August 17, 2023: We updated the instructions and screenshots in this post to align with changes to the AWS Management Console. April 25, 2023: We’ve updated this blog post to include more security learning resources. AD Connector is designed to give you an easy way to establish a …

AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On) is widely used by organizations to centrally manage federated access to their Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. As organizations grow, it’s crucial that they maintain control of access to their environment and conduct regular reviews of existing granted permissions …

When you’re designing a security strategy for your organization, firewalls provide the first line of defense against threats. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers AWS Network Firewall, a stateful, managed network firewall that includes intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) for your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Logging plays a …

In Part 1 of this series, we provided guidance on how to discover and classify secrets and design a migration solution for customers who plan to migrate secrets to AWS Secrets Manager. We also mentioned steps that you can take to enable preventative and detective controls for Secrets Manager …

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” – Benjamin Franklin A secret can be defined as sensitive information that is not intended to be known or disclosed to unauthorized individuals, entities, or processes. Secrets like API keys, passwords, and SSH keys provide access to confidential systems and …

Software development is a well-established process—developers write code, review it, build artifacts, and deploy the application. They then monitor the application using data to improve the code. This process is often repeated many times over. As Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers embrace modern software development practices, they sometimes …

AWS Security Hub is a cloud security posture management service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates security findings from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and third-party security services, and enables automated remediation. Most of the checks Security Hub performs on AWS resources happen as soon as there is a …

AWS recommends using automation where possible to keep people away from systems—yet not every action can be automated in practice, and some operations might require access by human users. Depending on their scope and potential impact, some human operations might require special treatment. One such treatment is temporary …

With Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), you can set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the AWS Cloud. Amazon RDS provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks. If you use Amazon RDS for your workloads, you can now …

August 13, 2018: Date this post was first published, on the Front-End Web and Mobile Blog. We updated the CloudFormation template, provided additional clarification on implementation steps, and revised to account for the new Amazon Cognito UI. User authentication and authorization can be challenging when you’re building web …

In this post, we’ll share an automation pattern that you can use to automatically detect and block suspicious hosts that are attempting to access your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources. The automation will rely on Amazon GuardDuty to generate findings about the suspicious hosts, and then you can …

Customers who require private keys for their TLS certificates to be stored in FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified hardware security modules (HSMs) can use AWS CloudHSM to store their keys for websites hosted in the cloud. In this blog post, we will show you how to automate the deployment …

In this blog post, we will show you how to use managed prefix lists to simplify management of your AWS Network Firewall rules and policies across your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) in the same AWS Region. AWS Network Firewall is a stateful, managed, network firewall and intrusion …

Today AWS launched two new global condition context keys that make it simpler for you to write policies in which Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance credentials work only when used on the instance to which they are issued. These new condition keys are available today in all …

In this blog post, we show you how to create an Amazon QuickSight dashboard to visualize the policy validation findings from AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer. You can use this dashboard to better understand your policies and how to achieve least privilege by periodically validating your …

Secrets managers are a great tool to securely store your secrets and provide access to secret material to a set of individuals, applications, or systems that you trust. Across your environments, you might have multiple secrets managers hosted on different providers, which can increase the complexity of maintaining a …

Some web applications need to protect their authentication tokens or session IDs from cross-site scripting (XSS). It’s an Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) best practice for session management to store secrets in the browsers’ cookie store with the HttpOnly attribute enabled. When cookies have the HttpOnly attribute …

When you use a centralized identity provider (IdP) for human user access, changes that an identity administrator makes to a user within the IdP won’t invalidate the user’s existing active Amazon Web Services (AWS) sessions. This is due to the nature of session durations that are configured …

Security teams use Amazon Macie to discover and protect sensitive data, such as names, payment card data, and AWS credentials, in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). When Macie discovers sensitive data, these teams will want to see examples of the actual sensitive data found. Reviewing a sampling of …

November 3, 2022: We updated this post to fix some syntax errors in the policy statements and to add additional use cases. August 30, 2021: This post is currently being updated. We will post another note when it’s complete. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles are a …

Security and network administrators can control outbound access from a virtual private cloud (VPC) to specific destinations by using a service like AWS Network Firewall. You can use stateful rule groups to control outbound access to domains for HTTP and HTTPS by default in Network Firewall. In this post …

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer provides tools to simplify permissions management by making it simpler for you to set, verify, and refine permissions. One such tool is IAM Access Analyzer policy generation, which creates fine-grained policies based on your AWS CloudTrail access activity—for example, the …

In this blog post, we will walk you through the EC2 forensic module factory solution to deploy automation to build forensic kernel modules that are required for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) incident response automation. When an EC2 instance is suspected to have been compromised, it’s strongly …

This solution consists of two parts. In the previous blog post Implement step-up authentication with Amazon Cognito, Part 1: Solution overview, you learned about the architecture and design of a step-up authentication solution that uses AWS services such as Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Cognito, Amazon DynamoDB, and AWS Lambda …

In this blog post, you’ll learn how to protect privileged business transactions that are exposed as APIs by using multi-factor authentication (MFA) or security challenges. These challenges have two components: what you know (such as passwords), and what you have (such as a one-time password token). By using …