AWS Security Blog

Category: Storage

How to Patch, Inspect, and Protect Microsoft Windows Workloads on AWS—Part 2

Yesterday in Part 1 of this blog post, I showed you how to: Launch an Amazon EC2 instance with an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role, an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume, and tags that Amazon EC2 Systems Manager (Systems Manager) and Amazon Inspector use. Configure Systems Manager to install the Amazon […]

How to Patch, Inspect, and Protect Microsoft Windows Workloads on AWS—Part 1

Most malware tries to compromise your systems by using a known vulnerability that the maker of the operating system has already patched. To help prevent malware from affecting your systems, two security best practices are to apply all operating system patches to your systems and actively monitor your systems for missing patches. In case you […]

AWS Earns Department of Defense Impact Level 5 Provisional Authorization

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has granted the AWS GovCloud (US) Region an Impact Level 5 (IL5) Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (CC SRG) Provisional Authorization (PA) for six core services. This means that AWS’s DoD customers and partners can now deploy workloads for Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) exceeding IL4 […]

How to Facilitate Data Analysis and Fulfill Security Requirements by Using Centralized Flow Log Data

I am an AWS Professional Services consultant, which has me working directly with AWS customers on a daily basis. One of my customers recently asked me to provide a solution to help them fulfill their security requirements by having the flow log data from VPC Flow Logs sent to a central AWS account. This is […]

Easily Tag Amazon EC2 Instances and Amazon EBS Volumes on Creation

In 2010, AWS launched resource tagging for Amazon EC2 instances and other EC2 resources. Since that launch, we have raised the allowable number of tags per resource from 10 to 50 and made tags more useful with the introduction of resource groups and Tag Editor. AWS customers use tags to track ownership, drive their cost accounting […]

s2n Is Now Handling 100 Percent of SSL Traffic for Amazon S3

In June 2015, we introduced s2n, an open-source implementation of the TLS encryption protocol, making the source code publicly available under the terms of the Apache Software License 2.0 from the s2n GitHub repository. One of the key benefits to s2n is far less code surface, with approximately 6,000 lines of code (compared to OpenSSL’s […]

How to Detect and Automatically Remediate Unintended Permissions in Amazon S3 Object ACLs with CloudWatch Events

Update on October 24, 2018: Note that if you do not author the Lambda function correctly, this setup can create an infinite loop (in this case, a rule that is fired repeatedly, which can impact your AWS resources and cause higher than expected charges to your account). The example Lambda function I provide in Step […]

How to Create a Custom AMI with Encrypted Amazon EBS Snapshots and Share It with Other Accounts and Regions

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. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides the information required to launch an instance (a virtual […]

How to restrict Amazon S3 bucket access to a specific IAM role

April 2, 2021: In the section “Granting cross-account bucket access to a specific IAM role,” we’ve updated the second policy to fix an error. I am a cloud support engineer here at AWS, and customers often ask me how they can limit Amazon S3 bucket access to a specific AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) […]

How to Prevent Uploads of Unencrypted Objects to Amazon S3

There are many use cases to prevent uploads of unencrypted objects to an Amazon S3 bucket, but the underlying objective is to protect the confidentiality and integrity of the objects stored in that bucket. AWS provides several services that help make this process easier, such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and AWS Key […]