AWS Security Blog

Category: Management Tools

How to automate SCAP testing with AWS Systems Manager and Security Hub

US federal government agencies use the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) framework to provide security and compliance guidance for their IT systems. The US Department of Defense (DoD) also requires its IT systems to follow the Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) produced by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). To aid in managing […]

How to implement the principle of least privilege with CloudFormation StackSets

March 24, 2021: We’ve corrected errors in the policy statements in steps 2 and 3 of the section “To create the IAM policy document.” AWS CloudFormation is a service that lets you create a collection of related Amazon Web Services and third-party resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion. A typical access […]

How to auto-remediate internet accessible ports with AWS Config and AWS Systems Manager

With the AWS Config service, you can assess, audit, and evaluate the configuration of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources. AWS Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations changes, and enables you to automate the evaluation of those recordings against desired configurations. Not only can AWS Config monitor and detect deviations from desired […]

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 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 […]

How to get read-only visibility into the AWS Control Tower console

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 audit an environment governed by AWS Control Tower, having visibility into the AWS Control Tower console allows you to collect important configuration […]

Improving security as part of accelerated data center migrations

Approached correctly, cloud migrations are a great opportunity to improve the security and stability of your applications. Many organizations are looking for guidance on how to meet their security requirements while moving at the speed that the cloud enables. They often try to configure everything perfectly in the data center before they migrate their first […]

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 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 […]

How to use AWS Certificate Manager with AWS CloudFormation

Last month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced the ability to automate issuing and validating public and private certificates using AWS CloudFormation. To make this easier, AWS has introduced three new features that let you: Automate the steps to validate your domain with DNS validation and issue your public certificate. Use AWS CloudFormation templates to issue […]