In the evolving landscape of network security, safeguarding data as it exits your virtual environment is as crucial as protecting incoming traffic. In a previous post, we highlighted the significance of ingress TLS inspection in enhancing security within Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments. Building on that foundation, I focus …

Continually reviewing your organization’s incident response capabilities can be challenging without a mechanism to create security findings with actual Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources within your AWS estate. As prescribed within the AWS Security Incident Response whitepaper, it’s important to periodically review your incident response capabilities to …

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the imagination of organizations and individuals around the world, and many have already adopted it to help improve workforce productivity, transform customer experiences, and more. When you use a generative AI-based service, you should understand how the information that you enter into the …

Implementing authentication and authorization mechanisms in modern applications can be challenging, especially when dealing with various client types and use cases. As developers, we often struggle to choose the right authentication flow to balance security, user experience, and application requirements. This is where understanding the OAuth 2.0 grant …

Use of long-term access keys for authentication between cloud resources increases the risk of key exposure and unauthorized secrets reuse. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed a solution to enable customers to securely authenticate Azure resources with AWS resources using short-lived tokens to reduce risks to secure authentication. In …

This blog post provides architectural guidance on AWS CloudHSM crypto user credential rotation and is intended for those using or considering using CloudHSM. CloudHSM is a popular solution for secure cryptographic material management. By using this service, organizations can benefit from a robust mechanism to manage their own dedicated …

For many network security operators, protecting application uptime can be a time-consuming challenge of baselining network traffic, investigating suspicious senders, and determining how best to mitigate risks. Simplifying this process and understanding network security posture at all times is the goal of most IT organizations that are trying to …

In this post, I’ll show how you can export software bills of materials (SBOMs) for your containers by using an AWS native service, Amazon Inspector, and visualize the SBOMs through Amazon QuickSight, providing a single-pane-of-glass view of your organization’s software supply chain. The concept of a bill …

You can use Amazon Security Lake to simplify log data collection and retention for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and non-AWS data sources. To make sure that you get the most out of your implementation requires proper planning. In this post, we will show you how to plan and implement …

The management of security services across organizations has evolved over the years, and can vary depending on the size of your organization, the type of industry, the number of services to be administered, and compliance regulations and legislation. When compliance standards require you to set up scoped administrative control …

This blog post provides recommendations that you can use to help improve resiliency in the unlikely event of disrupted availability of the global (now legacy) AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) endpoint. Although the global (legacy) AWS STS endpoint https://sts.amazonaws.com is highly available, it’s hosted …

AWS Network Firewall is a stateful managed network firewall and intrusion detection and prevention service designed for the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). This post concentrates on automating rule updates in a central Network Firewall by using distributed firewall configurations. If you’re new to Network Firewall or …

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 currently supports vulnerability reporting for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, container images stored in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and AWS …

An AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role is an IAM identity that you create in your AWS account that has specific permissions. An IAM role is similar to an IAM user because it’s an AWS identity with permission policies that determine what the identity can and cannot …

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 has expanded capability that allows customers to export a consolidated Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for supported Amazon Inspector monitored resources, excluding Windows EC2 …

With Amazon Cognito, you can implement customer identity and access management (CIAM) into your web and mobile applications. You can add user authentication and access control to your applications in minutes. In this post, I introduce you to the new access token customization feature for Amazon Cognito user pools …

In this post, we show you how to apply attribute-based access control (ABAC) while you store and manage your Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS) workload secrets in AWS Secrets Manager, and then retrieve them by integrating Secrets Manager with Amazon EKS using External Secrets Operator to define more …

Containerization technologies such as Docker and orchestration solutions such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) are popular with customers due to their portability and scalability advantages. Container runtime monitoring is essential for customers to monitor the health, performance, and security of containers. AWS services such as Amazon GuardDuty …

Organizations undergoing cloud migrations and business transformations often find themselves managing IT operations in hybrid or multicloud environments. This can make it more complex to safeguard workloads, applications, and data, and to securely handle identities and permissions across Amazon Web Services (AWS), hybrid, and multicloud setups. In this post …

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies are at the core of access control on AWS. They enable the bundling of permissions, helping to provide effective and modular access control for AWS services. Service control policies (SCPs) complement IAM policies by helping organizations enforce permission guardrails at scale across …

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer offers tools that help you set, verify, and refine permissions. You can use IAM Access Analyzer external access findings to continuously monitor your AWS Organizations organization and Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts for public and cross-account access to your resources, and …

I’ve always loved building things, but when I first began as a software developer, my least favorite part of the job was thinking about security. The security of those first lines of code just didn’t seem too important. Only after struggling through security reviews at the end …

As cloud environments—and security risks associated with them—become more complex, it becomes increasingly critical to understand your cloud security posture so that you can quickly and efficiently mitigate security gaps. AWS Security Hub offers close to 300 automated controls that continuously check whether the configuration of your …

You can now use AWS IAM Identity Center application assignment APIs to programmatically manage and audit user and group access to AWS managed applications. Previously, you had to use the IAM Identity Center console to manually assign users and groups to an application. Now, you can automate this task …

AWS Secrets Manager is a service that helps you manage, retrieve, and rotate database credentials, application credentials, OAuth tokens, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycles. You can use Secrets Manager to help remove hard-coded credentials in application source code. Storing the credentials in Secrets Manager helps avoid …