For decades, we’ve watched energy companies attempt to bring off-the-shelf information technology (IT) systems into operations technology (OT) environments. These attempts have had varying degrees of success. While converging OT and IT brings new efficiencies, it also brings new risks. There are many moving parts to convergence, and …

In this blog post, we delve into using Amazon Web Services (AWS) data protection services such as Amazon Secrets Manager, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to help fortify both the security of the pipeline and security in the pipeline. We explore how these …

Cedar is an open-source language that you can use to write policies and make authorization decisions based on those policies. AWS security services including AWS Verified Access and Amazon Verified Permissions use Cedar to define policies. Cedar supports schema declaration for the structure of entity types in those policies …

AWS Signer is a fully managed code-signing service to help ensure the trust and integrity of your code. It helps you verify that the code comes from a trusted source and that an unauthorized party has not accessed it. AWS Signer manages code signing certificates and public and private …

As you design your Amazon API Gateway applications to rely on mutual certificate authentication (mTLS), you need to consider how your application will verify the revocation status of a client certificate. In your design, you should account for the performance and availability of your verification mechanism to make sure …

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation. GuardDuty Malware Protection helps detect the presence of malware by performing agentless scans of the Amazon Elastic Block Store …

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles are a powerful way to manage permissions to resources in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. IAM roles are useful when granting permissions to users whose workloads are static. However, for users whose access patterns are more dynamic, relying on roles can …

Several independent software vendors (ISVs) and software as a service (SaaS) providers need to access their customers’ Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, especially if the SaaS product accesses data from customer environments. SaaS providers have adopted multiple variations of this third-party access scenario. In some cases, the providers ask …

As organizations expand their Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment and migrate workloads to the cloud, they find themselves dealing with many AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and policies. These roles and policies multiply because IAM fills a crucial role in securing and controlling access to AWS resources …

In this post, I will show you how to apply security at multiple layers of a web application hosted on AWS. Apply security at all layers is a design principle of the Security pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It encourages you to apply security at the network edge …

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer was launched in late 2019. Access Analyzer guides customers toward least-privilege permissions across Amazon Web Services (AWS) by using analysis techniques, such as automated reasoning, to make it simpler for customers to set, verify, and refine IAM permissions. Today, we are …

iam:PassRole is an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permission that allows an IAM principal to delegate or pass permissions to an AWS service by configuring a resource such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance or AWS Lambda function with an IAM role. The service …

Welcome to the fifth post in the Establishing a data perimeter on AWS series. Throughout this series, we’ve discussed how a set of preventative guardrails can create an always-on boundary to help ensure that your trusted identities are accessing your trusted resources over expected networks. In a previous …

The rapid growth of data has empowered organizations to develop better products, more personalized services, and deliver transformational outcomes for their customers. As organizations use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to modernize their data capabilities, they can sometimes find themselves with data spread across several AWS accounts, each aligned to …

Traditionally, applications or systems—defined as pieces of autonomous logic functioning without direct user interaction—have faced challenges associated with long-lived credentials such as access keys. In certain circumstances, long-lived credentials can increase operational overhead and the scope of impact in the event of an inadvertent disclosure. To help …

Amazon Verified Permissions is designed to simplify the process of managing permissions within an application. In this blog post, we aim to help customers understand how this service can be applied to several business use cases. Companies typically use custom entitlement logic embedded in their business applications. This is …

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a comprehensive managed container orchestrator that simplifies the deployment, maintenance, and scalability of container-based applications. With Amazon ECS, you can deploy your containerized application as a standalone task, or run a task as part of a service in your cluster. The Amazon …

Simulations, tests, and game days are critical parts of preparing and verifying incident response processes. Customers often face challenges getting started and building their incident response function as the applications they build become increasingly complex. In this post, we will introduce the concept of chaos engineering and how you …

Update: An earlier version of this post was published on September 14, 2017, on the Front-End Web and Mobile Blog. Amazon Cognito user pools offer a fully managed OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity provider so you can quickly add authentication and control access to your mobile app or web application …

Part 3 of a 3-part series Part 1 – Aggregating, searching, and visualizing log data from distributed sources with Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight Part 2 – How to visualize Amazon Security Lake findings with Amazon QuickSight This is the final part of a three-part series on visualizing security data using …

Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) offers healthcare organizations a comprehensive and standardized approach to information security, privacy, and compliance. HITRUST Common Security Framework (HITRUST CSF) can be used by organizations to establish a robust security program, ensure patient data privacy, and assist with compliance with industry regulations. HITRUST CSF …

Amazon Cognito is a customer identity and access management solution that scales to millions of users. With Cognito, you have four ways to secure multi-tenant applications: user pools, application clients, groups, or custom attributes. In an earlier blog post titled Role-based access control using Amazon Cognito and an external …

AWS Secrets Manager helps you manage, retrieve, and rotate database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycles. You might already use Secrets Manager to store and manage secrets in your applications built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but what about secrets for applications that are hosted in …

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Roles Anywhere enables workloads that run outside of Amazon Web Services (AWS), such as servers, containers, and applications, to use X.509 digital certificates to obtain temporary AWS credentials and access AWS resources, the same way that you use IAM roles for workloads …

AWS Management Console Private Access is an advanced security feature to help you control access to the AWS Management Console. In this post, I will show you how this feature works, share current limitations, and provide AWS CloudFormation templates that you can use to automate the deployment. AWS Management …