AWS Security Blog
Category: Advanced (300)
Architecting for database encryption on AWS
In this post, I review the options you have to protect your customer data when migrating or building new databases in Amazon Web Services (AWS). I focus on how you can support sensitive workloads in ways that help you maintain compliance and regulatory obligations, and meet security objectives. Understanding transparent data encryption I commonly see […]
AWS Firewall Manager helps automate security group management: 3 scenarios
April 25, 2023: We’ve updated this blog post to include more security learning resources. In this post, we walk you through scenarios that use AWS Firewall Manager to centrally manage security groups across your AWS Organizations implementation. Firewall Manager is a security management tool that helps you centralize, configure, and maintain AWS WAF rules, AWS […]
Isolating network access to your AWS Cloud9 environments
In this post, I show you how to create isolated AWS Cloud9 environments for your developers without requiring ingress (inbound) access from the internet. I also walk you through optional steps to further isolate your AWS Cloud9 environment by removing egress (outbound) access. Until recently, AWS Cloud9 required you to allow ingress Secure Shell (SSH) […]
How to add DNS filtering to your NAT instance with Squid
September 23, 2020: The squid configuration file in this blog post and associated YAML template have been updated. September 4, 2019: We’ve updated this blog post, initially published on January 26, 2016. Major changes include: support of Amazon Linux 2, no longer having to compile Squid 3.5, and a high availability version of the solution […]
On-Demand SCIM provisioning of Azure AD to AWS IAM Identity Center with PowerShell
September 20, 2022: We updated the link to the GitHub repository. September 12, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more about the name change here. February 14, 2022: We updated this post to include a link to an […]
Role-based access control using Amazon Cognito and an external identity provider
Amazon Cognito simplifies the development process by helping you manage identities for your customer-facing applications. As your application grows, some of your enterprise customers may ask you to integrate with their own Identity Provider (IdP) so that their users can sign-on to your app using their company’s identity, and have role-based access-control (RBAC) based on […]
Integrating AWS CloudFormation security tests with AWS Security Hub and AWS CodeBuild reports
The concept of infrastructure as code, by using pipelines for continuous integration and delivery, is fundamental for the development of cloud infrastructure. Including code quality and vulnerability scans in the pipeline is essential for the security of this infrastructure as code. In one of our previous posts, How to build a CI/CD pipeline for container […]
How to import PFX-formatted certificates into AWS Certificate Manager using OpenSSL
In this blog post, we show you how to import PFX-formatted certificates into AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) using OpenSSL tools. Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates are small data files that digitally bind a cryptographic key pair to an organization’s details. The key pair is used to secure network communications and establish […]
How to use AWS Config to determine compliance of AWS KMS key policies to your specifications
August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. One of the top security methodologies is the principle of least privilege, which is the […]
Automate Amazon Athena queries for PCI DSS log review using AWS Lambda
In this post, I will show you how to use AWS Lambda to automate PCI DSS (v3.2.1) evidence generation, and daily log review to assist with your ongoing PCI DSS activities. We will specifically be looking at AWS CloudTrail Logs stored centrally in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) (which is also a Well-Architected Security […]