Category: Networking & Content Delivery

Controlling outbound communication from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to the internet is an important part of your overall preventive security controls. By limiting outbound traffic to certain trusted domains (called “whitelisting”) you help prevent instances from downloading malware, communicating with bot networks, or attacking internet hosts. It’s not practical to prevent all […]

Note from June 5, 2019: We updated all of the figures in the post for clarity and added two paragraphs in the “Additional considerations and limitations” section. In a previous post, I showed you a solution to implement central DNS in a multi-account environment that simplified DNS management by reducing the number of servers and […]

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be adding enhanced domain protections to Amazon CloudFront. The short version is this: the new measures are designed to ensure that requests handled by CloudFront are handled on behalf of legitimate domain owners. Using CloudFront to receive traffic for a domain you aren’t authorized to use is already a violation […]

Amazon S3 provides comprehensive security and compliance capabilities that meet even the most stringent regulatory requirements. It gives you flexibility in the way you manage data for cost optimization, access control, and compliance. However, because the service is flexible, a user could accidentally configure buckets in a manner that is not secure. For example, let’s […]

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoints powered by AWS PrivateLink. This means you now can connect directly to AWS KMS through a private endpoint in your VPC, keeping all traffic within your VPC and the AWS network. Previously, applications running inside a VPC required internet access […]

Amazon CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content to end users through a worldwide network of edge locations. CloudFront provides a number of benefits and capabilities that can help you secure your applications and content while meeting compliance requirements. For example, you can configure CloudFront to […]

In a previous AWS Security Blog post, Jeff Levine showed how you can monitor changes to your Amazon EC2 security groups. The methods he describes in that post are examples of detective controls, which can help you determine when changes are made to security controls on your AWS resources. In this post, I take that […]

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has granted the AWS GovCloud (US) Region an Impact Level 5 (IL5) Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (CC SRG) Provisional Authorization (PA) for six core services. This means that AWS’s DoD customers and partners can now deploy workloads for Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) exceeding IL4 […]

Simple AD, which is powered by Samba  4, supports basic Active Directory (AD) authentication features such as users, groups, and the ability to join domains. Simple AD also includes an integrated Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server. LDAP is a standard application protocol for the access and management of directory information. You can use the […]

AWS is excited to announce that the AWS EU (London) Region has achieved Public Services Network (PSN) assurance. This means that the EU (London) Region can now be connected to the PSN (or PSN customers) by PSN-certified AWS Direct Connect partners. PSN assurance demonstrates to our UK Public Sector customers that the EU (London) Region […]