or keys).

• Rotate, manage, and retrieve secrets

• Encrypt secrets at rest

• Integrates with services like RDS, Redshift, and DocumentDB

Secret Manager in the Real World

• Retrieve database credentials needed for your application code: Secret Manager allows you to retrieve database credentials with a call to Secrets Manager APIs, removing the need to hardcode sensitive information in plain text within your application code.