Category: Intermediate (200)

In this post, I explain how you can use attribute-based access controls (ABAC) in Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help provision simple, maintainable access controls to different projects, teams, and workloads as your organization grows. ABAC gives you access to granular permissions and employee-attribute based authorization. By using ABAC, you need fewer AWS Identity and […]

In this post, I use the new Cross-Account feature of AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) to create a CA in one account and then use ACM in a second account to issue a private certificate that automatically renews the following year. This newly available workflow expands the usability of ACM Private CA […]

In this post, we discuss how to implement the operating system security requirements defined by the Defence Information Systems Agency (DISA) Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs). As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer, you can use Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) published by AWS or APN partners. These AMIs, which are owned and published by AWS, […]

December 2, 2024: This post has been updated to reflect the transition to WAFV2, with aligned 1:1 mapping from Classic partner-managed rules to partner-managed rules. AWS WAF Classic support will end on September 30, 2025. In November 2019, Amazon launched a new version of AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) that offers a richer and easier […]

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. In this post, I will provide guidance and resources that will help you align to […]

AWS Organizations provides central governance and management across AWS accounts. In this post, we explain how AWS Organizations can make the lives of your Information Security engineers easier, based on our experience in the Information Security team at Amazon. The service control policies (SCPs) feature in AWS Organizations offers you central control over permissions for […]

In this post, we show you how you can use AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) to request or issue private certificates across a multi-account environment by using IAM roles. This solution allows you to centralize your ACM Private CA inside your AWS Organization, which reduces the complexity and the cost of having […]

You can use AWS CloudHSM to help manage your encryption keys on FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated hardware security modules (HSMs). AWS recommends running a high-availability production architecture with at least two CloudHSM HSMs in different Availability Zones. Although many workloads must be available 24/7, quality assurance or development environments typically do not have this […]

November 1, 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. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, performance, […]

In this post, we provide advice on how you can build a current cyber range using AWS services. Conducting security incident simulations is a valuable exercise for organizations. As described in the AWS Security Incident Response Guide, security incident response simulations (SIRS) are useful tools to improve how an organization handles security events. These simulations […]