AWS Security Blog

Category: Best Practices

Automate the deployment of an NGINX web service using Amazon ECS with TLS offload in CloudHSM

Customers who require private keys for their TLS certificates to be stored in FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified hardware security modules (HSMs) can use AWS CloudHSM to store their keys for websites hosted in the cloud. In this blog post, we will show you how to automate the deployment of a web application using NGINX […]

laptop with lots of stickers on

Use backups to recover from security incidents

Greetings from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT)! AWS CIRT is dedicated to supporting customers during active security events on the customer side of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. Over the past three years, AWS CIRT has supported customers with security events in their AWS accounts. These include the unauthorized use of AWS Identity […]

network firewall

Simplify management of Network Firewall rule groups with VPC managed prefix lists

In this blog post, we will show you how to use managed prefix lists to simplify management of your AWS Network Firewall rules and policies across your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) in the same AWS Region. AWS Network Firewall is a stateful, managed, network firewall and intrusion detection and prevention service for your […]

Establishing a data perimeter on AWS: Allow only trusted resources from my organization

Companies that store and process data on Amazon Web Services (AWS) want to prevent transfers of that data to or from locations outside of their company’s control. This is to support security strategies, such as data loss prevention, or to comply with the terms and conditions set forth by various regulatory and privacy agreements. On […]

AWS Logo

Three ways to boost your email security and brand reputation with AWS

If you own a domain that you use for email, you want to maintain the reputation and goodwill of your domain’s brand. Several industry-standard mechanisms can help prevent your domain from being used as part of a phishing attack. In this post, we’ll show you how to deploy three of these mechanisms, which visually authenticate […]

How to use granular geographic match rules with AWS WAF

How to use granular geographic match rules with AWS WAF

In November 2022, AWS introduced support for granular geographic (geo) match conditions in AWS WAF. This blog post demonstrates how you can use this new feature to customize your AWS WAF implementation and improve the security posture of your protected application. AWS WAF provides inline inspection of inbound traffic at the application layer. You can […]

AWS Private CA logo

How to use AWS Private Certificate Authority short-lived certificate mode

AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA) is a highly available, fully managed private certificate authority (CA) service that you can use to create CA hierarchies and issue private X.509 certificates. You can use these private certificates to establish endpoints for TLS encryption, cryptographically sign code, authenticate users, and more. Based on customer feedback for […]

AWS IAM Identity Center

Define a custom session duration and terminate active sessions in IAM Identity Center

Managing access to accounts and applications requires a balance between delivering simple, convenient access and managing the risks associated with active user sessions. Based on your organization’s needs, you might want to make it simple for end users to sign in and to operate long enough to get their work done, without the disruptions associated […]

Reduce risk by implementing HttpOnly cookie authentication in Amazon API Gateway

Some web applications need to protect their authentication tokens or session IDs from cross-site scripting (XSS). It’s an Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) best practice for session management to store secrets in the browsers’ cookie store with the HttpOnly attribute enabled. When cookies have the HttpOnly attribute set, the browser will prevent client-side JavaScript […]

Approaches for authenticating external applications in a machine-to-machine scenario

December 8, 2022: This post has been updated to reflect changes for M2M options with the new service of IAMRA. This blog post was first published November 19, 2013. August 10, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more […]