AWS Security Blog

Category: Intermediate (200)

How to continuously audit and limit security groups with AWS Firewall Manager

At AWS re:Invent 2019 and in a subsequent blog post, Stephen Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer for Amazon Web Services (AWS), laid out the top 10 security items that AWS customers should pay special attention to if they want to improve their security posture. High on the list is the need to manage your network […]

Use new account assignment APIs for AWS SSO to automate multi-account access

September 28, 2022: In July 2022, we renamed AWS Single Sign-On to AWS IAM Identity Center. In this blog, you will notice that we preserved backward compatibility with API calls and CLI scripts by retaining the API and CLI namespaces that were used under AWS Single Sign-On. September 12, 2022: This blog post has been […]

How to approach threat modeling

April 25, 2023: We’ve updated this blog post to include more security learning resources. August 3, 2022: Conclusion updated to reference the AWS “Threat modeling the right way for builders” workshop training. February 14, 2022: Conclusion updated to reference the companion “How to approach threat modelling” video session. In this post, I’ll provide my tips […]

Masking field values with Amazon Elasticsearch Service

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) is a fully managed service that you can use to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost-effectively at scale. The service provides support for open-source Elasticsearch APIs, managed Kibana, and integration with Logstash and other AWS […]

Control VPC sharing in an AWS multi-account setup with service control policies

January 29, 2021: We made minor updates to the architectural diagram in Figure 1. Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers who establish shared infrastructure services in a multi-account environment through AWS Organizations and AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) may find that the default permissions assigned to the management account are too broad. This may allow organizational […]

Use AWS Secrets Manager to simplify the management of private certificates

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy public and private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with Amazon Web Services (AWS) services and your internal connected resources. For private certificates, AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority (ACM PCA) can be used to create private CA hierarchies, including root […]

Figure 1: Architectural overview

Signing executables with HSM-backed certificates using multiple Windows instances

Feb 17, 2025: This blog post references AWS CloudHSM Client SDK 3, which is no longer the recommended version. AWS recommends that you use the latest version, AWS CloudHSM Client SDK 5, which provides updated functionality and commands. We are currently working on an updated blog post for CloudHSM Client SDK 5. See the AWS […]

How to deploy public ACM certificates across multiple AWS accounts and Regions using AWS CloudFormation StackSets

December, 6, 2022: The post had been updated to reflect the updates on Lambda function runtime in the cloudformation template from version 3.6 to 3.9, as 3.6 is deprecated, as well as updates in Lambda deployment package filename in the same template. In this post, I take you through the steps to deploy a public […]

Use a single AWS Managed Microsoft AD for Amazon RDS for SQL Server instances in multiple Regions

Many Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers use Active Directory to centralize user authentication and authorization for a variety of applications and services. For these customers, Active Directory is a critical piece of their IT infrastructure. AWS offers AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, to provide a highly […]

How to bulk import users and groups from CSV into AWS IAM Identity Center

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. When you connect an external identity provider (IdP) to AWS IAM Identity Center using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 standard, you must create […]