Category: Expert (400)

Securing east-west traffic in service meshes, such as AWS App Mesh, by using mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) adds an additional layer of defense beyond perimeter control. mTLS adds bidirectional peer-to-peer authentication on top of the one-way authentication in normal TLS. This is done by adding a client-side certificate during the TLS handshake, through which […]

With AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority (ACM Private CA) you can create private certificate authority (CA) hierarchies, including root and subordinate CAs, without the investment and maintenance costs of operating an on-premises CA. In this post, I will explain how you can use ACM Private CA with AWS CloudHSM to operate a hybrid public […]

Multi-tenant applications must be architected so that the resources of each tenant are isolated and cannot be accessed by other tenants in the system. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is often a key element in achieving this goal. One of the challenges with using IAM, however, is that the number and complexity of IAM […]

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. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) makes it easy to create and manage cryptographic keys […]

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. May 26, 2021: In the section “Secure your tags using an AWS Organizations service control […]

Many Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer workflows require ingesting sensitive and regulated data such as Payments Card Industry (PCI) data, personally identifiable information (PII), and protected health information (PHI). In this post, I’ll show you a method designed to protect sensitive data for its entire lifecycle in AWS. This method can help enhance your data […]

Customers want to use AWS services to operate on their most sensitive data, but they want to make sure that only the right people have access to that data. Even when the right people are accessing data, customers want to account for what actions those users took while accessing the data. In this post, we […]

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network that can help you increase the performance of your web applications and significantly lower the latency of delivering content to your customers. For CloudFront to access an origin (the source of the content behind CloudFront), the origin has to be publicly available and reachable. Anyone with the origin […]

One of the security epics core to the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) is a focus on incident response and preparedness to address unauthorized activity. Multiple methods exist in Amazon Web Services (AWS) for automating classic incident response techniques, and the AWS Security Incident Response Guide outlines many of these methods. This post demonstrates […]

If you have multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, and you have AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles among those multiple accounts that are supposed to be similar, those roles can deviate over time from your intended baseline due to manual actions performed directly out-of-band called drift. As part of regular compliance checks, you […]