Generative AI Meets AWS Security

A Case Study Presented by CodeWhisperer Customizations

Amazon CodeWhisperer is an AI-powered coding assistant that is trained on a wide variety of data, including Amazon and open-source code. With the launch of CodeWhisperer Customizations, customers can create a customization resource. The customization is produced by augmenting CodeWhisperer using a customer’s private code repositories. This enables organization-specific code recommendations tailored to the customer’s own internal APIs, libraries, and frameworks.

When we started designing CodeWhisperer Customizations, we considered what our guiding principles, our tenets, should be. Customer trust was at the top of the list, but that posed new questions. How could we best earn our customer’s trust with a feature that fundamentally relies on a customer’s sensitive information? How could we properly secure this data so that customers could safely leverage the advanced capabilities we launched for them?

When considering these questions, we analyzed several design principles. It was important not to combine a customer’s data, or use it alongside, another customer’s. In other words, we needed to store each customer’s data in isolation. Additionally, we also wanted to restrict data processing to single-tenant compute. By this, we mean that access of the data itself should be done on short-lived and non-shared compute, whenever possible. Another principle we considered was how to prevent unauthorized access of customer data. Across AWS, we build our systems to avoid intermingling of customer data during normal service operation, and to mitigate any risk of unauthorized users gaining unintended access to customer data.

These design principles pointed to a set of security controls available via native AWS technologies. We needed to provide data and compute isolation as well as mitigate confused deputy risks at each step of the process. In this blog post, we will consider how each of these security considerations is addressed, utilizing AWS best practices. We will first consider the flow of data through the admin’s management of customization resources. Next, we will outline data interactions when developers send runtime requests to a given customization from their integrated development environment (IDE).

In reading this blog post, you will learn how we developed CodeWhisperer Customizations with security at the forefront. We also hope that you are inspired to leverage some of the same AWS technologies in your own applications.

Diagram

The diagram above depicts the flow of data during an administrator’s management of a customization as well as during a developer’s usage of the customization from their IDE.

1. API Layer: Authenticates and authorizes each request. Passes data references to the downstream dependencies.
2. Data Ingestion Layer: Ingests and processes customer data into the format required for CodeWhisperer.
3. Customization Layer: Produces a customization resource based on the internal representation of the customer data. Shares the customization artifacts for inference.
4. Model Inference Layer: Provides customer-specific recommendations based on the customization.
5. AWS IAM Identity Center: Provides user-level authentication.
6. Amazon Verified Permissions: Provides customization-level authorization.

Customization Management

Organization admins are responsible for managing their customizations. To enable CodeWhisperer to produce these resources, the admin provides access to their private code repositories. CodeWhisperer uses AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) encryption for all customization data, and admins can optionally configure their own profile-level encryption keys. Based on the role assumed by the admin in the AWS console, CodeWhisperer accesses and ingests the referenced code data on the user’s behalf.

Data Isolation

During customization management, data storage occurs in two forms:

1. Longer-term/persistent (e.g. service-owned Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets)
2. Short-term/transient (e.g. ephemeral disks on service-managed, serverless compute)

When persisting data in any form, the best security control to apply is encryption. By encrypting the data, only entities with access to the encryption key will be able to see, or use, the data. For example, when encrypted data is stored in Amazon S3, users with access to the bucket can see that the data exists, but will be unable to view the content, unless they also have access to the encryption key.

Within CodeWhisperer, long-term customer data storage in Amazon S3 is cryptographically isolated using KMS keys with customer-level encryption context metadata. The encryption context provides a further safeguard which prevents unauthorized users from accessing the content even if they gain access to the key. It also prevents unintentional, cross-customer data access as the context value is tied to a particular customer’s identity. Having access to the KMS key without this context is like having the physical invitation to a private meeting without knowing the spoken passphrase for the event.

CodeWhisperer gives customers the option to configure their own KMS keys for AWS to use when encrypting their data. Additionally, we restrict programmatic access (i.e. service usage) to Amazon S3 data via scoped-down IAM roles assigned to specific internal components. By doing this, the KMS grants created for each key are strictly limited to the services that need access to the data for service operation.

When data needs to be persisted for short-term processing, we also encrypt it. CodeWhisperer leverages client-side encryption with service-owned keys for such ephemeral disks. Data is only stored on the disk while the process is executing, and any on-disk data storage is explicitly deleted, alarming on any failures, before the process is terminated. To avoid cross-over of customer data, each instance of the serverless compute is spun up for a specific operation on a specific resource. No two customer resources are processed by the same workflow or serverless function execution.

Compute Isolation

When creating or activating a customization, customer data is handled in a series of serverless environments. Most of this processing is facilitated through AWS Step Functions workflows – comprised of AWS Lambda, AWS Batch (on AWS Fargate), and nested Step Functions tasks. Each of these serverless tasks are instantiated for a given job in the system. In other words, the compute will not be shared, or reused, between two operations.

The general principle that can be observed here is the reuse of existing AWS services. By leveraging these various serverless options, we did not have to spend undifferentiated development effort on securing the compute usage. Instead, we inherited the security controls baked into these services and focused our energy on enabling the unique capabilities of customizing CodeWhisperer.

Confused Deputy Mitigations

When building a multi-tenant service, it is important to be mindful not only of how data is accessed in the expected cases, but also how it might be accessed in accidental as well as malicious scenarios. This is where the concept of confused deputy mitigations comes into picture.

To prevent cross-customer data access during data ingestion, we have two mitigations in place:

1. We explicitly check that the AWS credentials received in the request correspond to the account that owns the data reference (i.e. AWS CodeStar Connections ARN).
2. We utilize a secure token, based on the administrator’s role, to gain permissions to download the data from the customer-provided reference.

Once the data is inside the CodeWhisperer service boundaries though, we are not done. Since CodeWhisperer is built on top of a microservice-based architecture, only the expected internal components should be able to interact with their respective consumers and dependencies. To prevent unauthorized users from invoking these internal services that handle the customer data, we utilize account-based allowlists. Each internal service is restricted to a set of CodeWhisperer-owned service accounts that have a need to invoke the service’s APIs.

As further protection for the data inside these services, we utilize customer-managed key encryption for all Amazon S3 data. When a customer does not explicitly provide their own key, we utilize a CodeWhisperer-owned KMS key for the same encryption.

KMS key usage requires a grant. These grants provide a given entity the ability to use the key to read, or write, data. To mitigate the risk of improper usage of these grants, we installed certain controls. To limit the number of entities with top-level grant permissions, all grants are managed by a single microservice. To restrict the usage of the grants to the expected CodeWhisperer workflows, the grants are created for the minimum lifecycle. They are immediately retired once the CodeWhisperer operation is complete.

Customization Usage

After an admin creates, activates, and grants access to a customization resource, a developer can select the customization within their IDE. Upon invocation, CodeWhisperer captures the user’s IDE code context and sends it to CodeWhisperer. The request also includes their authentication token and a reference to their target customization resource. Given successful authentication and authorization, CodeWhisperer responds with the customized recommendation(s).

Data Isolation

There is no persistent data storage used during invocations of a customization. These invocations are stateless, meaning that any data passed within the request is not persisted beyond the life of the request itself. To mitigate any data risks within the lifetime of the request, we authenticate and authorize users via IAM Identity Center.

Since a customization is tied to company data and its recommendations can reproduce such data, it is crucial to maintain tight authorization around the resource access. CodeWhisperer authorizes individual users against the customization resource via Amazon Verified Permissions policies. These policies are configured by a customer admin in the AWS Console when they assign users and groups to a given customization. (Note: CodeWhisperer manages these Verified Permissions policies on behalf of our customers, which is why admins will not see the policies themselves listed in the console directly.) The service internally resolves the policy to the corresponding service-owned resources constituting the customization.

Compute Isolation

The primary compute for CodeWhisperer invocations is an instance hosting the generative model. Generative models run multi-tenanted on a physical host, i.e. each model runs on a dedicated compute resource within a host that has multiple such resources. By tying each request to a particular compute resource, inference calls cannot interact or communicate with any other ongoing inference.

All other runtime processing is executed in independent threads on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) container instances with Fargate technology. No computation on user data spans across more than one of these threads within a given CodeWhisperer service.

Confused Deputy Mitigations

As we discussed for customization management, confused deputy mitigations are applied to reduce the risk of accidental and malicious access to customer data by unauthorized entities. To address this when a customization is used, we restrict customers, via Verified Permissions permissions, to accessing only the internal resources tied to their selected customization. We further protect against confused deputy risks by configuring a session policy for each inference request. This session policy scopes down the permission to a specific resource name, which is internally managed and not exposed publicly.

Conclusion

In the age of generative AI, data is a chief differentiator for the efficacy of end applications. The CodeWhisperer foundational model has been trained on a wide array of data. This enables CodeWhisperer to help boost developer productivity from the baseline and utilize open-source packages that are commonly included throughout software development. To further improve developer productivity, customers can leverage the CodeWhisperer customization capability to ingest their private data and securely provide tailored recommendations to their developers.

CodeWhisperer Customizations was built with security and customer trust at the forefront. We have the following security invariants baked in from day one:

• All asynchronous customer data workloads are fully data isolated.
• All customer data is KMS key encrypted at rest, and when possible, encrypted with a customer KMS key.
• All customer data access is gated by authorization derived from authenticated contexts obtained from trusted authorities (IAM, Identity Center).
• All customer data in customization management workflows is stored in cryptographically enforced isolation.

We hope you are as excited as us about this capability with generative AI! Give CodeWhisperer Customizations a try today: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codewhisperer/latest/userguide/customizations.html