AWS News Blog

Amazon RDS: Support For SSL Connections

Voiced by Polly

By popular demand, the Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports SSL encrypted connections!

We now generate an SSL certificate for each DB Instance. If you need a certificate for an existing instance you’ll need to reboot it using the AWS Management Console, the RDS command-line tools, or the RDS APIs.

CloudWatch Metrics in the AWS Management ConsoleHere are a few things to keep in mind:

  • SSL encrypts the data transferred “over the wire” between your DB Instance and your application. It does not protect data “at rest.” If you want to do this, you’ll need to encrypt and decrypt the data on your own.
  • SSL encryption and decryption is a compute-intensive task and as such it will increase the load on your DB Instance. You should monitor your database performance using the CloudWatch metrics in the AWS Management Console (pictured at right), and scale up to a more powerful instance type if necessary.
  • The SSL support is provided for encryption purposes and should not be relied upon to authenticate the DB Instance itself.
  • You can configure your database to accept only SSL connections by using the GRANT command with the REQUIRE SSL option. You can do this on a per-user basis so you could, for example, require SSL requests only from users connecting from a non-EC2 host.

You can learn more about this new feature in the RDS Documentation on Database Instances and in the forum post.

— Jeff;

Modified 08/17/2020 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.
Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.