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 …

This blog post shows you how to share encrypted Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets across accounts on a multi-tenant data lake. Our objective is to show scalability over a larger volume of accounts that can access the data lake, in a scenario where there is one central …

Your organization can use AWS Security Hub to gain a comprehensive view of your security and compliance posture across your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. Security Hub receives security findings from AWS security services and supported third-party products and centralizes them, providing a single view for identifying and analyzing …

Network and security teams often need to evaluate the internet accessibility of all their resources on AWS and block any non-essential internet access. Validating who has access to what can be complicated—there are several different controls that can prevent or authorize access to resources in your Amazon Virtual …

As customers mature their security posture on Amazon Web Services (AWS), they are adopting multiple ways to detect suspicious behavior and notify response teams or workflows to take action. One example is using Amazon GuardDuty to monitor AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and deliver detailed security findings …

Using certificates to authenticate and encrypt data is vital to any enterprise security. For example, companies rely on certificates to provide TLS encryption for web applications so that client data is protected. However, not all certificates need to be issued from a publicly trusted certificate authority (CA). A privately …

We’re happy to announce that an updated version of the AWS Security Reference Architecture (AWS SRA) is now available. The AWS SRA is a holistic set of guidelines for deploying the full complement of AWS security services in a multi-account environment. You can use it to help your …