Amazon ECS Agent Adds Signing for Additional Security

Posted on: May 24, 2018

The Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) agent is now digitally signed using PGP and Windows signatures.

The Amazon ECS agent is open source software that runs on each EC2 compute instance in your Amazon ECS cluster and is responsible for starting, stopping, and monitoring containers on the instance. Previously, if you were downloading the ECS agent code to install on an instance yourself or include as part of your own Amazon Machine Image (AMI), AWS provided an MD5 sum with the ECS agent, which let you check that the code was not corrupted, but did not certify that the code was created by AWS.

Now, the ECS agent is signed by AWS using PGP and Windows signatures. This allows you to ensure your containerized infrastructure is secure when you download the ECS agent to install yourself or include as part of your own AMI. The Amazon ECS agent is included automatically as part of the Amazon ECS-optimized AMI.

To learn more, visit the Amazon ECS documentation. You can get more information about Amazon ECS here.

Please visit the AWS global region table to see all AWS regions where Amazon ECS is available.