AWS Security Blog

Category: Technical How-to

ASR architecture diagram

Implementing a compliance and reporting strategy for NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides tools that simplify automation and monitoring for compliance with security standards, such as the NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 Operational Best Practices. Organizations can set preventative and proactive controls to help ensure that noncompliant resources aren’t deployed. Detective and responsive controls notify stakeholders of misconfigurations immediately and automate fixes, thus […]

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How to issue use-case bound certificates with AWS Private CA

In this post, we’ll show how you can use AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA) to issue a wide range of X.509 certificates that are tailored for specific use cases. These use-case bound certificates have their intended purpose defined within the certificate components, such as the Key Usage and Extended Key usage extensions. We […]

Establishing a data perimeter on AWS: Analyze your account activity to evaluate impact and refine controls

April 22, 2025: This post was updated to fix a typo in the Example 2 section. A data perimeter on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a set of preventive controls you can use to help establish a boundary around your data in AWS Organizations. This boundary helps ensure that your data can be accessed only […]

Accelerate incident response with Amazon Security Lake

September 20, 2024: Updated the incident response life cycle related wording in the first blog of this series, so to better align with the NIST defined terms. This blog post is the first of a two-part series that will demonstrate the value of Amazon Security Lake and how you can use it and other resources to accelerate […]

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How to implement single-user secret rotation using Amazon RDS admin credentials

You might have security or compliance standards that prevent a database user from changing their own credentials and from having multiple users with identical permissions. AWS Secrets Manager offers two rotation strategies for secrets that contain Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) credentials: single-user and alternating-user. In the preceding scenario, neither single-user rotation nor alternating-user rotation would […]

High-level solution architecture for Integrating AWS Verified Access with Jamf as a device trust provider

Integrating AWS Verified Access with Jamf as a device trust provider

In this post, we discuss how to architect Zero Trust based remote connectivity to your applications hosted within Amazon Web Services (AWS). Specifically, we show you how to integrate AWS Verified Access with Jamf as a device trust provider. This post is an extension of our previous post explaining how to integrate AWS Verified Access […]

High-level diagram for SAML IdP-initiated authentication flow in a web or mobile app

How to set up SAML federation in Amazon Cognito using IdP-initiated single sign-on, request signing, and encrypted assertions

When an identity provider (IdP) serves multiple service providers (SPs), IdP-initiated single sign-on provides a consistent sign-in experience that allows users to start the authentication process from one centralized portal or dashboard. It helps administrators have more control over the authentication process and simplifies the management. However, when you support IdP-initiated authentication, the SP (Amazon […]

Investigating lateral movements with Amazon Detective investigation and Security Lake integration

According to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, lateral movement consists of techniques that threat actors use to enter and control remote systems on a network. In Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments, threat actors equipped with illegitimately obtained credentials could potentially use APIs to interact with infrastructures and services directly, and they might even be able to use […]

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Governing and securing AWS PrivateLink service access at scale in multi-account environments

Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers have been adopting the approach of using AWS PrivateLink to have secure communication to AWS services, their own internal services, and third-party services in the AWS Cloud. As these environments scale, the number of PrivateLink connections outbound to external services and inbound to internal services increase and are spread out […]