December 2, 2019: Original publication date of this post. At AWS, we encourage you to use automation. Not just to deploy your workloads and configure services, but to also help you quickly detect and respond to security events within your AWS environments. In addition to increasing the speed of …

One of the most common questions about secrets management strategies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is whether an organization should centralize its secrets. Though this question is often focused on whether secrets should be centrally stored, there are four aspects of centralizing the secrets management process that need to …

Over the first half of this year, AWS WAF introduced new application-layer protections to address the growing trend of short-lived, high-throughput Layer 7 (L7) distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These protections are provided through the AWS WAF Anti-DDoS AWS Managed Rules (Anti-DDoS AMR) rule group. While the default …

In this post, we introduce the AWS provider for the Secrets Store CSI Driver, a new AWS Secrets Manager add-on for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) that you can use to fetch secrets from Secrets Manager and parameters from AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and mount them as …

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is introducing guidelines for network scanning of customer workloads. By following these guidelines, conforming scanners will collect more accurate data, minimize abuse reports, and help improve the security of the internet for everyone. Network scanning is a practice in modern IT environments that can be …

Certificates and the hierarchy of trust they create are the backbone of a secure infrastructure. AWS Private Certificate Authority is a highly available certificate authority (CA) that you can use to create private CA hierarchies, secure your applications and devices with private certificates, and manage certificate lifecycles. A certificate …

Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon OpenSearch Service have launched a new dashboard that simplifies the analysis of AWS Network Firewall logs. Previously, in our blog post How to analyze AWS Network Firewall logs using Amazon OpenSearch Service we demonstrated the required services and steps to create an OpenSearch dashboard. The …

Following our recent announcement of ML-DSA support in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), we just introduced post-quantum ML-DSA signature support in AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA). Customers can use AWS Private CA to create and manage their own private public key infrastructure (PKI) hierarchies. Through this …

Application authorization is a critical component of modern software systems, determining what actions users can perform on specific resources. Many organizations have adopted Open Policy Agent (OPA) with its Rego policy language to implement fine-grained authorization controls across their applications and infrastructure. While OPA has proven effective for policy-as-code …

AWS Secrets Manager is a service that you can use to manage, retrieve, and rotate database credentials, application credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycles. You can also use Secrets Manager to replace hard-coded credentials in application source code with runtime calls to retrieve credentials dynamically when …

Recently, AWS released Amazon Bedrock API keys to make calls to the Amazon Bedrock API. In this post, we provide practical security guidance on effectively implementing, monitoring, and managing this new option for accessing Amazon Bedrock to help you build a comprehensive strategy for securing these keys. We also …

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides configurable safeguards to help you safely build generative AI applications at scale. It offers integrated safety and privacy protections that work across multiple foundation models (FMs), including models available in Amazon Bedrock and models hosted outside Amazon Bedrock from other providers. Bedrock Guardrails currently offers …

As generative AI becomes foundational across industries—powering everything from conversational agents to real-time media synthesis—it simultaneously creates new opportunities for bad actors to exploit. The complex architectures behind generative AI applications expose a large surface area including public-facing APIs, inference services, custom web applications, and integrations with …

Security teams must efficiently validate and document exceptions to AWS Security Hub findings, while maintaining proper governance. Enterprise security teams need to make sure that exceptions to security best practices are properly validated and documented, while development teams need a streamlined process for implementing and verifying compensating controls. In …

October 1, 2025: This post was updated to reflect the new name of Security Hub, which is AWS Security Hub CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management). Security teams must efficiently validate and document exceptions to AWS Security Hub (Cloud Security Posture Management, previously known as Security Hub) findings, while maintaining …

Organizations are increasingly using large language models (LLMs) to provide new types of customer interactions through generative AI-powered chatbots, virtual assistants, and intelligent search capabilities. To enhance these interactions, organizations are using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to incorporate proprietary data, industry-specific knowledge, and internal documentation to provide more accurate, contextual …

AWS Network Firewall is a managed firewall service that filters and controls network traffic in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Unlike traditional network controls such as security groups or network access control lists (NACLs), Network Firewall can inspect and make decisions based on information from higher layers of …

Elastic Load Balancing simplifies authentication by offloading it to OpenID Connect (OIDC) compatible identity providers (IdPs). This lets builders focus on application logic while using robust identity management. OIDC client secrets are confidential credentials used in OAuth 2.0 and OIDC protocols for authenticating clients (applications). However, manual management …

The guest data of AWS customers running on the AWS Nitro System and Nitro Hypervisor is not at risk from a new attack dubbed “L1TF Reloaded.” No additional action is required by AWS customers; however, AWS continues to recommend that customers isolate their workloads using instance, enclave, or function …

As introduced in Part 1 of this series, implementing secure file sharing solutions in AWS requires a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s needs and constraints. Before selecting a specific solution, organizations must evaluate five fundamental areas: access patterns and scale, technical requirements, security and compliance, operational requirements, and …

Securely share sensitive data with time-limited, nonce-enhanced presigned URLs that prevent replay attacks, minimizing exposure risks through granular access controls and rigorous monitoring. [...]

July 30, 2025: This post has been republished to migrate the Amazon EC2 Oracle Transparent Data Encryption database encryption keystore to AWS CloudHSM using AWS CloudHSM Client SDK 5. Encrypting databases is crucial for protecting sensitive data, helping you to be aligned with security regulations and safeguarding against data …

Organizations are facing an increasing number of security threats, especially in the form of compromised user accounts. Manually monitoring and acting on suspicious activities is not only time-consuming but also prone to human error. The lack of automated responses to security incidents can lead to disastrous consequences, such as …

Amazon Cognito is a managed customer identity and access management (CIAM) service that enables seamless user sign-up and sign-in for web and mobile applications. Through user pools, Amazon Cognito provides a user directory with strong authentication features, including passkeys, federation to external identity providers (IdPs), and OAuth 2.0 …

Today, Amazon Verified Permissions announced the release of @verifiedpermissions/authorization-clients-js, an open source package that developers can use to implement external fine-grained authorization for Express.js web application APIs in minutes when using Verified Permissions. Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a …