AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) lets you provision, manage, and deploy public and private Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates for use with AWS services and your internal connected resources. You probably have many users, applications, or accounts that request and use TLS certificates as part of your public key infrastructure …

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) helps customers build secure and scalable applications. IMDS solves a security challenge for cloud users by providing access to temporary and frequently-rotated credentials, and by removing the need to hardcode or distribute sensitive credentials to instances manually or …

You can now deploy AWS WAF managed rules as part of the Security Automations for AWS WAF solution. In this post, we show you how to get started and set up monitoring for this automated solution with additional recommendations. This article discusses AWS WAF, a service that assists you …

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) services help customers automate deployments of infrastructure as code and software within the cloud. Common native Amazon Web Services (AWS) CI/CD services include AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy. You can also use third-party CI/CD services hosted outside the …

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) events occur when a threat actor sends traffic floods from multiple sources to disrupt the availability of a targeted application. DDoS simulation testing uses a controlled DDoS event to allow the owner of an application to assess the application’s resilience and practice event …

In March 2022, AWS announced support for custom certificate extensions, including name constraints, using AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA). Defining DNS name constraints with your subordinate CA can help establish guardrails to improve public key infrastructure (PKI) security and mitigate certificate misuse. For example, you can …

A key part of protecting your organization’s non-public, sensitive data is to understand who can access it and from where. One of the common requirements is to restrict access to authorized users from known locations. To accomplish this, you should be familiar with the expected network access patterns …

Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) released Amazon Corretto Crypto Provider (ACCP) 2, a cryptography provider built by AWS for Java virtual machine (JVM) applications. ACCP 2 delivers comprehensive performance enhancements, with some algorithms (such as elliptic curve key generation) seeing a greater than 13-fold improvement over ACCP …

In 2017, AWS announced the release of Rate-based Rules for AWS WAF, a new rule type that helps protect websites and APIs from application-level threats such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, brute force log-in attempts, and bad bots. Rate-based rules track the rate of requests for each …

Over the past few decades, digital technologies have brought tremendous benefits to our societies, governments, businesses, and everyday lives. However, the more we depend on them for critical applications, the more we must do so securely. The increasing reliance on these systems comes with a broad responsibility for society …

Welcome to another blog post from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT)! For this post, we’re looking at two events that the team was involved in from the viewpoint of a regularly discussed but sometimes misunderstood subject, least privilege. Specifically, we consider the idea that the benefit …

At AWS, we often hear from customers that they want expanded security coverage for the multiple services that they use on AWS. However, alert fatigue is a common challenge that customers face as we introduce new security protections. The challenge becomes how to operationalize, identify, and prioritize alerts that …

Product security teams play a critical role to help ensure that new services, products, and features are built and shipped securely to customers. However, since security teams are in the product launch path, they can form a bottleneck if organizations struggle to scale their security teams to support their …

On June 19, 2023, AWS Verified Access introduced improved logging functionality; Verified Access now logs more extensive user context information received from the trust providers. This improved logging feature simplifies administration and troubleshooting of application access policies while adhering to zero-trust principles. In this blog post, we will show …

You can use AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) to securely, simply, and consistently share supported resource types within your organization or organizational units (OUs) and across AWS accounts. This means you can provision your resources once and use AWS RAM to share them with accounts. With AWS RAM …

This blog post demonstrates how you can activate Amazon Inspector within one or more AWS accounts and be notified when a vulnerability is detected in an AWS Lambda function. Amazon Inspector is an automated vulnerability management service that continually scans workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. Amazon …

July 27, 2023: This post was originally published February 5, 2015, and received a major update July 31, 2023. As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) administrator, it’s crucial for you to implement robust protective controls to maintain your security configuration. Employing a detective control mechanism to monitor changes …

With AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), you can simplify certificate lifecycle management by using event-driven workflows to notify or take action on expiring TLS certificates in your organization. Using ACM, you can provision, manage, and deploy public and private TLS certificates for use with integrated AWS services like Amazon CloudFront …

As Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers build new applications, APIs have been key to driving the adoption of these offerings. APIs simplify client integration and provide for efficient operations and management of applications by offering standard contracts for data exchange. APIs are also the front door to hosted applications …

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 supports vulnerability reporting and deep inspection of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, container images stored in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR …

Customers who build smart home devices using the Matter protocol from the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) need to create and maintain digital certificates, called device attestation certificates (DACs), to allow their devices to interoperate with devices from other vendors. DACs must be issued by a Matter device attestation certificate …

In this blog post, we focus on two recently released features of AWS Security Hub: the consolidated controls view and consolidated control findings. You can use these features to manage controls across standards and to consolidate findings, which can help you significantly reduce finding noise and administrative overhead. Security …

In this blog post, we show you how to use AWS Private Certificate Authority (CA) to create Matter device attestation CAs to issue device attestation certificates (DAC). By using this solution, device makers can operate their own device attestation CAs, building on the solid security foundation provided by AWS …

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), our APIs and service functionality are a promise to our customers, so we very rarely make breaking changes or remove functionality from production services. Customers use the AWS Cloud to build solutions for their customers, and when disruptive changes are made or functionality is …

AWS customers already use Amazon Cognito for simple, fast authentication. With the launch of Amazon Verified Permissions, many will also want to add simple, fast authorization to their applications by using the user attributes that they have in Amazon Cognito. In this post, I will show you how to …