Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

Great security research combines extremely high levels of creativity, paranoia, and attention to detail. All of these qualities are in evidence in two new research papers about how s2n, our Open Source implementation of the SSL/TLS protocols, handles the Lucky 13 attack from 2013. The research found issues with how s2n mitigates Lucky 13 and improvements that […]

Today, AWS introduced the preview of Short Message Service (SMS) support for multi-factor authentication (MFA), making it easier for you to implement a security best practice. Until now, you could enable MFA for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users only with hardware or virtual MFA tokens, but this new feature enables you to use […]

One of the most important and critical concepts in AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for advanced and secure data usage is EncryptionContext. Using EncryptionContext properly can help significantly improve the security of your applications. In this blog post, I will show the importance of EncryptionContext and will provide a simple example showing how you can […]

To make it easier for you to test, verify, and understand resource-level permissions in your account, the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy simulator will now automatically provide a list of resources and parameters required for each AWS action. These enhancements provide you with more accurate simulation results and help ensure that your policies […]

Today, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) made it easier to help you verify your permissions by adding support for resource-based policies in the IAM policy simulator. This extends the capabilities of the IAM policy simulator console and APIs to help you understand, test, and validate how your resource-based policies and IAM policies work together […]

I am pleased to announce that AWS has successfully completed a new assessment, ISO/IEC 27018:2014, a code of practice regarding the protection of personally identifiable information (PII) in the cloud and our adherence to the commitments we make to our customers with regard to their content. This privacy code of practice is now an integral […]

AWS’s industry-leading security strength benefits you in many ways, one of which is by using a platform that is audited extensively by independent third-party assessors. At times, these audits confirm we can meet new requirements, even as they are issued, and this is the case for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines 800-171, […]

July 21, 2020: We’ve updated this post to include AWS Managed Microsoft AD, as well as Simple AD. AWS Directory Service allows you to create a standalone, highly available AWS-managed directory called Simple AD in a matter of minutes. With Simple AD, you can centrally manage user accounts and group memberships for Amazon EC2 instances […]

Important note from July 18, 2019: The original version of this blog uses Python2.x scripts. We now have Python3.x scripts that you can download here: Form-based authentication version of the Python3.x script AD FS 3.0-specific version of the Python3.x script Note from May 24, 2019: The features and services described in this post have changed since […]

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, […]