AWS Security Blog

Category: AWS Key Management Service

Demystifying KMS keys operations, bring your own key (BYOK), custom key store, and ciphertext portability

As you prepare to build or migrate your workload on Amazon Web Services (AWS), designing your encryption scheme can be a challenging—and sometimes confusing—endeavor. This blog post gives you a framework to select the right AWS cryptographic services and tools for your application to help you with your journey. I share common repeatable cryptographic patterns, […]

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 […]

Round 2 post-quantum TLS is now supported in AWS KMS

January 30, 2024: The API in this blog post has been changed in newer version of the AWS CRT Client. See this page for more info. January 25, 2023: AWS KMS, ACM, Secrets Manager TLS endpoints have been updated to only support NIST’s Round 3 picked KEM, Kyber. s2n-tls and s2n-quic have also been updated […]

Combining encryption and signing with AWS KMS asymmetric keys

August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. In this post, I discuss how to use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to combine […]

Architecting for database encryption on AWS

In this post, I review the options you have to protect your customer data when migrating or building new databases in Amazon Web Services (AWS). I focus on how you can support sensitive workloads in ways that help you maintain compliance and regulatory obligations, and meet security objectives. Understanding transparent data encryption I commonly see […]

Improved client-side encryption: Explicit KeyIds and key commitment

November 1, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. I’m excited to announce the launch of two new features in the AWS Encryption SDK […]

How to use AWS Config to determine compliance of AWS KMS key policies to your specifications

August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. One of the top security methodologies is the principle of least privilege, which is the […]

Code signing using AWS Certificate Manager Private CA and AWS Key Management Service asymmetric keys

August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. In this post, we show you how to combine the asymmetric signing feature of the […]

The importance of encryption and how AWS can help

Encryption is a critical component of a defense-in-depth strategy, which is a security approach with a series of defensive mechanisms designed so that if one security mechanism fails, there’s at least one more still operating. As more organizations look to operate faster and at scale, they need ways to meet critical compliance requirements and improve […]

How to verify AWS KMS asymmetric key signatures locally with OpenSSL

August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. In this post, I demonstrate a sample workflow for generating a digital signature within AWS […]