AWS Security Blog

Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

Enhance programmatic access for IAM users using a YubiKey for multi-factor authentication

Organizations are increasingly providing access to corporate resources from employee laptops and are required to apply the correct permissions to these computing devices to make sure that secrets and sensitive data are adequately protected. The combination of Amazon Web Services (AWS) long-term credentials and a YubiKey security token for multi-factor authentication (MFA) is an option […]

Isolating network access to your AWS Cloud9 environments

In this post, I show you how to create isolated AWS Cloud9 environments for your developers without requiring ingress (inbound) access from the internet. I also walk you through optional steps to further isolate your AWS Cloud9 environment by removing egress (outbound) access. Until recently, AWS Cloud9 required you to allow ingress Secure Shell (SSH) […]

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Updated IRAP reference architectures and consumer guidance for Australian public sector organizations building workloads at PROTECTED level

In July 2020, we announced that 92 Amazon Web Services (AWS) services had successfully assessed compliant with the Australian government’s Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) for operating workloads at the PROTECTED level. This enables organizations to use AWS to build a wide range of applications and services for the benefit of all residents of […]

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 add DNS filtering to your NAT instance with Squid

September 23, 2020: The squid configuration file in this blog post and associated YAML template have been updated. September 4, 2019: We’ve updated this blog post, initially published on January 26, 2016. Major changes include: support of Amazon Linux 2, no longer having to compile Squid 3.5, and a high availability version of the solution […]

Improving security as part of accelerated data center migrations

Approached correctly, cloud migrations are a great opportunity to improve the security and stability of your applications. Many organizations are looking for guidance on how to meet their security requirements while moving at the speed that the cloud enables. They often try to configure everything perfectly in the data center before they migrate their first […]

On-Demand SCIM provisioning of Azure AD to AWS IAM Identity Center with PowerShell

June 6, 2023: We made minor updates to the section “Grant permission to the Graph API to access the Default Directory in Azure AD.” September 20, 2022: We updated the link to the GitHub repository. September 12, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – […]

Automatically updating AWS WAF Rule in real time using Amazon EventBridge

December 4, 2020: This post has been updated to include links to the CloudFormation templates used in the solution. In this post, I demonstrate a method for collecting and sharing threat intelligence between Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts by using AWS WAF, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics, and Amazon EventBridge. AWS WAF helps protect against common […]

Get ready for upcoming changes in the AWS IAM Identity Center user sign-in process

April 3, 2023: This guidance is out of date. It is being updated and will be republished as soon as possible. September 12, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more about the name change here. October 21, 2020: […]

How Security Operation Centers can use Amazon GuardDuty to detect malicious behavior

The Security Operations Center (SOC) has a tough job. As customers modernize and shift to cloud architectures, the ability to monitor, detect, and respond to risks poses different challenges. In this post we address how Amazon GuardDuty can address some common concerns of the SOC regarding the number of security tools and the overhead to […]