AWS Security Blog
Category: Networking & Content Delivery
How to Set Up DNS Resolution Between On-Premises Networks and AWS by Using Unbound
In previous AWS Security Blog posts, Drew Dennis covered two options for establishing DNS connectivity between your on-premises networks and your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environments. His first post explained how to use Simple AD to forward DNS requests originating from on-premises networks to an Amazon Route 53 private hosted zone. His second […]
How to Optimize and Visualize Your Security Groups
September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. May 3, 2017: We published a related blog post also written by Guy Denney, How to Visualize and Refine Your Network’s Security by Adding Security Group IDs to Your VPC Flow Logs. Many organizations start their journey with AWS by experimenting […]
How to Prevent Hotlinking by Using AWS WAF, Amazon CloudFront, and Referer Checking
At some point, you might have to deal with hotlinking: when third parties embed in their websites the content they find on your websites. The third-party website does not incur the cost of hosting the content, which means your website can end up paying for the content other sites use. Now, you can use AWS […]
How to Reduce Security Threats and Operating Costs Using AWS WAF and Amazon CloudFront
Note from July 3, 2017: The solution in this post has been integrated into AWS WAF Security Automations, and AWS maintains up-to-date solution code in the companion GitHub repository. Some Internet operations trust that clients are “well behaved.” As an operator of a publicly accessible web application, for example, you have to trust that the clients […]
How to Set Up DNS Resolution Between On-Premises Networks and AWS Using AWS Directory Service and Amazon Route 53
As you establish private connectivity between your on-premises networks and your AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environments, the need for Domain Name System (DNS) resolution across these environments grows in importance. One common approach used to address this need is to run DNS servers on Amazon EC2 across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) and integrate them […]
How to Automatically Update Your Security Groups for Amazon CloudFront and AWS WAF by Using AWS Lambda
Note from April 1, 2021: Before implementing the steps in this blog post, please request an EC2 limit increase for “rules per security group.” Ask for 220 rules per security group in the AWS Region where your security groups will be. Note from December 3, 2019: The features and services described in this post have […]
How to Help Prepare for DDoS Attacks by Reducing Your Attack Surface
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are sometimes used by malicious actors in an attempt to flood a network, system, or application with more traffic, connections, or requests than it can handle. Not surprisingly, customers often ask us how we can help them protect their applications against these types of attacks. To help you optimize […]
How to Address the PCI DSS Requirements for Data Encryption in Transit Using Amazon VPC
The PCI requirements for encryption for data in transit are different for private networks than they are for public networks. When correctly designed, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a logically isolated portion of the AWS infrastructure that allows you to extend your existing data center network to the cloud, can be considered a private network, […]
With New ELB Permissions, Support for IAM in AWS Is Going Strong
The Elastic Load Balancing team announced on May 13, 2014 that they’ve added support for resource-level permissions. Not only can you specify which ELB actions a user can perform, you can specify which resources the user can perform those actions on. For more information about the new ELB permissions, see Controlling Access to Your Load […]
Securely Connect to Linux Instances Running in a Private Amazon VPC
Updated May 21, 2014: Clarified that for the Mac, the private key is stored in memory and the passphrase in the keychain. Important note: You should enable SSH agent forwarding with caution. When you set up agent forwarding, a socket file is created on the forwarding host, which is the mechanism by which the key […]