AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer provides many tools to help you set, verify, and refine permissions. One part of IAM Access Analyzer—policy validation—helps you author secure and functional policies that grant the intended permissions. Now, I’m excited to announce that AWS has updated …

This blog post shows how to set up an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) cluster such that the applications hosted on the cluster can have their outbound internet access restricted to a set of hostnames provided by the Server Name Indication (SNI) in the allow list in the …

Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers can use AWS Shield Advanced to detect and mitigate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that target their applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Elastic Local Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, and Amazon Route 53. By using protection groups …

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 …

Note: This post includes links to third-party websites. AWS is not responsible for the content on those websites. Following the release of Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, Amazon Web Services (AWS) published several blog posts to help you protect your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) DNS resolution …

Many organizations restrict permissions to create and manage AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resources to a group of privileged users or a central team. This post explains how you can safely grant these permissions to builders – the people who are developing, testing, launching, and managing cloud infrastructure – to …

Amazon Macie is a fully managed data security and data privacy service that uses machine learning and pattern matching to discover and help you protect your sensitive data in Amazon Web Services (AWS). The data that is available within your AWS account can grow rapidly, which increases your need …

With AWS Security Hub you are able to manage your security posture in AWS, perform security best practice checks, aggregate alerts, and automate remediation. Now you are able to use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to subscribe to the new Security Hub Announcements topic to receive updates about …

AWS Security Hub is a central dashboard for security, risk management, and compliance findings from AWS Audit Manager, AWS Firewall Manager, Amazon GuardDuty, IAM Access Analyzer, Amazon Inspector, and many other AWS and third-party services. You can use the insights from Security Hub to get an understanding of your …

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 …

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently released a new whitepaper, Does data localization cause more problems than it solves?, as part of the AWS Innovating Securely briefing series. The whitepaper draws on research from Emily Wu’s paper Sovereignty and Data Localization, published by Harvard University’s Belfer Center, and …

Git hooks are scripts that extend Git functionality when certain events and actions occur during code development. Developer teams often use Git hooks to perform quality checks before they commit their code changes. For example, see the blog post Use Git pre-commit hooks to avoid AWS CloudFormation errors for …

Git hooks are scripts that extend Git functionality when certain events and actions occur during code development. Developer teams often use Git hooks to perform quality checks before they commit their code changes. For example, see the blog post Use Git pre-commit hooks to avoid AWS CloudFormation errors for …

Today AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is introducing new APIs to generate and verify hash-based message authentication codes (HMACs) using the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 validated hardware security modules (HSMs) in AWS KMS. HMACs are a powerful cryptographic building block that incorporate secret key material in …

Organizations who want to federate their external identity provider (IdP) to AWS will typically do it through AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), or use both. With AWS SSO, you configure federation once and manage access to all of your AWS accounts centrally. With …

March 16, 2022: The title and the opening section of this blog post has been updated. Federating your external identity provider (IdP) to AWS is a best practice. The simplest way to federate into AWS is with AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO). With AWS SSO, you configure federation once …

Protecting your network and computers from security events requires multi-level strategies, and you can use network level traffic filtration as one level of defense. Users need access to the internet for business reasons, but they can inadvertently download malware, which can impact network and data security. This post describes …

Tokenization of sensitive data elements is a hot topic, but you may not know what to tokenize, or even how to determine if tokenization is right for your organization’s business needs. Industries subject to financial, data security, regulatory, or privacy compliance standards are increasingly looking for tokenization solutions …

For most customers today, security compliance auditing can be a very cumbersome and costly process. This activity within a security program often comes with a dependency on third party audit firms and robust security teams, to periodically assess risk and raise compliance gaps aligned with applicable industry requirements. Due …

In this blog post, I show you how to configure AWS Single Sign-On to define attribute-based access control (ABAC) permissions to manage Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and AWS Systems Manager Session Manager for federated users. This combination allows you to control access to specific Amazon EC2 …

AWS Managed Rules for AWS WAF provides a group of rules created by AWS that can be used help protect you against common application vulnerabilities and other unwanted access to your systems without having to write your own rules. AWS Threat Research Team updates AWS Managed Rules to respond …