AWS Security Blog

Category: Networking & Content Delivery

Protect public clients for Amazon Cognito by using an Amazon CloudFront proxy

September 8, 2023: It’s important to know that if you activate user sign-up in your user pool, anyone on the internet can sign up for an account and sign in to your apps. Don’t enable self-registration in your user pool unless you want to open your app to allow users to sign up. Sep 6 […]

Use EC2 Instance Connect to provide secure SSH access to EC2 instances with private IP addresses

In this post, I show you how to use Amazon EC2 Instance Connect to use Secure Shell (SSH) to securely access your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running on private subnets within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). EC2 Instance Connect provides a simple and secure way to connect to your EC2 […]

How to protect sensitive data for its entire lifecycle in AWS

April 25, 2023: We’ve updated this blog post to include more security learning resources. 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 […]

How to protect a self-managed DNS service against DDoS attacks using AWS Global Accelerator and AWS Shield Advanced

In this blog post, I show you how to improve the distributed denial of service (DDoS) resilience of your self-managed Domain Name System (DNS) service by using AWS Global Accelerator and AWS Shield Advanced. You can use those services to incorporate some of the techniques used by Amazon Route 53 to protect against DDoS attacks. […]

Configuring AWS VPN for UK public sector use

In this post, we explain the United Kingdom (UK) National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)’s guidance on VPN profiles configuration, and how the configuration parameters for the AWS Virtual Private Network (AWS VPN) align with the NCSC guidance. At the end of the post, there are links to code to deploy the AWS VPN in line […]

Automatically update security groups for Amazon CloudFront IP ranges using AWS Lambda

June 21, 2023: This blog post is out of date. You should now use the new managed prefix list for CloudFront in your Security Group instead of this custom Lambda solution. Please refer to this blog post for detailed info. Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network that can help you increase the performance of […]

How to enhance Amazon CloudFront origin security with AWS WAF and AWS Secrets Manager

Whether your web applications provide static or dynamic content, you can improve their performance, availability, and security by using Amazon CloudFront as your content delivery network (CDN). CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your web content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations. CloudFront ensures that end-user requests […]

How to add DNS filtering to your NAT instance with Squid

September 23, 2020: The squid configuration file in this blog post and associated YAML template have been updated. September 4, 2019: We’ve updated this blog post, initially published on January 26, 2016. Major changes include: support of Amazon Linux 2, no longer having to compile Squid 3.5, and a high availability version of the solution […]

How to configure an LDAPS endpoint for Simple AD

In this blog post, we show you how to configure an LDAPS (LDAP over SSL or TLS) encrypted endpoint for Simple AD so that you can extend Simple AD over untrusted networks. Our solution uses Network Load Balancer (NLB) as SSL/TLS termination. The data is then decrypted and sent to Simple AD. Network Load Balancer […]

What is a cyber range and how do you build one on AWS?

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 […]