AWS Security Blog

Tag: Amazon EC2

Get the full benefits of IMDSv2 and disable IMDSv1 across your AWS infrastructure

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) helps customers build secure and scalable applications. IMDS solves a security challenge for cloud users by providing access to temporary and frequently-rotated credentials, and by removing the need to hardcode or distribute sensitive credentials to instances manually or programmatically. The Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) […]

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How to scan EC2 AMIs using Amazon Inspector

Amazon Inspector is an automated vulnerability management service that continually scans Amazon Web Services (AWS) workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. Amazon Inspector supports vulnerability reporting and deep inspection of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, container images stored in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and AWS Lambda functions. Operating system […]

AWS CIRT announces the release of five publicly available workshops

Greetings from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT)! AWS CIRT is dedicated to supporting customers during active security events on the customer side of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. Over the past year, AWS CIRT has responded to hundreds of such security events, including the unauthorized use of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) […]

Introducing the Security Design of the AWS Nitro System whitepaper

AWS recently released a whitepaper on the Security Design of the AWS Nitro System. The Nitro System is a combination of purpose-built server designs, data processors, system management components, and specialized firmware that serves as the underlying virtualization technology that powers all Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances launched since early 2018. With the […]

How to enable secure seamless single sign-on to Amazon EC2 Windows instances with AWS IAM Identity Center

September 23, 2022: This blog post has been updated with correction on sample custom permissions policy download URL. 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. Today, we’re launching new functionality that […]

Forensic investigation environment strategies in the AWS Cloud

When a deviation from your secure baseline occurs, it’s crucial to respond and resolve the issue quickly and follow up with a forensic investigation and root cause analysis. Having a preconfigured infrastructure and a practiced plan for using it when there’s a deviation from your baseline will help you to extract and analyze the information […]

Use IAM Access Analyzer to generate IAM policies based on access activity found in your organization trail

January 25, 2024: The path of the bucket was updated in this post. In April 2021, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer added policy generation to help you create fine-grained policies based on AWS CloudTrail activity stored within your account. Now, we’re extending policy generation to enable you to generate policies based on […]

Use EC2 Instance Connect to provide secure SSH access to EC2 instances with private IP addresses

In this post, I show you how to use Amazon EC2 Instance Connect to use Secure Shell (SSH) to securely access your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running on private subnets within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). EC2 Instance Connect provides a simple and secure way to connect to your EC2 […]

How to confirm your automated Amazon EBS snapshots are still created after the TLS 1.2 uplift on AWS FIPS endpoints

We are happy to announce that all AWS Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) endpoints have been updated to only accept a minimum of Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 connections. This ensures that our customers who run regulated workloads can meet FedRAMP compliance requirements that mandate a minimum of TLS 1.2 encryption for data in transit. Attempts […]

Review last accessed information to identify unused EC2, IAM, and Lambda permissions and tighten access for your IAM roles

September 28, 2023: IAM is incrementally adding support for actions from more services. For a list of services that report action last accessed information, see IAM action last accessed information services and actions. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) helps customers analyze access and achieve least privilege. When you are working on new permissions for […]