AWS re:Inforce 2023: Key announcements and session highlights

Thank you to everyone who participated in AWS re:Inforce 2023, both virtually and in-person. The conference featured a lineup of over 250 engaging sessions and hands-on labs, in collaboration with more than 80 AWS partner sponsors, over two days of immersive cloud security learning. The keynote was delivered by CJ Moses, AWS Chief Information Security Officer, Becky Weiss, AWS Senior Principal Engineer, and Debbie Wheeler, Delta Air Lines Chief Information Security Officer. They shared the latest innovations in cloud security from AWS and provided insights on how to foster a culture of security in your organization.

If you couldn’t join us or would like to revisit the insightful themes discussed, we’ve put together this blog post for you. It provides a comprehensive summary of all the key announcements made and includes information on where you can watch the keynote and sessions at your convenience.

Key announcements

Here are some of the top announcements that we made at AWS re:Inforce 2023:

• Amazon Verified Permissions — Verified Permissions is a scalable permissions management and fine-grained authorization service for the applications you build. The service helps your developers build secure applications faster by externalizing authorization and centralizing policy management and administration. Developers can align their application access with Zero Trust principles by implementing least privilege and continual verification within applications. Security and audit teams can better analyze and audit who has access to what within applications. Amazon Verified Permissions uses Cedar, an open-source policy language for access control that empowers developers and admins to define policy-based access controls using roles and attributes for context-aware access control.
• Amazon Inspector code scanning of Lambda functions — Amazon Inspector now supports code scanning of AWS Lambda functions, expanding the existing capability to scan Lambda functions and associated layers for software vulnerabilities in application package dependencies. Amazon Inspector code scanning of Lambda functions scans custom proprietary application code you write within Lambda functions for security vulnerabilities such as injection flaws, data leaks, weak cryptography, or missing encryption. Upon detecting code vulnerabilities within the Lambda function or layer, Amazon Inspector generates actionable security findings that provide several details, such as security detector name, impacted code snippets, and remediation suggestions to address vulnerabilities. The findings are aggregated in the Amazon Inspector console and integrated with AWS Security Hub and Amazon EventBridge for streamlined workflow automation.
• Amazon Inspector SBOM export — Amazon Inspector now offers the ability to export a consolidated Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) for resources that it monitors across your organization in multiple industry-standard formats, including CycloneDx and Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX). With this new capability, you can use automated and centrally managed SBOMs to gain visibility into key information about your software supply chain. This includes details about software packages used in the resource, along with associated vulnerabilities. SBOMs can be exported to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket and downloaded for analyzing with Amazon Athena or Amazon QuickSight to visualize software supply chain trends. This functionality is available with a few clicks in the Amazon Inspector console or using Amazon Inspector APIs.
• Amazon CodeGuru Security — Amazon CodeGuru Security offers a comprehensive set of APIs that are designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing pipelines and tooling. CodeGuru Security serves as a static application security testing (SAST) tool that uses machine learning to help you identify code vulnerabilities and provide guidance you can use as part of remediation. CodeGuru Security also provides in-context code patches for certain classes of vulnerabilities, helping you reduce the effort required to fix code.
• Amazon EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint — Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) announced support for connectivity to instances using SSH or RDP in private subnets over the Amazon EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint (EIC Endpoint). With this capability, you can connect to your instances by using SSH or RDP from the internet without requiring a public IPv4 address.
• AWS built-in partner solutions — AWS built-in partner solutions are co-built with AWS experts, helping to ensure that AWS Well-Architected security reference architecture guidelines and best security practices were rigorously followed. AWS built-in partner solutions can save you valuable time and resources by getting the building blocks of cloud development right when you begin a migration or modernization initiative. AWS built-in solutions also automate deployments and can reduce installation time from months or weeks to a single day. Customers often look to our partners for innovation and help with “getting cloud right.” Now, partners with AWS built-in solutions can help you be more efficient and drive business value for both partner software and AWS native services.
• AWS Cyber Insurance Partners — AWS has worked with leading cyber insurance partners to help simplify the process of obtaining cyber insurance. You can now reduce business risk by finding and procuring cyber insurance directly from validated AWS cyber insurance partners. To reduce the amount of paperwork and save time, download and share your AWS Foundational Security Best Practices Standard detailed report from AWS Security Hub and share the report with the AWS Cyber Insurance Partner of your choice. With AWS vetted cyber insurance partners, you can have confidence that these insurers understand AWS security posture and are evaluating your environment according to the latest AWS Security Best Practices. Now you can get a full cyber insurance quote in just two business days.
• AWS Global Partner Security Initiative — With the AWS Global Partner Security Initiative, AWS will jointly develop end-to-end security solutions and managed services, leveraging the capabilities, scale, and deep security knowledge of our Global System Integrators (GSI) partners.
• Amazon Detective finding groups — Amazon Detective expands its finding groups capability to include Amazon Inspector findings, in addition to Amazon GuardDuty findings. Using machine learning, this extension of the finding groups feature significantly streamlines the investigation process, reducing the time spent and helping to improve identification of the root cause of security incidents. By grouping findings from Amazon Inspector and GuardDuty, you can use Detective to answer difficult questions such as “was this EC2 instance compromised because of a vulnerability?” or “did this GuardDuty finding occur because of unintended network exposure?” Furthermore, Detective maps the identified findings and their corresponding tactics, techniques, and procedures to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, enhancing the overall effectiveness and alignment of security measures.
• [Pre-announce] AWS Private Certificate Authority Connector for Active Directory –— AWS Private CA will soon launch a Connector for Active Directory (AD). The Connector for AD will help to reduce upfront public key infrastructure (PKI) investment and ongoing maintenance costs with a fully managed serverless solution. This new feature will help reduce PKI complexity by replacing on-premises certificate authorities with a highly secure hardware security module (HSM)-backed AWS Private CA. You will be able to automatically deploy certificates using auto-enrollment to on-premises AD and AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory.
• AWS Payment Cryptography — The day before re:Inforce, AWS Payment Cryptography launched with general availability. This service simplifies cryptography operations in cloud-hosted payment applications. AWS Payment Cryptography simplifies your implementation of the cryptographic functions and key management used to secure data and operations in payment processing in accordance with various PCI standards.
• AWS WAF Fraud Control launches account creation fraud prevention — AWS WAF Fraud Control announces Account Creation Fraud Prevention, a managed protection for AWS WAF that’s designed to prevent creation of fake or fraudulent accounts. Fraudsters use fake accounts to initiate activities, such as abusing promotional and sign-up bonuses, impersonating legitimate users, and carrying out phishing tactics. Account Creation Fraud Prevention helps protect your account sign-up or registration pages by allowing you to continuously monitor requests for anomalous digital activity and automatically block suspicious requests based on request identifiers and behavioral analysis.
• AWS Security Hub automation rules — AWS Security Hub, a cloud security posture management service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts, and facilitates automated remediation, now features a capability to automatically update or suppress findings in near real time. You can now use automation rules to automatically update various fields in findings, suppress findings, update finding severity and workflow status, add notes, and more.
• Amazon S3 announces dual-layer server-side encryption — Amazon S3 is the only cloud object storage service where you can apply two layers of encryption at the object level and control the data keys used for both layers. Dual-layer server-side encryption with keys stored in AWS Key Management Service (DSSE-KMS) is designed to adhere to National Security Agency Committee on National Security Systems Policy (CNSSP) 15 for FIPS compliance and Data-at-Rest Capability Package (DAR CP) Version 5.0 guidance for two layers of MFS U/00/814670-15 Commercial National Security Algorithm (CNSA) encryption.
• AWS CloudTrail Lake dashboards — AWS CloudTrail Lake, a managed data lake that lets organizations aggregate, immutably store, visualize, and query their audit and security logs, announces the general availability of CloudTrail Lake dashboards. CloudTrail Lake dashboards provide out-of-the-box visualizations and graphs of key trends from your audit and security data directly within the CloudTrail console. It also offers the flexibility to drill down on additional details, such as specific user activity, for further analysis and investigation using CloudTrail Lake SQL queries.
• AWS Well-Architected Profiles — AWS Well-Architected introduces Profiles, which allows you to tailor your Well-Architected reviews based on your business goals. This feature creates a mechanism for continuous improvement by encouraging you to review your workloads with certain goals in mind first, and then complete the remaining Well-Architected review questions.

Watch on demand

Leadership sessions — You can watch the leadership sessions to learn from AWS security experts as they talk about essential topics, including open source software (OSS) security, Zero Trust, compliance, and proactive security.

Breakout sessions, lightning talks, and more — Explore our content across these six tracks:

• Application Security— Discover how AWS, customers, and AWS Partners move fast while understanding the security of the software they build.
• Data Protection — Learn how AWS, customers, and AWS Partners work together to protect data. Get insights into trends in data management, cryptography, data security, data privacy, encryption, and key rotation and storage.
• Governance, Risk, and Compliance — Dive into the latest hot topics in governance and compliance for security practitioners, and discover how to automate compliance tools and services for operational use.
• Identity and Access Management — Learn how AWS, customers, and AWS Partners use AWS Identity Services to manage identities, resources, and permissions securely and at scale. Discover how to configure fine-grained access controls for your employees, applications, and devices and deploy permission guardrails across your organization.
• Network and Infrastructure Security — Gain practical expertise on the services, tools, and products that AWS, customers, and partners use to protect the usability and integrity of their networks and data.
• Threat Detection and Incident Response — Discover how AWS, customers, and AWS Partners get the visibility they need to improve their security posture, reduce the risk profile of their environments, identify issues before they impact business, and implement incident response best practices.
• You can also watch our Lightning Talks and the AWS On Air day 1 and day 2 livestream on demand.

Session presentation downloads are also available on the AWS Events Content page. If you’re interested in further in-person security learning opportunities, consider registering for AWS re:Invent 2023, which will be held from November 27 to December 1 in Las Vegas, NV. We look forward to seeing you there!

If you would like to discuss how these new announcements can help your organization improve its security posture, AWS is here to help. Contact your AWS account team today.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.