Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

Today, we are happy to announce that the Center for Internet Security (CIS) has published the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark, a set of security configuration best practices for AWS. These industry-accepted best practices go beyond the high-level security guidance already available, providing AWS users with clear, step-by-step implementation and assessment procedures. This is the first […]

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.   Internet-facing web applications are frequently scanned and probed by various sources, sometimes for good and other times to identify weaknesses. It takes some sleuthing to determine the […]

In my previous posts in this series, I explained how to get started with the DevSecOps environment for HIPAA that is depicted in the following architecture diagram. In my second post in this series, I gave you guidance about how to set up AWS Service Catalog (#4 in the following diagram) to allow developers a […]

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.   One security challenge you may have faced is how to prevent your web servers from being flooded by unwanted requests, or scanning tools such as bots and […]

In my previous post, I showed how to use Simple AD to forward DNS requests originating from on-premises networks to an Amazon Route 53 private hosted zone. Today, I will show how you can use Microsoft Active Directory (also provisioned with AWS Directory Service) to provide the same DNS resolution with some additional forwarding capabilities. […]

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 […]

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. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) celebrated its one-year launch anniversary in November 2015, and […]

AWS Config recently added the ability to record changes to the configuration of your AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, groups, and roles (collectively referred to as IAM entities) and the policies associated with them. Using this feature, you can record configuration details for these IAM entities, including details about which policies are associated […]

July 29, 2025: This blog post is outdated. Use CloudFront’s managed prefix list for Security Groups instead of the Lambda solution. CloudFront now supports VPC origins, allowing secure connectivity to private VPC resources. For details on managed prefix lists, see this post. For VPC origins implementation guide, refer to this post. April 1, 2021: Before […]

AWS supports Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, an open standard for identity federation used by many identity providers (IdPs). SAML enables federated single sign-on (SSO), which enables your users to sign in to the AWS Management Console or to make programmatic calls to AWS APIs by using assertions from a SAML-compliant IdP. Many of […]