AWS Security Blog

Today, we made it easier for you to configure trust relationships between AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also referred to as Microsoft AD, and your on-premises Microsoft Active Directory. Establishing trust relationships requires conditional forwarders, which resolve Domain Name System (DNS) queries between the domain names of trusting directories. Now, by […]

May 22, 2019 update: We’ve removed a reference to the IT-Grundschutz Certification Workbook. AWS now recommends that customers refer to the Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5) instead. Learn more about C5 here: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/bsi-c5/ Every month, AWS Compliance fields thousands of questions about how to achieve and maintain compliance in the cloud. Among other things, […]

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 […]

Starting today, you can use AWS CloudTrail to track the activity of your federated users (web identity federation and Security Assertion Markup Language [SAML]). For example, you can now use CloudTrail to identify a SAML federated user who terminated an Amazon EC2 instance in your AWS account, or to identify a mobile application user who […]

To celebrate 10 years of AWS, qwikLABS is offering 95 free online labs through the end of March 2016. Here are some of the labs related to security and compliance that you can take for free while the offer is live: Introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Introduction to AWS Key Management Service Performing […]

Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) is a common identity provider that many AWS customers use to give federated users access to the AWS Management Console. AD FS uses multiple certificates to ensure secure communication between servers and to act as authentication mechanisms. One such mechanism is called the token-signing certificate. When the token-signing certificate expires, […]

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.   Some Internet operations trust that clients are “well behaved.” As an operator of a publicly accessible web application, for example, you have to trust that the clients […]

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 […]