Tag Archives: auditing

On Financial Fraud

2018-07-25 Bruce Schneier

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/07/on_financial_fr.html

There are some good lessons in this article on financial fraud:

That’s how we got it so wrong. We were looking for incidental breaches of technical regulations, not systematic crime. And the thing is, that’s normal. The nature of fraud is that it works outside your field of vision, subverting the normal checks and balances so that the world changes while the picture stays the same. People in financial markets have been missing the wood for the trees for as long as there have been markets.
[..]
Trust — particularly between complete strangers, with no interactions beside relatively anonymous market transactions — is the basis of the modern industrial economy. And the story of the development of the modern economy is in large part the story of the invention and improvement of technologies and institutions for managing that trust.
And as industrial society develops, it becomes easier to be a victim. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith described how prosperity derived from the division of labour — the 18 distinct operations that went into the manufacture of a pin, for example. While this was going on, the modern world also saw a growing division of trust. The more a society benefits from the division of labour in checking up on things, the further you can go into a con game before you realise that you’re in one.
[…]
Libor teaches us a valuable lesson about commercial fraud — that unlike other crimes, it has a problem of denial as well as one of detection. There are very few other criminal acts where the victim not only consents to the criminal act, but voluntarily transfers the money or valuable goods to the criminal. And the hierarchies, status distinctions and networks that make up a modern economy also create powerful psychological barriers against seeing fraud when it is happening. White-collar crime is partly defined by the kind of person who commits it: a person of high status in the community, the kind of person who is always given the benefit of the doubt.
[…]
Fraudsters don’t play on moral weaknesses, greed or fear; they play on weaknesses in the system of checks and balances — the audit processes that are meant to supplement an overall environment of trust. One point that comes up again and again when looking at famous and large-scale frauds is that, in many cases, everything could have been brought to a halt at a very early stage if anyone had taken care to confirm all the facts. But nobody does confirm all the facts. There are just too bloody many of them. Even after the financial rubble has settled and the arrests been made, this is a huge problem.

How to use Amazon AppStream 2.0 to reduce your bastion host attack surface

2018-05-02 Chaim Landau

Post Syndicated from Chaim Landau original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-use-amazon-appstream-2-0-to-reduce-your-bastion-host-attack-surface/

To help protect their assets, many security-conscious enterprises require their system administrators to go through a “bastion” (or “jump”) host to gain administrative access to backend systems in protected or sensitive network segments.

A bastion host is a special-purpose instance that hosts a minimal number of administrative applications, such as RDP for Windows or Putty for Linux-based distributions. All other unnecessary services are removed. The host is typically placed in a segregated network (or “DMZ”), and is often protected with multi-factor authentication (MFA) and monitored with auditing tools. And most enterprises require that the access trail to the bastion host be auditable.

In this post, I demonstrate the use of Amazon AppStream 2.0 as a hardened and auto-scaled bastion host solution, and show how it could reduce the attack surface by stripping away the underlying OS and exposing only the necessary tools to system administrators that need access to protected network segments.

Prerequisites

A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with a dedicated subnet for AppStream 2.0.
An existing Active Directory (AD) domain. This may be on premises, on AWS EC2 for Windows, or AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory used as a user directory.
Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS).
A Linux or Windows instance for which AppStream 2.0 will be acting as a bastion host.

Solution overview

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed application streaming service that provides users instant access to their desktop applications from anywhere by using an HTML5-compatible desktop browser. When a user requests access to an application, AppStream 2.0 uses a base image to deploy a streaming instance and destroys the instance after the user closes their session. This ensures the same consistent experience during each logon.

You can use AppStream 2.0 as a bastion solution to enable your system administrators to manage their environment without giving them a full bastion host. Because AppStream 2.0 freshly builds instances each time a user requests access, a compromised instance will only last for the duration of a user session. As soon as the user closes their session and the Disconnect Timeout period is reached, AppStream 2.0 terminates the instance and, with it, you’ve reduced your risks of compromised instances.

You will also potentially reduce your costs because AppStream 2.0 has built-in auto-scaling to increase and decrease capacity based on user demand. It allows you to take advantage of the pay-as-you-go model, where you only pay for what you use.

High-level AppStream 2.0 architecture

The diagram below depicts a high-level AppStream 2.0 architecture used as a bastion host for servers in another VPC.

There are three VPCs shown: AppStream 2.0 VPC, Bastion host VPC, and application VPC. The AppStream 2.0 VPC is an AWS-owned VPC where the AppStream 2.0 maintains its infrastructure. Customers are not responsible for this VPC and have no access to it. AppStream 2.0 builds each streaming instance with two Elastic Network Interfaces (ENI); one in the AppStream 2.0 VPC and one in the VPC where you choose to deploy your AppStream 2.0 instances. The third VPC is the application VPC where you would typically keep your backend servers.

The diagram also depicts the end-user process to access the AppStream 2.0 environment, which works as follow:

Using an HTML5 desktop browser the user logs on to a Single Sign-On URL. This authenticates the user against the corporate directory using SAML 2.0 federation and with optional MFA.
After successful authentication, the user will see a list of provisioned applications.
The user can launch applications, such as RDP and Putty, which are only visible within the browser and with its underlying OS hidden. The user is then able to connect to the backend systems over the ports that were opened through security groups. The user logs off and AppStream 2.0 destroys the instance used for the session.

Figure 1: Architecture diagram

Step-by-step instructions

This walk-through assumes you have created the following resources as prerequisites.

A single VPC with a /23 CIDR range and two private subnets in two AZs.

Note: “private” subnet refers to a subnet that has no internet gateway (IGW) attached.
- Bastion Subnets — used for the AppStream 2.0 instances that will be hosting the bastion applications.
- Apps Subnets — used for the servers for which the AppStream 2.0 instances will be acting as a bastion host.
  
  Figure 2: Screen shot of bastion and apps subnets
A peering connection to a VPC where the corporate Active Directory resides and with updated routing tables. This is only necessary if your AD resides in a different VPC.
Two EC2 instances with private IP addresses in the app subnet.

Phase 1: Create the DHCP Options Set

For the AppStream 2.0 instances to be able to join the corporate domain, they need to have their DNS entries point to the corporate domain controller(s). To accomplish this, you need to create a DHCP Options Set and assign it to the VPC:

Sign in to the AWS console, and then select VPC Dashboard > DHCP Option Sets > Create DHCP options set.
Give the DHCP Options Set a name, enter the domain name and DNS server(s) of your corporate domain controller(s), and then select Yes, Create.
Select your VPC Dashboard > your VPC > Actions > Edit DHCP Options Set.
Select the DHCP Options Set created in the previous step, and then select Save.

Figure 3: The “Edit DHCP Options Set” dialog

Phase 2: Create the AppStream 2.0 Stack

An AppStream 2.0 stack consists of a fleet, user access policies, and storage configuration. To create a stack, follow these steps:

Sign in to the AWS console and select AppStream 2.0 > Stack > Create Stack.
Give the stack a name, and then select Next.
Enable Home Folders, if you want persistent storage, and then select Review.

Figure 4: The “Enable Home Folders” dialog
Select Create.

Phase 3: Create the AppsStream 2.0 Directory Configuration

First create a directory configuration so you can join the AppStream 2.0 instances to an Organizational Unit (OU) in your corporate directory.

Note: AppStream 2.0 instances must be placed in an OU and can’t reside in the Computer Container.

To create a directory configuration, follow these steps:

Sign in to the AWS console and select AppStream 2.0 > Directory Configs > Create Directory Config.
Enter the following Directory Config information:
- Directory name: The FQDN of your corporate domain.
- Service Account Name: The account AppStream 2.0 uses to join the instances to the corporate domain. The required service account privileges are documented here.
- Organizational Unit (OU): The OUs where AppStream 2.0 will create your instances. You can add additional OUs by clicking the plus (+) sign.
Select Next, and then select Create.

Create Security Groups

Now, create AWS security groups for your AppStream 2.0 instances and backend servers.

BastionHostSecurityGroup

For your AppStream 2.0 instances, you must attach a “BastionHostSecurityGroup” in order to communicate to the backend servers. This security group is only used as a “source” by the security groups the backend servers are attached to and, therefore, they don’t require any inbound ports to be opened.

To create a security group, follow these steps:

Sign in to the AWS console and select VPC > Security Groups > Create Security Group.
Give your “BastionHostSecurityGroup” Security Group a name, select the VPC where you will place the AppStream 2.0 instances, and then select Yes, Create.

BastionHostAccessSecurityGroup

For your backend servers, you must attach a “BastionHostAccessSecurityGroup” that allows incoming traffic from the AppStream 2.0 instance. Unlike the “BastionHostSecurityGroup”, this one requires open inbound ports.

Sign in to the AWS console and select VPC > Security Groups > Create Security Group.
Give your “BastionHostAccessSecurityGroup” security group a name, select the correct VPC, and then select Yes, Create.
In the Security Group console, select the newly created security group, select the Inbound Rule tab, and then select Edit.
Add rules to open port 3389 and 22, use the previously-created security group as the source, and then select Save.

Figure 5: Opening ports 3389 and 22
Note: In addition to security groups, you can place Network ACLs (NACLs) around the subnet you use for AppStream 2.0 as an additional layer of security. The main differences between security groups and NACLs are that security groups are mandatory and you apply them to the instance level, while you apply NACLs to the subnet level and are optional. Another difference worth pointing out is that NACLs are “stateless” while security groups are “stateful.” This means that any port allowed inbound via NACLs will need a corresponding outbound rule. For more information on NACLs, refer to this documentation.

Phase 4: Build the AppStream 2.0 Image

An AppStream 2.0 image contains applications that you can stream to users. AppStream 2.0 uses the image to launch streaming instances that are part of an AppStream 2.0 fleet.

Once you have created the stack, create a custom image to make custom applications available to the users:

Sign in to the AWS console and select AppStream 2.0 > Images > Image Builder > Launch Image Builder.
Choose the image you want to use as a starting point, and then select Next. For this example, I chose a generic image from the General Purpose stock.

Figure 6: Choosing an image
Give your image a name, choose the instance family, and then select Next.
Choose the VPC and subnet you want to deploy the AppStream 2.0 instances in.
Select the security group you created for the AppStream 2.0 instances.
Select the directory configuration you created, the OU you want your AppStream 2.0 instances to reside in, and then select Review.
Select Launch.
Once the image is built and in a running state, select the image, and then select Connect. This will open a new browser tab where you’ll be able to connect to and manage the image.
Select Administrator and log in.

Figure 7: Log in as a local administrator
Once logged in as administrator, select the Image Assistant shortcut on the desktop.

Figure 8: The Image Assistant shortcut on the desktop
Add all the applications you want to make available to your users for streaming, and then select Next.

Note: If you need to upload installation or configuration files, you can use the My Files option in the Control menu. Any files uploaded through this method will show up under the X: drive on the Image Builder.

Figure 9: The “Control” menu
If you want to test the applications as a non-privileged user, follow the on-screen instructions to switch the user. Otherwise, select Next.

Figure 10: “Switch User” on-screen instructions
Select Launch to have the Image Assistant optimize the applications.
Give the image a name, and then select Next.
Select Disconnect and Create Image.
Go back to the AppStream 2.0 console and wait for the “snapshotting” to complete and for the image to be in an available state before continuing to the next step.

Phase 5: Create the AppStream 2.0 Fleet

Once you create your Stack and image, you need to create a Fleet and associate it with your Stack.

AppStream 2.0 fleets consist of streaming instances that run the image that you specify. The fleet type determines when your instances run and how you pay for them. You can specify a fleet type when you create a fleet, and you can’t change them once they’ve been created.

To create a fleet, follow these steps:

Sign in to the AWS console and select AppStream 2.0 > Fleets > Create Fleet.
Give your fleet a name, and then select Next.
Select the newly created image, and then select Next.
Choose your preferred settings, and then select Next.

Important: Pay special attention to the Fleet capacity value. Fleet capacity determines the number of running instances you have at any given time, and it affects your costs.

Figure 11: The “Fleet capacity” dialog
Select your VPC, subnet(s), security Group(s), Active Directory settings, and then select Next.
Review the information, and then select Create.

Figure 12: Review your settings

Associate the fleet with the stack

Follow these steps:

Sign in to the AWS console and select AppStream 2.0 > Stacks.
Select the stack, select Actions, and then select Associate Fleet.
Select the fleet, and then select Associate.

Phase 6: Configure ADFS for AppStream 2.0

To have users authenticate against the corporate directory prior to accessing AppStream 2.0, use a Single Sign-On solution. For this demo, I use ADFS. If you choose another solution, follow the instructions that come with the solution. For help with setting up ADFS with AppStream 2.0, review Enabling Identify Federation with ADSF and Amazon Appstream 2.0.

Note: If you use AWS Directory Service for Microsoft AD (AWS Managed Microsoft AD) as your user directory, you can use ADFS by following the ADFS set-up instructions in the blog on How to Enable Your Users to Access Office 365 with AWS Managed Microsoft AD Credentials.

End User Experience

This section shows you what the AppStream 2.0 end user experience is like when connecting to backend Windows and Linux instances.

Note: Make sure you have backend servers to connect to, as indicated in the prerequisites.

Process

Access the ADFS URL that you created as part of the ADFS setup.
Sign in using your corporate credentials.
Select Remote Desktop from the list of applications.
Enter your corporate credentials.
Enter the private IP address of the backend windows instance you want to remote in to.

Figure 13: Enter the private IP address
You’re now logged on to the backend Windows instance through AppStream 2.0.
To test in Linux, open putty. Select the Launch app icon in the Control menu, and then select putty.

Figure 14: The “Control” menu showing putty
Provide the private IP address of a backend Linux host you want to connect to, and then select Open.

Note: For putty to connect to a Linux instance on AWS, you will need to provide a KeyPair. For information on how to configure putty and KeyPairs, refer to this documentation.

You’re now logged on to a backend Linux host through AppStream 2.0.

Monitoring

You can monitor AppStream 2.0 use by default with the following AWS monitoring services.

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources. For more information, refer to this documentation. Here’s a sample CloudWatch metric showing in-use capacity was 100% at 14:30, which indicates the Fleet capacity may need to be adjusted.

Figure 15: An example CloudWatch metric
AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. For more information, refer to this documentation. Here’s a sample CloudTrail event. For example, from this event you can see that user Bob logged on to AppStream 2.0 on March 4, 2018, and you can see his source IP.

Figure 16: An example CloudTrail event

Summary

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a cost-effective way to provide administrators with a secure and auditable method to access their backend environments.

The AppStream 2.0 built-in auto-scaling feature offers a pay-as-you-go model, where the number of instances running is based on user demand. This allows you to keep costs down without compromising availability. Another cost-saving benefit of AppStream 2.0 is its underlying infrastructure being managed and maintained by AWS, so you can deploy AppStream 2.0 with minimal effort.

AppStream 2.0 helps with reducing the attack surface by hiding the shell of the streaming OS. This prevents administrators from interacting with executables that haven’t been made available to them through AppStream 2.0.

Another security benefit of AppStream 2.0 is that it destroys streaming instances after each use, reducing risks. This is a good mitigation strategy against compromised instances, as the lifespan of an instance is limited to the length of a user’s session.

AppStream 2.0 support for SAML provides yet another layer of security, allowing you to restrict access to SAML-federated URLs from corporate networks only, as well as the ability to enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA).

You can monitor the AppStream 2.0 environment through the use of AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch, allowing you to monitor and trace the usage of AppStream 2.0.

For all of these reasons, AppStream 2.0 makes for a uniquely attractive bastion host solution.

For more information on the technologies mentioned in this blog, see the links below:

If you have comments about this post, submit them in the Comments section below. If you have questions about anything in this post, start a new thread on the Amazon AppStream 2.0 forum or contact AWS Support.

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Store, Protect, Optimize Your Healthcare Data with AWS

2018-04-26 Stephen Jepsen

Post Syndicated from Stephen Jepsen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/store-protect-optimize-your-healthcare-data-with-aws/

This blog post was co-authored by Ujjwal Ratan, a senior AI/ML solutions architect on the global life sciences team.

Healthcare data is generated at an ever-increasing rate and is predicted to reach 35 zettabytes by 2020. Being able to cost-effectively and securely manage this data whether for patient care, research or legal reasons is increasingly important for healthcare providers.

Healthcare providers must have the ability to ingest, store and protect large volumes of data including clinical, genomic, device, financial, supply chain, and claims. AWS is well-suited to this data deluge with a wide variety of ingestion, storage and security services (e.g. AWS Direct Connect, Amazon Kinesis Streams, Amazon S3, Amazon Macie) for customers to handle their healthcare data. In a recent Healthcare IT News article, healthcare thought-leader, John Halamka, noted, “I predict that five years from now none of us will have datacenters. We’re going to go out to the cloud to find EHRs, clinical decision support, analytics.”

I realize simply storing this data is challenging enough. Magnifying the problem is the fact that healthcare data is increasingly attractive to cyber attackers, making security a top priority. According to Mariya Yao in her Forbes column, it is estimated that individual medical records can be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars on the black market.

In this first of a 2-part post, I will address the value that AWS can bring to customers for ingesting, storing and protecting provider’s healthcare data. I will describe key components of any cloud-based healthcare workload and the services AWS provides to meet these requirements. In part 2 of this post we will dive deep into the AWS services used for advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The data tsunami is upon us

So where is this data coming from? In addition to the ubiquitous electronic health record (EHR), the sources of this data include:

genomic sequencers
devices such as MRIs, x-rays and ultrasounds
sensors and wearables for patients
medical equipment telemetry
mobile applications

Additional sources of data come from non-clinical, operational systems such as:

human resources
finance
supply chain
claims and billing

Data from these sources can be structured (e.g., claims data) as well as unstructured (e.g., clinician notes). Some data comes across in streams such as that taken from patient monitors, while some comes in batch form. Still other data comes in near-real time such as HL7 messages. All of this data has retention policies dictating how long it must be stored. Much of this data is stored in perpetuity as many systems in use today have no purge mechanism. AWS has services to manage all these data types as well as their retention, security and access policies.

Imaging is a significant contributor to this data tsunami. Increasing demand for early-stage diagnoses along with aging populations drive increasing demand for images from CT, PET, MRI, ultrasound, digital pathology, X-ray and fluoroscopy. For example, a thin-slice CT image can be hundreds of megabytes. Increasing demand and strict retention policies make storage costly.

Due to the plummeting cost of gene sequencing, molecular diagnostics (including liquid biopsy) is a large contributor to this data deluge. Many predict that as the value of molecular testing becomes more identifiable, the reimbursement models will change and it will increasingly become the standard of care. According to the Washington Post article “Sequencing the Genome Creates so Much Data We Don’t Know What to do with It,”

“Some researchers predict that up to one billion people will have their genome sequenced by 2025 generating up to 40 exabytes of data per year.”

Although genomics is primarily used for oncology diagnostics today, it’s also used for other purposes, pharmacogenomics — used to understand how an individual will metabolize a medication.

Reference Architecture

It is increasingly challenging for the typical hospital, clinic or physician practice to securely store, process and manage this data without cloud adoption.

Amazon has a variety of ingestion techniques depending on the nature of the data including size, frequency and structure. AWS Snowball and AWS Snowmachine are appropriate for extremely-large, secure data transfers whether one time or episodic. AWS Glue is a fully-managed ETL service for securely moving data from on-premise to AWS and Amazon Kinesis can be used for ingesting streaming data.

Amazon S3, Amazon S3 IA, and Amazon Glacier are economical, data-storage services with a pay-as-you-go pricing model that expand (or shrink) with the customer’s requirements.

The above architecture has four distinct components – ingestion, storage, security, and analytics. In this post I will dive deeper into the first three components, namely ingestion, storage and security. In part 2, I will look at how to use AWS’ analytics services to draw value on, and optimize, your healthcare data.

Ingestion

A typical provider data center will consist of many systems with varied datasets. AWS provides multiple tools and services to effectively and securely connect to these data sources and ingest data in various formats. The customers can choose from a range of services and use them in accordance with the use case.

For use cases involving one-time (or periodic), very large data migrations into AWS, customers can take advantage of AWS Snowball devices. These devices come in two sizes, 50 TB and 80 TB and can be combined together to create a petabyte scale data transfer solution.

The devices are easy to connect and load and they are shipped to AWS avoiding the network bottlenecks associated with such large-scale data migrations. The devices are extremely secure supporting 256-bit encryption and come in a tamper-resistant enclosure. AWS Snowball imports data in Amazon S3 which can then interface with other AWS compute services to process that data in a scalable manner.

For use cases involving a need to store a portion of datasets on premises for active use and offload the rest on AWS, the Amazon storage gateway service can be used. The service allows you to seamlessly integrate on premises applications via standard storage protocols like iSCSI or NFS mounted on a gateway appliance. It supports a file interface, a volume interface and a tape interface which can be utilized for a range of use cases like disaster recovery, backup and archiving, cloud bursting, storage tiering and migration.

The AWS Storage Gateway appliance can use the AWS Direct Connect service to establish a dedicated network connection from the on premises data center to AWS.

Specific Industry Use Cases

By using the AWS proposed reference architecture for disaster recovery, healthcare providers can ensure their data assets are securely stored on the cloud and are easily accessible in the event of a disaster. The “AWS Disaster Recovery” whitepaper includes details on options available to customers based on their desired recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).

AWS is an ideal destination for offloading large volumes of less-frequently-accessed data. These datasets are rarely used in active compute operations but are exceedingly important to retain for reasons like compliance. By storing these datasets on AWS, customers can take advantage of the highly-durable platform to securely store their data and also retrieve them easily when they need to. For more details on how AWS enables customers to run back and archival use cases on AWS, please refer to the following set of whitepapers.

A healthcare provider may have a variety of databases spread throughout the hospital system supporting critical applications such as EHR, PACS, finance and many more. These datasets often need to be aggregated to derive information and calculate metrics to optimize business processes. AWS Glue is a fully-managed Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) service that can read data from a JDBC-enabled, on-premise database and transfer the datasets into AWS services like Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift and Amazon RDS. This allows customers to create transformation workflows that integrate smaller datasets from multiple sources and aggregates them on AWS.

Healthcare providers deal with a variety of streaming datasets which often have to be analyzed in near real time. These datasets come from a variety of sources such as sensors, messaging buses and social media, and often do not adhere to an industry standard. The Amazon Kinesis suite of services, that includes Amazon Kinesis Streams, Amazon Kinesis Firehose, and Amazon Kinesis Analytics, are the ideal set of services to accomplish the task of deriving value from streaming data.

Example: Using AWS Glue to de-identify and ingest healthcare data into S3
Let’s consider a scenario in which a provider maintains patient records in a database they want to ingest into S3. The provider also wants to de-identify the data by stripping personally- identifiable attributes and store the non-identifiable information in an S3 bucket. This bucket is different from the one that contains identifiable information. Doing this allows the healthcare provider to separate sensitive information with more restrictions set up via S3 bucket policies.

To ingest records into S3, we create a Glue job that reads from the source database using a Glue connection. The connection is also used by a Glue crawler to populate the Glue data catalog with the schema of the source database. We will use the Glue development endpoint and a zeppelin notebook server on EC2 to develop and execute the job.

Step 1: Import the necessary libraries and also set a glue context which is a wrapper on the spark context:

Step 2: Create a dataframe from the source data. I call the dataframe “readmissionsdata”. Here is what the schema would look like:

Step 3: Now select the columns that contains indentifiable information and store it in a new dataframe. Call the new dataframe “phi”.

Step 4: Non-PHI columns are stored in a separate dataframe. Call this dataframe “nonphi”.

Step 5: Write the two dataframes into two separate S3 buckets

Once successfully executed, the PHI and non-PHI attributes are stored in two separate files in two separate buckets that can be individually maintained.

Storage

In 2016, 327 healthcare providers reported a protected health information (PHI) breach, affecting 16.4m patient records[1]. There have been 342 data breaches reported in 2017 — involving 3.2 million patient records.[2]

To date, AWS has released 51 HIPAA-eligible services to help customers address security challenges and is in the process of making many more services HIPAA-eligible. These HIPAA-eligible services (along with all other AWS services) help customers build solutions that comply with HIPAA security and auditing requirements. A catalogue of HIPAA-enabled services can be found at AWS HIPAA-eligible services. It is important to note that AWS manages physical and logical access controls for the AWS boundary. However, the overall security of your workloads is a shared responsibility, where you are responsible for controlling user access to content on your AWS accounts.

AWS storage services allow you to store data efficiently while maintaining high durability and scalability. By using Amazon S3 as the central storage layer, you can take advantage of the Amazon S3 storage management features to get operational metrics on your data sets and transition them between various storage classes to save costs. By tagging objects on Amazon S3, you can build a governance layer on Amazon S3 to grant role based access to objects using Amazon IAM and Amazon S3 bucket policies.

To learn more about the Amazon S3 storage management features, see the following link.

Security

In the example above, we are storing the PHI information in a bucket named “phi.” Now, we want to protect this information to make sure its encrypted, does not have unauthorized access, and all access requests to the data are logged.

Encryption: S3 provides settings to enable default encryption on a bucket. This ensures any object in the bucket is encrypted by default.

Logging: S3 provides object level logging that can be used to capture all API calls to the object. The API calls are logged in cloudtrail for easy access and consolidation. Moreover, it also supports events to proactively alert customers of read and write operations.

Access control: Customers can use S3 bucket policies and IAM policies to restrict access to the phi bucket. It can also put a restriction to enforce multi-factor authentication on the bucket. For example, the following policy enforces multi-factor authentication on the phi bucket:

"Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Id": "123",
    "Statement": [
      {
        "Sid": "",
        "Effect": "Deny",
        "Principal": "*",
        "Action": "s3:*",
        "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::phi/*",
        "Condition": { "Null": { "aws:MultiFactorAuthAge": true } }
      },
      {
        "Sid": "",
        "Effect": "Allow",
        "Principal": "*",
        "Action": ["s3:GetObject"],
        "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::phi/*"
      }
    ]
 }

Conclusion

In Part 1 of this blog, we detailed the ingestion, storage, security and management of healthcare data on AWS. Stay tuned for part two where we are going to dive deep into optimizing the data for analytics and machine learning.

Please visit Healthcare Providers and Insurers in the Cloud for additional information.

[1] “Largest Healthcare Data Breaches of 2016.” HIPAA Journal, 29 Aug. 2017
[2] “Largest Healthcare Data Breaches of 2017.” HIPAA Journal, 8 Mar. 2018

About the Author

Stephen Jepsen is a Global HCLS Practice Manager in AWS Professional Services.

Securing Elections

2018-04-20 Bruce Schneier

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_electi_1.html

Elections serve two purposes. The first, and obvious, purpose is to accurately choose the winner. But the second is equally important: to convince the loser. To the extent that an election system is not transparently and auditably accurate, it fails in that second purpose. Our election systems are failing, and we need to fix them.

Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers. We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to use something that is not hackable or unreliable at scale; the best way to do that is to back up as much of the system as possible with paper.

Recently, there have been two graphic demonstrations of how bad our computerized voting system is. In 2007, the states of California and Ohio conducted audits of their electronic voting machines. Expert review teams found exploitable vulnerabilities in almost every component they examined. The researchers were able to undetectably alter vote tallies, erase audit logs, and load malware on to the systems. Some of their attacks could be implemented by a single individual with no greater access than a normal poll worker; others could be done remotely.

Last year, the Defcon hackers’ conference sponsored a Voting Village. Organizers collected 25 pieces of voting equipment, including voting machines and electronic poll books. By the end of the weekend, conference attendees had found ways to compromise every piece of test equipment: to load malicious software, compromise vote tallies and audit logs, or cause equipment to fail.

It’s important to understand that these were not well-funded nation-state attackers. These were not even academics who had been studying the problem for weeks. These were bored hackers, with no experience with voting machines, playing around between parties one weekend.

It shouldn’t be any surprise that voting equipment, including voting machines, voter registration databases, and vote tabulation systems, are that hackable. They’re computers — often ancient computers running operating systems no longer supported by the manufacturers — and they don’t have any magical security technology that the rest of the industry isn’t privy to. If anything, they’re less secure than the computers we generally use, because their manufacturers hide any flaws behind the proprietary nature of their equipment.

We’re not just worried about altering the vote. Sometimes causing widespread failures, or even just sowing mistrust in the system, is enough. And an election whose results are not trusted or believed is a failed election.

Voting systems have another requirement that makes security even harder to achieve: the requirement for a secret ballot. Because we have to securely separate the election-roll system that determines who can vote from the system that collects and tabulates the votes, we can’t use the security systems available to banking and other high-value applications.

We can securely bank online, but can’t securely vote online. If we could do away with anonymity — if everyone could check that their vote was counted correctly — then it would be easy to secure the vote. But that would lead to other problems. Before the US had the secret ballot, voter coercion and vote-buying were widespread.

We can’t, so we need to accept that our voting systems are insecure. We need an election system that is resilient to the threats. And for many parts of the system, that means paper.

Let’s start with the voter rolls. We know they’ve already been targeted. In 2016, someone changed the party affiliation of hundreds of voters before the Republican primary. That’s just one possibility. A well-executed attack that deletes, for example, one in five voters at random — or changes their addresses — would cause chaos on election day.

Yes, we need to shore up the security of these systems. We need better computer, network, and database security for the various state voter organizations. We also need to better secure the voter registration websites, with better design and better internet security. We need better security for the companies that build and sell all this equipment.

Multiple, unchangeable backups are essential. A record of every addition, deletion, and change needs to be stored on a separate system, on write-only media like a DVD. Copies of that DVD, or — even better — a paper printout of the voter rolls, should be available at every polling place on election day. We need to be ready for anything.

Next, the voting machines themselves. Security researchers agree that the gold standard is a voter-verified paper ballot. The easiest (and cheapest) way to achieve this is through optical-scan voting. Voters mark paper ballots by hand; they are fed into a machine and counted automatically. That paper ballot is saved, and serves as a final true record in a recount in case of problems. Touch-screen machines that print a paper ballot to drop in a ballot box can also work for voters with disabilities, as long as the ballot can be easily read and verified by the voter.

Finally, the tabulation and reporting systems. Here again we need more security in the process, but we must always use those paper ballots as checks on the computers. A manual, post-election, risk-limiting audit varies the number of ballots examined according to the margin of victory. Conducting this audit after every election, before the results are certified, gives us confidence that the election outcome is correct, even if the voting machines and tabulation computers have been tampered with. Additionally, we need better coordination and communications when incidents occur.

It’s vital to agree on these procedures and policies before an election. Before the fact, when anyone can win and no one knows whose votes might be changed, it’s easy to agree on strong security. But after the vote, someone is the presumptive winner — and then everything changes. Half of the country wants the result to stand, and half wants it reversed. At that point, it’s too late to agree on anything.

The politicians running in the election shouldn’t have to argue their challenges in court. Getting elections right is in the interest of all citizens. Many countries have independent election commissions that are charged with conducting elections and ensuring their security. We don’t do that in the US.

Instead, we have representatives from each of our two parties in the room, keeping an eye on each other. That provided acceptable security against 20th-century threats, but is totally inadequate to secure our elections in the 21st century. And the belief that the diversity of voting systems in the US provides a measure of security is a dangerous myth, because few districts can be decisive and there are so few voting-machine vendors.

We can do better. In 2017, the Department of Homeland Security declared elections to be critical infrastructure, allowing the department to focus on securing them. On 23 March, Congress allocated $380m to states to upgrade election security.

These are good starts, but don’t go nearly far enough. The constitution delegates elections to the states but allows Congress to “make or alter such Regulations”. In 1845, Congress set a nationwide election day. Today, we need it to set uniform and strict election standards.

This essay originally appeared in the Guardian.

Easily manage table metadata for Presto running on Amazon EMR using the AWS Glue Data Catalog

2018-03-10 Radhika Ravirala

Post Syndicated from Radhika Ravirala original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/easily-manage-table-metadata-for-presto-running-on-amazon-emr-using-the-aws-glue-data-catalog/

Amazon EMR empowers many customers to build big data processing applications quickly and cost-effectively, using popular distributed frameworks such as Apache Spark, Apache HBase, Presto, and Apache Flink. For organizations that are crafting their analytical applications on Amazon EMR, there is a growing need to keep their data assets organized in an automated fashion. Because datasets tend to grow exponentially, using cataloging tools is essential to automating data discovery and organizing data assets.

AWS Glue Data Catalog provides this essential capability, allowing you to automatically discover and catalog metadata about your data stores in a central repository. Since Amazon EMR 5.8.0, customers have been using the AWS Glue Data Catalog as a metadata store for Apache Hive and Spark SQL applications that are running on Amazon EMR. Starting with Amazon EMR 5.10.0, you can catalog datasets using AWS Glue and run queries using Presto on Amazon EMR from the Hue (Hadoop User Experience) and Apache Zeppelin UIs.

You might wonder what scenarios warrant using Presto running on Amazon EMR and when to choose Amazon Athena (which uses Presto as the query engine under the hood). It is important to note that both are excellent tools for querying massive amounts of data and addressing different needs and use cases.

Amazon Athena provides the easiest way to run interactive queries for data in Amazon S3 without needing to set up or manage any servers. Presto running on Amazon EMR gives you much more flexibility in how you configure and run your queries, providing the ability to federate to other data sources if needed. For example, you might have a use case that requires LDAP authentication for clients such as the Presto CLI or JDBC/ODBC drivers. Or you might have a workflow where you need to join data between different systems like MySQL/Amazon Redshift/Apache Cassandra and Hive. In these examples, Presto running on Amazon EMR is the right tool to use because it can be configured to enable LDAP authentication in addition to the desired database connectors at cluster launch.

Now, let’s look at how metadata management for Presto works with AWS Glue.

Using an AWS Glue crawler to discover datasets

The AWS Glue Data Catalog is a reference to the location, schema, and runtime metrics of your datasets. To create this reference metadata, AWS Glue needs to crawl your datasets. In this exercise, we use an AWS Glue crawler to populate tables in the Data Catalog for the NYC taxi rides dataset.

The following are the steps for adding a crawler:

Sign in to the AWS Management Console, and open the AWS Glue console. In the navigation pane, choose Crawlers. Then choose Add crawler.
On the Add a data store page, specify the location of the NYC taxi rides dataset.

In the next step, choose an existing IAM role if one is available, or create a new role. Then choose Next.

On the scheduling page, for Frequency, choose Run on demand.
On the Configure the crawler’s output page, choose Add database. Specify blog-db as the database name. (You can specify a name of your choice, but be sure to choose the correct database name when running queries.)
Follow the remaining steps using the default values to create a crawler.

When the crawler displays the Ready state, navigate to the Databases (Choose blog-db from the list of databases, or search for it by specifying it as a filter, as shown in the following screenshot.) Then choose Tables. You should see the three tables created by the crawler, as follows.

(Optional) The discovered data is classified as CSV files. You can optionally convert this data into Parquet format for better response times on your queries.

Launching an Amazon EMR cluster

With the dataset discovered and organized, we can now walk through different options for launching Presto on an Amazon EMR cluster to use the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

Option 1: From the Amazon EMR console

On the Amazon EMR console, choose Create cluster.
In Create Cluster – Quick Options, choose EMR release 10.0 or greater.
Choose Presto as an application.
Under AWS Glue Data Catalog settings, select Use for Presto table metadata.

Option 2: From the AWS CLI

Create a classification configuration as shown following, and save it as a JSON file (presto-emr-config.json).

 [
  {
   "Classification": "presto-connector-hive",
   "Properties": {
     "hive.metastore.glue.datacatalog.enabled": "true"
    }
  }
]

Create the cluster using the AWS CLI as follows:

aws emr create-cluster --name "<your-cluster-name>" --configurations file:///<local-folder>/presto-emr-config.json --release-label emr-5.10.0 --use-default-roles --ec2-attributes KeyName=<your-key-name> --applications Name=Hadoop Name=Spark Name=Hive Name=PRESTO Name=HUE --instance-groups InstanceGroupType=MASTER,InstanceCount=1,InstanceType=m3.xlarge InstanceGroupType=CORE,InstanceCount=3,InstanceType=m3.xlarge

Running queries with Presto on Amazon EMR

After you’ve set up the Amazon EMR cluster with Presto, the AWS Glue Data Catalog is available through a default “hive” catalog. To change between the Hive and Glue metastores, you have to manually update hive.properties and restart the Presto server. Connect to the master node on your EMR cluster using SSH, and run the Presto CLI to start running queries interactively.

$ presto-cli --catalog hive

Begin with a simple query to sample a few rows:

presto> SELECT * FROM “blog-db”.taxi limit 10;

The query shows a few sample rows as follows:

Query the average fare for trips at each hour of the day and for each day of the month on the Parquet version of the taxi dataset.

presto> SELECT EXTRACT (HOUR FROM pickup_datetime) AS hour, avg(fare_amount) AS average_fare FROM “blog-db”.taxi_parquet GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 1;

The following image shows the results:

More interestingly, you can compute the number of trips that gave tips in the 10 percent, 15 percent, or higher percentage range:

presto> -- Tip Percent Category
SELECT TipPrctCtgry
, COUNT (DISTINCT TripID) TripCt
FROM
(SELECT TripID
, (CASE 
WHEN fare_prct < 0.7 THEN 'FL70'
WHEN fare_prct < 0.8 THEN 'FL80'
WHEN fare_prct < 0.9 THEN 'FL90'
ELSE 'FL100'
END) FarePrctCtgry
, (CASE 
WHEN tip_prct < 0.1 THEN 'TL10'
WHEN tip_prct < 0.15 THEN 'TL15'
WHEN tip_prct < 0.2 THEN 'TL20'
ELSE 'TG20'
END) TipPrctCtgry

FROM
(SELECT TripID
, (fare_amount / total_amount) as fare_prct
, (extra / total_amount) as extra_prct
, (mta_tax / total_amount) as tip_prct
, (tolls_amount / total_amount) as mta_taxprct
, (tip_amount / total_amount) as tolls_prct
, (improvement_surcharge / total_amount) as imprv_suchrgprct
, total_amount
FROM 
(SELECT *
 , (cast(pickup_longitude AS VARCHAR(100)) || '_' || cast(pickup_latitude AS VARCHAR(100))) as TripID
 from "blog-db”.taxi_parquet 
 WHERE total_amount > 0
 ) as t
) as t
) ct
GROUP BY TipPrctCtgry;

The results are as follows:

While the preceding query is running, navigate to the web interface for Presto on Amazon EMR at <http://master-public-dns-name:8889/. Here you can look into the query metrics, such as active worker nodes, number of rows read per second, reserved memory, and parallelism.

Running queries in the Presto Editor on Hue

If you installed Hue with your Amazon EMR launch, you can also run queries on Hue’s Presto Editor. On the Amazon EMR Cluster console, choose Enable Web Connection, and follow the instructions to access the web interfaces for Hue and Zeppelin.

After the web connection is enabled, choose the Hue link to open the web interface. At the login screen, if you are the administrator logging in for the first time, type a user name and password to create your Hue superuser account. Then choose Create account. Otherwise, type your user name and password and choose Create account, or type the credentials provided by your administrator.

Choose the Presto Editor from the menu. You can run Presto queries against your tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

Conclusion

Having a shared data catalog for applications on Amazon EMR alleviates a myriad of data-related challenges that organizations face today—including discovery, governance, auditability, and collaboration. In this post, we explored how the AWS Glue Data Catalog addresses discoverability and manageability for table metadata for Presto on Amazon EMR. Go ahead, give this a try, and share your experience with us!

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Custom Log Presto Query Events on Amazon EMR for Auditing and Performance Insights and Build a Multi-Tenant Amazon EMR Cluster with Kerberos, Microsoft Active Directory Integration and EMRFS Authorization.

About the Author

Radhika Ravirala is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services where she helps customers craft distributed big data applications on the AWS platform. Prior to her cloud journey, she worked as a software engineer and designer for technology companies in Silicon Valley. She holds a M.S in computer science from San Jose State University.

Amazon Relational Database Service – Looking Back at 2017

2018-02-13 Jeff Barr

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-relational-database-service-looking-back-at-2017/

The Amazon RDS team launched nearly 80 features in 2017. Some of them were covered in this blog, others on the AWS Database Blog, and the rest in What’s New or Forum posts. To wrap up my week, I thought it would be worthwhile to give you an organized recap. So here we go!

Certification & Security

January – FedRAMP Certification for Amazon RDS for MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL.
February – Forced SSL Support for SQL Server.
April – Access Management for MySQL and Aurora Using IAM.
June – TDE Encrypted Cross-Region Snapshots for RDS SQL Server and Oracle.
June – RDS Encryption at Rest for Additional T2 Instance Types.
September – Migration of Encrypted RDS MySQL to Aurora.
September – HIPAA Eligibility for RDS for SQL Server and RDS for MariaDB.

Features

January – Advanced Auditing for Amazon Aurora.
January – RDS MySQL to Aurora Replication in Same Region.
January – Cross-Region Read Replicas of Encrypted Database Instances.
January – Outbound Oracle Network Access Using Custom DNS Servers.
March – Cross-Region Snapshot Copy, Cross-Region Replication, Cross-Account Snapshot Sharing for Aurora.
April – Fast, Online DDL Processing for Aurora.
May – Linux Huge Page Support for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.
June – Amazon Aurora Select Into Amazon S3.
June – Stopping and Starting of RDS Database Instances.
June – Amazon Aurora Copy on Write Database Cloning.
August – Amazon Aurora Fast Database Cloning.
August – 16 TB Maximum Database Storage Size for SQL Server.
September – Open Preview of Performance Insights for Aurora PostgreSQL.
September – Amazon Aurora Audit Log Upload to CloudWatch Logs.
October – Size Flexibility for Amazon RDS Reserved Instances.
October – General Availability of Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility.
October – Amazon Aurora for MySQL Asynchronous Key Prefetch.
October – Amazon RDS For Oracle Support for Oracle SQLT Diagnostics Tool.
November – Restore MySQL Backup to Amazon RDS MySQL Database.
November – Auto Scaling for Aurora Replicas.
November – Scaling of Storage Size for Amazon RDS for SQL Server.
November – Up to 16 TB of Storage & Faster Scaling for Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and PostgreSQL.
November – Amazon RDS for SQL Server Storage Reconfiguration on Snapshot Restore.
November – Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Support for the pgrouting and postrgresql-hll Extensions, HyperLogLog Data, and decoder_raw Module.
December – Batched Scans and Hashed Joins for Aurora with MySQL Compatibility.

Engine Versions & Features

January – MariaDB 10.0.28.
April – Open Preview of Aurora for PostgreSQL.
May – Amazon RDS Support for Versions 9.6.2, 9.5.6, 9.4.11 and 9.3.16 of PostgreSQL.
May – Oracle Patch Set Upgrades (PSU) for April 2017.
June – Amazon RDS Support for Versions 9.6.2, 9.5.6, 9.4.11, and 9.3.16 in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region.
June – SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1 (SP1).
July – Amazon RDS for Oracle Supports HugePages.
July – Amazon RDS for SQL Server Enterprise Edition with License Included in More Regions.
July – Oracle SE2 License Included Available in AWS GovCloud (US).
July – MariaDB 10.1.23 and 10.0.31.
July – PostgreSQL 9.6.3, 9.5.7, 9.4.12, and 9.3.17.
September – PostgreSQL 9.6.3, 9.5.7, 9.4.12, and 9.3.17 in AWS GovCloud (US).
September – Amazon RDS for Oracle Support for Oracle APEX.
September – Amazon RDS for Oracle Support for Oracle Multimedia, Spatial, and Locator Options.
September – Amazon RDS for Oracle Support for Customer-Initiated Snapshot Upgrades for Deprecated Database Versions.
November – Amazon RDS for Oracle Support for Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 13c1 and 13c2.
November – PostgreSQL 9.6.5, 9.5.9, 9.4.14, and 9.3.19 in Commercial and AWS GovCloud (US).
November – Oracle Patch Set Upgrades (PSU) for July 2017.
November – SQL Server 2016 SP1 CU5 and SQL Server 2017.
November – MariaDB 10.1.26 and 10.0.32.
December – Oracle Patch Set Upgrades (PSU) for October 2017.

Regional Support

March – Aurora in the US West (N. California) Region.
June – Aurora in the EU (Frankfurt) Region.
July – Windows Authentication for RDS for SQL Server in More Regions.
August – Multi-AZ for RDS SQL Server in the EU (Frankfurt) Region.
November – Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL in the Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Regions.
December – Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL in the EU (Paris) Region.

Instance Support

March – Aurora on T2.Small Instances.
June – RDS on M4 Instances in the São Paulo Region.
October – Amazon RDS for Oracle on New R4, T2, and M4 Instance Types.
October – Amazon Aurora on R4 Instances.
November – Amazon RDS for MySQL and MariaDB on R4, T2, and M4 Instance Types.
November – Amazon RDS for SQL Server on R4 and M4 Instance Types.
December – Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL on R4, T2, and M4 Instance Types.

Price Reductions

July – Price Reduction for R3 Instances running SQL Server Enterprise License Included.

And That’s a Wrap
I’m pretty sure that’s everything. As you can see, 2017 was quite the year! I can’t wait to see what the team delivers in 2018.

— Jeff;

Announcing our new beta for the AWS Certified Security – Specialty exam

2018-01-11 Janna Pellegrino

Post Syndicated from Janna Pellegrino original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/announcing-our-new-beta-for-the-aws-certified-security-specialty-exam/

Take the AWS Certified Security – Specialty beta exam for the chance to be among the first to hold this new AWS Certification. This beta exam allows experienced cloud security professionals to demonstrate and validate their expertise. Register today – this beta exam will only be available from January 15 to March 2!

About the exam

This beta exam validates that the successful candidate can effectively demonstrate knowledge of how to secure the AWS platform. The exam covers incident response, logging and monitoring, infrastructure security, identity and access management, and data protection.

The exam validates:

Familiarity with regional- and country-specific security and compliance regulations and meta issues that these regulations embody.
An understanding of specialized data classifications and AWS data protection mechanisms.
An understanding of data encryption methods and AWS mechanisms to implement them.
An understanding of secure Internet protocols and AWS mechanisms to implement them.
A working knowledge of AWS security services and features of services to provide a secure production environment.
Competency gained from two or more years of production deployment experience using AWS security services and features.
Ability to make tradeoff decisions with regard to cost, security, and deployment complexity given a set of application requirements.
An understanding of security operations and risk.

Learn more and register >>

Who is eligible

The beta is open to anyone who currently holds an Associate or Cloud Practitioner certification. We recommend candidates have five years of IT security experience designing and implementing security solutions, and at least two years of hands-on experience securing AWS workloads.

How to prepare

We have training and other resources to help you prepare for the beta exam:

AWS Security Fundamentals Digital| 3 Hours
This course introduces you to fundamental cloud computing and AWS security concepts, including AWS access control and management, governance, logging, and encryption methods. It also covers security-related compliance protocols and risk management strategies, as well as procedures related to auditing your AWS security infrastructure.

Security Operations on AWS Classroom | 3 Days
This course demonstrates how to efficiently use AWS security services to stay secure and compliant in the AWS Cloud. The course focuses on the AWS-recommended security best practices that you can implement to enhance the security of your data and systems in the cloud. The course highlights the security features of AWS key services including compute, storage, networking, and database services.

Online resources for Cloud Security and Compliance

Review documentation, whitepapers, and articles & tutorials related to cloud security and compliance.

Learn more and register >>

Please contact us if you have questions about exam registration.

Good luck!

Validate Your IT Security Expertise with the New AWS Certified Security – Specialty Beta Exam

2018-01-11 Sara Snedeker

Post Syndicated from Sara Snedeker original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/validate-your-it-security-expertise-with-the-new-aws-certified-security-specialty-beta-exam/

AWS Training and Certification image

If you are an experienced cloud security professional, you can demonstrate and validate your expertise with the new AWS Certified Security – Specialty beta exam. This exam allows you to demonstrate your knowledge of incident response, logging and monitoring, infrastructure security, identity and access management, and data protection. Register today – this beta exam will be available only from January 15 to March 2, 2018.

By taking this exam, you can validate your:

Familiarity with region-specific and country-specific security and compliance regulations and meta issues that these regulations include.
Understanding of data encryption methods and secure internet protocols, and the AWS mechanisms to implement them.
Working knowledge of AWS security services to provide a secure production environment.
Ability to make trade-off decisions with regard to cost, security, and deployment complexity when given a set of application requirements.

See the full list of security knowledge you can validate by taking this beta exam.

Who is eligible?

The beta exam is open to anyone who currently holds an AWS Associate or Cloud Practitioner certification. We recommend candidates have five years of IT security experience designing and implementing security solutions, and at least two years of hands-on experience securing AWS workloads.

How to prepare

You can take the following courses and use AWS cloud security resources and compliance resources to prepare for this exam.

AWS Security Fundamentals (digital, 3 hours)
This digital course introduces you to fundamental cloud computing and AWS security concepts, including AWS access control and management, governance, logging, and encryption methods. It also covers security-related compliance protocols and risk management strategies, as well as procedures related to auditing your AWS security infrastructure.

Security Operations on AWS (classroom, 3 days)
This instructor-led course demonstrates how to efficiently use AWS security services to help stay secure and compliant in the AWS Cloud. The course focuses on the AWS-recommended security best practices that you can implement to enhance the security of your AWS resources. The course highlights the security features of AWS compute, storage, networking, and database services.

If you have questions about this new beta exam, contact us.

Good luck with the exam!

– Sara

Use Kerberos Authentication to Integrate Amazon EMR with Microsoft Active Directory

2018-01-10 Bruno Faria

Post Syndicated from Bruno Faria original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/use-kerberos-authentication-to-integrate-amazon-emr-with-microsoft-active-directory/

Many enterprises use Microsoft Active Directory to manage users, groups, and computers in a network. And a question is asked frequently: How can Active Directory users access big data workloads running on Amazon EMR with the same single sign-on (SSO) experience they have when accessing resources in the Active Directory network?

This post walks you through the process of using AWS CloudFormation to set up a cross-realm trust and extend authentication from an Active Directory network into an Amazon EMR cluster with Kerberos enabled. By establishing a cross-realm trust, Active Directory users can use their Active Directory credentials to access an Amazon EMR cluster and run jobs as themselves.

Walkthrough overview

In this example, you build a solution that allows Active Directory users to seamlessly access Amazon EMR clusters and run big data jobs. Here’s what you need before setting up this solution:

An AWS account
An Amazon EC2 key pair
A possible limit increase for your account (Note: Usually a limit increase will not be necessary. See the AWS Service Limits documentation if you encounter a limit error while building the solution.)

To make it easier for you to get started, I created AWS CloudFormation templates that automatically configure and deploy the solution for you. The following steps and resources are involved in setting up the solution:

Create and configure an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).
Launch an Amazon EC2 Windows instance (Active Directory domain controller).
Create an Amazon EMR security configuration for Kerberos and cross-realm trust.
Launch an Amazon EMR cluster with Kerberos enabled and a cross-realm trust configuration.

You can use the AWS CloudFormation templates to complete each step individually, or you can deploy the entire solution through a single step.

To skip the basics and deploy the entire solution through the single-step AWS CloudFormation template, go to the Single-step solution deployment
To set up each component individually, go to the Deploying each component individually

Note: If you want to manually create and configure the components for this solution without using AWS CloudFormation, refer to the Amazon EMR cross-realm documentation.
IMPORTANT: The AWS CloudFormation templates used in this post are designed to work only in the us-east-1 (N. Virginia) Region. They are not intended for production use without modification.

Single-step solution deployment

If you don’t want to set up each component individually, you can use the single-step AWS CloudFormation template. The single-step template is a master template that uses nested stacks (additional templates) to launch and configure all the resources for the solution in one go.

To deploy the single-step template into your account, choose Launch Stack:

This takes you to the Create stack wizard in the AWS CloudFormation console. The template is launched in the US East (N. Virginia) Region by default. Do not change to a different Region because the template is designed to work only in us-east-1 (N. Virginia).

On the Select Template page, keep the default URL for the AWS CloudFormation template, and then choose Next.

On the Specify Details page, review the parameters for the template. Provide values for the parameters that require input (for more information, see the parameters table that follows).

The following parameters are available in this template.

Parameter	Default	Description
Domain Controller name	DC1	NetBIOS (hostname) name of the Active Directory server. This name can be up to 15 characters long.
Active Directory domain	example.com	Fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the forest root domain (for example, `example.com`).
Domain NetBIOS name	EXAMPLE	NetBIOS name of the domain for users of earlier versions of Windows. This name can be up to 15 characters long.
Domain admin user	CrossRealmAdmin	User name for the account that is added as domain administrator. This account is separate from the default administrator account.
Domain admin password	Requires input	Password for the domain admin user. Must be at least eight characters including letters, numbers, and symbols.
Key pair name	Requires input	Name of an existing key pair, which enables you to connect securely to your instance after it launches.
Instance type	m4.xlarge	Instance type for the domain controller and the Amazon EMR cluster.
Allowed IP address	10.0.0.0/16	The client IP address can that can reach your cluster. Specify an IP address range in CIDR notation (for example, 203.0.113.5/32). By default, only the VPC CIDR (10.0.0.0/16) can reach the cluster. Be sure to add your client IP range so that you can connect to the cluster using SSH.
EMR Kerberos realm	EC2.INTERNAL	Cluster’s Kerberos realm name. By default, the realm name is derived from the cluster’s VPC domain name in uppercase letters (for example, `EC2.INTERNAL` is the default VPC domain name in the us-east-1 Region).
Trusted AD domain	EXAMPLE.COM	The Active Directory (AD) domain that you want to trust. This is the same as the “Active Directory domain.” However, it must use all uppercase letters (for example, `EXAMPLE.COM`).
Cross-realm trust password	Requires input	Password that you want to use for your cross-realm trust.
Instance count	2	The number of instances (core nodes) for the cluster.
EMR applications	Hadoop, Spark, Ganglia, Hive	Comma separated list of applications to install on the cluster.

After you specify the template details, choose Next. On the Options page, choose Next again. On the Review page, select the I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names check box, and then choose Create.

It takes approximately 45 minutes for the deployment to complete. When the stack launch is complete, it will return outputs with information about the resources that were created. Note the outputs and skip to the Managing and testing the solution section. You can view the stack outputs on the AWS Management Console or by using the following AWS CLI command:

$ aws cloudformation describe-stacks --stack-name <Stack_Name> --region us-east-1 --query Stacks[0].Outputs

Deploying each component individually

This section describes how to use AWS CloudFormation templates to perform each step separately in the solution.

Create and configure an Amazon VPC

In order for you to establish a cross-realm trust between an Amazon EMR Kerberos realm and an Active Directory domain, your Amazon VPC must meet the following requirements:

The subnet used for the Amazon EMR cluster must have a CIDR block of fewer than nine digits (for example, 10.0.1.0/24).
Both DNS resolution and DNS hostnames must be enabled (set to “yes”).
The Active Directory domain controller must be the DNS server for instances in the Amazon VPC (this is configured in the next step).

To use the AWS CloudFormation template to create and configure an Amazon VPC with the prerequisites listed previously, choose Launch Stack:

Note: If you want to create the VPC manually (without using AWS CloudFormation), see Set Up the VPC and Subnet in the Amazon EMR documentation.

Launching this stack creates the following AWS resources:

Amazon VPC with CIDR block 10.0.0.0/16 (Name: CrossRealmVPC)
Internet Gateway (Name: CrossRealmGateway)
Public subnet with CIDR block 10.0.1.0/24 (Name: CrossRealmSubnet)
Security group allowing inbound access from the VPC’s subnets (Name tag: CrossRealmSecurityGroup)

When the stack launch is complete, it should return outputs similar to the following.

Key	Value example	Description
SubnetID	subnet-xxxxxxxx	The subnet for the Active Directory domain controller and the EMR cluster.
SecurityGroup	sg-xxxxxxxx	The security group for the Active Directory domain controller.
VPCID	vpc-xxxxxxxx	The Active Directory domain controller and EMR cluster will be launched on this VPC.

Note the outputs because they are used in the next step. You can view the stack outputs on the AWS Management Console or by using the following AWS CLI command:

$ aws cloudformation describe-stacks --stack-name <Stack_Name> --region us-east-1 --query Stacks[0].Outputs

Launch and configure an Active Directory domain controller

In this step, you use an AWS CloudFormation template to automatically launch and configure a new Active Directory domain controller and cross-realm trust.

Note: There are various ways to install and configure an Active Directory domain controller. For details on manually launching and installing a domain controller without AWS CloudFormation, see Step 2: Launch and Install the AD Domain Controller in the Amazon EMR documentation.

In addition to launching and configuring an Active Directory domain controller and cross-realm trust, this AWS CloudFormation template also sets the domain controller as the DNS server (name server) for your Amazon VPC. In other words, the template creates a new DHCP option-set for the VPC where it’s being deployed to, and it sets the private IP of the domain controller as the name server for that new DHCP option set.

IMPORTANT: You should not use this template on a production VPC with existing resources like Amazon EC2 instances. When you launch this stack, make sure that you use the new environment and resources (Amazon VPC, subnet, and security group) that were created in the Create and configure an Amazon VPC step.

To launch this stack, choose Launch Stack:

The following table contains information about the parameters available in this template. Review the parameters for the template and provide values for those that require input.

Parameter	Default	Description
VPC ID	Requires input	Launch the domain controller on this VPC (for example, use the VPC created in the Create and configure an Amazon VPC step).
Subnet ID	Requires input	Subnet used for the domain controller (for example, use the subnet created in the Create and configure an Amazon VPC step).
Security group ID	Requires input	Security group (SG) for the domain controller (for example, use the SG created in the Create and configure an Amazon VPC step).
Domain Controller name	DC1	NetBIOS name of the Active Directory server (up to 15 characters).
Active Directory domain	example.com	Fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the forest root domain (for example, `example.com`).
Domain NetBIOS name	EXAMPLE	NetBIOS name of the domain for users of earlier versions of Windows. This name can be up to 15 characters long.
Domain admin user	CrossRealmAdmin	User name for the account that is added as domain administrator. This account is separate from the default administrator account.
Domain admin password	Requires input	Password for the domain admin user. Must be at least eight characters including letters, numbers, and symbols.
Key pair name	Requires input	Name of an existing EC2 key pair to enable access to the domain controller instance.
Instance type	m4.xlarge	Instance type for the domain controller.
EMR Kerberos realm	EC2.INTERNAL	Cluster’s Kerberos realm name. By default, the realm name is derived from the cluster’s VPC domain name in uppercase letters (for example, `EC2.INTERNAL` is the default VPC domain name in the us-east-1 Region).
Cross-realm trust password	Requires input	Password that you want to use for your cross-realm trust.

It takes 25–30 minutes for this stack to be created. When it’s complete, note the stack’s outputs, and then move to the next step: Launch an EMR cluster with Kerberos enabled.

Create a security configuration and launch an Amazon EMR cluster with Kerberos enabled

To launch a kerberized Amazon EMR cluster, you first need to create a security configuration containing the cross-realm trust configuration. You then specify cluster-specific Kerberos attributes when launching the cluster.

In this step, you use AWS CloudFormation to launch and configure a kerberized Amazon EMR cluster with a cross-realm trust. If you want to manually launch and configure a cluster with Kerberos enabled, see Step 6: Launch a Kerberized EMR Cluster in the Amazon EMR documentation.

Note: At the time of this writing, AWS CloudFormation does not yet support launching Amazon EMR clusters with Kerberos authentication enabled. To overcome this limitation, I created a template that uses an AWS Lambda-backed custom resource to launch and configure the Amazon EMR cluster with Kerberos enabled. If you use this template, there’s nothing else that you need to do. Just keep in mind that the template creates and invokes an AWS Lambda function (custom resource) to launch the cluster.

To create a cross-realm trust security configuration and launch a kerberized Amazon EMR cluster using AWS CloudFormation, choose Launch Stack:

The following table lists and describes the template parameters for deploying a kerberized Amazon EMR cluster and configuring a cross-realm trust.

Parameter	Default	Description
Active Directory domain	example.com	The Active Directory domain that you want to establish the cross-realm trust with.
Domain admin user (joiner user)	CrossRealmAdmin	The user name of an Active Directory domain user with privileges to join domains/computers to the Active Directory domain (joiner user).
Domain admin password	Requires input	Password of the joiner user.
Cross-realm trust password	Requires input	Password of your cross-realm trust.
EC2 key pair name	Requires input	Name of an existing key pair, which enables you to connect securely to your cluster after it launches.
Subnet ID	Requires input	Subnet that you want to use for your Amazon EMR cluster (for example, choose the subnet created in the Create and configure an Amazon VPC step).
Security group ID	Requires input	Security group that you want to use for your Amazon EMR cluster (for example, choose the security group created in the Create and configure an Amazon VPC step).
Instance type	m4.xlarge	The instance type that you want to use for the cluster nodes.
Instance count	2	The number of instances (core nodes) for the cluster.
Allowed IP address	10.0.0.0/16	The client IP address can that can reach your cluster. Specify an IP address range in CIDR notation (for example, 203.0.113.5/32). By default, only the VPC CIDR (10.0.0.0/16) can reach the cluster. Be sure to add your client IP range so that you can connect to the cluster using SSH.
EMR applications	Hadoop, Spark, Ganglia, Hive	Comma separated list of the applications that you want installed on the cluster.
EMR Kerberos realm	EC2.INTERNAL	Cluster’s Kerberos realm name. By default, the realm name is derived from the cluster’s VPC domain name in uppercase letters (for example, `EC2.INTERNAL` is the default VPC domain name in the us-east-1 Region).
Trusted AD domain	EXAMPLE.COM	The Active Directory domain that you want to trust. This name is the same as the “AD domain name.” However, it must use all uppercase letters (for example, `EXAMPLE.COM`).

It takes 10–15 minutes for this stack to be created. When it’s complete, note the stack’s outputs, and then move to the next section: Managing and testing the solution.

Managing and testing the solution

Now that you’ve configured and built the solution, it’s time to test it by connecting to a cluster using Active Directory credentials.

SSH to a cluster using Active Directory credentials (single sign-on)

After you launch a kerberized Amazon EMR cluster, if you used the AWS CloudFormation templates and added your client IP range to the Allowed IP address parameter, you should be able to connect to the cluster using an SSH client and your Active Directory user credentials. If you have trouble connecting to the cluster using SSH, check the cluster’s security group to make sure that it allows inbound SSH connection (TCP port 22) from your client’s IP address (source).

The following steps assume that you’re using a client such as OpenSSH. If you’re using a different SSH application (for example, PuTTY), consult the application-specific documentation.

Note: Because the cluster was launched with a cross-realm trust configuration, you don’t need to use a private key (.pem file) when you connect to it as a domain user using SSH.

To connect to your Amazon EMR cluster as an Active Directory user using SSH, run the following command. Replace ad_user with the domain admin user that you created while setting up the domain controller and replace master_node_URL with the cluster’s URL (see the stack’s outputs to find this information):

$ ssh -l <ad_user> <master_node_URL>

If your SSH client is configured to use a key as the preferred authentication method, the login might fail. If that’s the case, you can add the following options to your SSH command to force the SSH connection to use password authentication:

$ ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=password -o PubkeyAuthentication=no -l <ad_user> <master_node_URL>

After a domain user connects to the cluster using SSH, if this is the first that the user is connecting, a local home directory is created for that user. In addition to creating a local home directory, if you used the create-hdfs-home-ba.sh bootstrap action when launching the cluster (done by default if you used the AWS CloudFormation template to launch a kerberized cluster), an HDFS user home directory is also automatically created.

Note: If you manually launched the cluster and did not use the create-hdfs-home-ba.sh bootstrap action, then you’ll need to manually create HDFS user home directories for your users.

When you connect to the cluster using SSH for the first time (as a domain user), you should see the following messages if the HDFS home directory for your domain user was successfully created:

Running jobs on a kerberized Amazon EMR cluster

To run a job on a kerberized cluster, the user submitting the job must first be authenticated. If you followed the previous section to connect to your cluster as an Active Directory user using SSH, the user should be authenticated automatically.

If running the klist command returns a “No credentials cache found” message, it means that the user is not authenticated (the user doesn’t have a Kerberos ticket). You can re-authenticate a user at any time by running the following command (be sure to use all uppercase letters for the Active Directory domain):

$ kinit <username>@<AD_DOMAIN>

When the user is authenticated, they can submit jobs just like they would on a non-kerberized cluster.

Auditing jobs

Another advantage that Kerberos can provide is that you can easily tell which user ran a particular job. For example, connect (using SSH) to a kerberized cluster with an Active Directory user, and submit the SparkPi sample application:

$ spark-example SparkPi

After running the SparkPi application, go to the Amazon EMR console and choose your cluster. Then choose the Application history tab. There you can see information about the application, including the user that submitted the job:

Common issues

Although it would be hard to cover every possible Kerberos issue, this section covers some of the more common issues that might occur and ways to fix them.

Issue 1: You can successfully connect and get authenticated on a cluster. However, whenever you try running job, it fails with an error similar to the following:

org.apache.hadoop.security.AccessControlException: Permission denied

Solution: Make sure that an HDFS home directory for the user was created and that it has the right permissions.

Issue 2: You can successfully connect to the cluster, but you can’t run any Hadoop or HDFS commands.

Solution: Use the klist command to confirm whether the user is authenticated and has a valid Kerberos ticket. Use the kinit command to re-authenticate a user.

Issue 3: You can’t connect (using SSH) to the cluster using Active Directory user credentials, but you can manually authenticate the user with kinit.

Solution: Make sure that the Active Directory domain controller is the DNS server (name server) for the cluster nodes.

Cleaning up

After completing and testing this solution, remember to clean up the resources. If you used the AWS CloudFormation templates to create the resources, then use the AWS CloudFormation console or AWS CLI/SDK to delete the stacks. Deleting a stack also deletes the resources created by that stack.

If one of your stacks does not delete, make sure that there are no dependencies on the resources created by that stack. For example, if you deployed an Amazon VPC using AWS CloudFormation and then deployed a domain controller into that VPC using a different AWS CloudFormation stack, you must first delete the domain controller stack before the VPC stack can be deleted.

Summary

The ability to authenticate users and services with Kerberos not only allows you to secure your big data applications, but it also enables you to easily integrate Amazon EMR clusters with an Active Directory environment. This post showed how you can use Kerberos on Amazon EMR to create a single sign-on solution where Active Directory domain users can seamlessly access Amazon EMR clusters and run big data applications. We also showed how you can use AWS CloudFormation to automate the deployment of this solution.

The Top 10 Most Downloaded AWS Security and Compliance Documents in 2017

2018-01-05 Sara Duffer

Post Syndicated from Sara Duffer original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/the-top-10-most-downloaded-aws-security-and-compliance-documents-in-2017/

AWS download logo

The following list includes the ten most downloaded AWS security and compliance documents in 2017. Using this list, you can learn about what other AWS customers found most interesting about security and compliance last year.

AWS Security Best Practices – This guide is intended for customers who are designing the security infrastructure and configuration for applications running on AWS. The guide provides security best practices that will help you define your Information Security Management System (ISMS) and build a set of security policies and processes for your organization so that you can protect your data and assets in the AWS Cloud.
AWS: Overview of Security Processes – This whitepaper describes the physical and operational security processes for the AWS managed network and infrastructure, and helps answer questions such as, “How does AWS help me protect my data?”
Architecting for HIPAA Security and Compliance on AWS – This whitepaper describes how to leverage AWS to develop applications that meet HIPAA and HITECH compliance requirements.
Service Organization Controls (SOC) 3 Report – This publicly available report describes internal AWS security controls, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
Introduction to AWS Security –This document provides an introduction to AWS’s approach to security, including the controls in the AWS environment, and some of the products and features that AWS makes available to customers to meet your security objectives.
AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency – This whitepaper covers techniques to mitigate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
AWS: Risk and Compliance – This whitepaper provides information to help customers integrate AWS into their existing control framework, including a basic approach for evaluating AWS controls and a description of AWS certifications, programs, reports, and third-party attestations.
Use AWS WAF to Mitigate OWASP’s Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities – AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps you protect your websites and web applications against various attack vectors at the HTTP protocol level. This whitepaper outlines how you can use AWS WAF to mitigate the application vulnerabilities that are defined in the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 list of most common categories of application security flaws.
Introduction to Auditing the Use of AWS – This whitepaper provides information, tools, and approaches for auditors to use when auditing the security of the AWS managed network and infrastructure.
AWS Security and Compliance: Quick Reference Guide – By using AWS, you inherit the many security controls that we operate, thus reducing the number of security controls that you need to maintain. Your own compliance and certification programs are strengthened while at the same time lowering your cost to maintain and run your specific security assurance requirements. Learn more in this quick reference guide.

– Sara

coWPAtty Download – Audit Pre-shared WPA Keys

2017-12-19 Darknet

Post Syndicated from Darknet original https://www.darknet.org.uk/2017/12/cowpatty-audit-pre-shared-wpa-keys/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=darknetfeed

coWPAtty is a C-based tool for running a brute-force dictionary attack against WPA-PSK and audit pre-shared WPA keys.

If you are auditing WPA-PSK networks, you can use this tool to identify weak passphrases that were used to generate the PMK. Supply a libpcap capture file that includes the 4-way handshake, a dictionary file of passphrases to guess with, and the SSID for the network.

What is coWPAtty?

coWPAtty is the implementation of an offline dictionary attack against WPA/WPA2 networks using PSK-based authentication (e.g.

Read the rest of coWPAtty Download – Audit Pre-shared WPA Keys now! Only available at Darknet.

Custom Log Presto Query Events on Amazon EMR for Auditing and Performance Insights

2017-12-15 Zafar Kapadia

Post Syndicated from Zafar Kapadia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/custom-log-presto-query-events-on-amazon-emr-for-auditing-and-performance-insights/

We find that AWS customers often require that every query submitted to Presto running on Amazon EMR is logged. They want to track what query was submitted, when it was submitted and who submitted it.

In this blog post, we will demonstrate how to implement and install a Presto event listener for purposes of custom logging, debugging and performance analysis for queries executed on an EMR cluster. An event listener is a plugin to Presto that is invoked when an event such as query creation, query completion, or split completion occurs.

Presto also provides a system connector to access metrics and details about a running cluster. In particular, the system connector gets information about currently running and recently run queries by using the system.runtime.queries table. From the Presto command line interface (CLI), you get this data with the entries Select * from system.runtime.queries; and Select * from system.runtime.tasks;. This connector is available out of the box and exposes information and metrics through SQL.

In addition to providing custom logging and debugging, the Presto event listener allows you to enhance the information provided by the system connector by providing a mechanism to capture detailed query context, query statistics and failure information during query creation or completion, or a split completion.

We will begin by providing a detailed walkthrough of the implementation of the Presto event listener in Java followed by its deployment on the EMR cluster.

Implementation

We use the Eclipse IDE to create a Maven Project, as shown below:

Once you have created the Maven Project, modify the pom.xml file to add the dependency for Presto, as shown following:

After you add the Presto dependency to our pom.xml file, create a Java package under the src/main/java folder. In our project, we have named the package com.amazonaws.QueryEventListener. You can choose the naming convention that best fits your organization. Within this package, create three Java files for the EventListener, the EventListenerFactory, and the EventListenerPlugin.

As the Presto website says: “EventListenerFactory is responsible for creating an EventListener instance. It also defines an EventListener name, which is used by the administrator in a Presto configuration. Implementations of EventListener implement methods for the event types they are interested in handling. The implementation of EventListener and EventListenerFactory must be wrapped as a plugin and installed on the Presto cluster.”

In our project, we have named these Java files QueryEventListener, QueryEventListenerFactory, and QueryEventListenerPlugin:

Now we write our code for the Java files.

QueryEventListener – QueryEventListener implements the Presto EventListener interface. It has a constructor that creates five rotating log files of 524 MB each. After creating QueryEventListener, we implement the query creation, query completion, and split completion methods and log the events relevant to us. You can choose to include more events based on your needs.

You can find the code for the QueryEventListener class in this Amazon repository.

QueryEventListenerFactory – The QueryEventListenerFactory class implements the Presto EventListenerFactory interface. We implement the method getName, which provides a registered EventListenerFactory name to Presto. We also implement the create method, which creates an EventListener instance.

You can find the code for the QueryEventListenerFactory class in this Amazon repository.

QueryEventListenerPlugin – The QueryEventListenerPlugin class implements the Presto EventListenerPlugin interface. This class has a getEventListenerFactories method that returns an immutable list containing the EventListenerFactory. Basically, in this class we are wrapping QueryEventListener and QueryEventListenerFactory.

You can find the code for the QueryEventListenerPlugin class in this Amazon repository.

Finally, in our project we add the META-INF folder and a services subfolder within the META-INF folder. In the services subfolder, you create a file called com.facebook.presto.spi.Plugin:

As the Presto documentation describes: “Each plugin identifies an entry point: an implementation of the plugin interface. This class name is provided to Presto via the standard Java ServiceLoader interface: the classpath contains a resource file named com.facebook.presto.spi.Plugin in the META-INF/services directory”.

We add the name of our plugin class com.amazonaws.QueryEventListener.QueryEventListenerPlugin to the com.facebook.presto.spi.Plugin file, as shown below:

Finally, we create a jar file to deploy to the EMR cluster by following the instructions provided on the Eclipse IDE website

We saved our jar file in our project directory as depicted in the screenshot below.

While creating the jar file, we save the MANIFEST.MF file in the services directory.

The entire Java project is available for your reference in this Amazon Repository.

Next we will show you how to deploy the Presto plugin we created to Amazon EMR for custom logging.

Presto logging overview on Amazon EMR

Presto by default will produce three log files that capture the configurations properties and the overall operational events of the components that make up Presto, plus log end user access to the Presto UI.

On Amazon EMR, these log files are written into /var/log/presto. The log files in this directory are pushed into Amazon S3. This S3 location is the location of the new log file.

Steps to deploy Presto on Amazon EMR with custom logging

To deploy Presto on EMR with custom logging a bootstrap action will be used. The bootstrap is available in this Amazon Repository.

#!/bin/bash
IS_MASTER=true
if [ -f /mnt/var/lib/info/instance.json ]
then
        if grep isMaster /mnt/var/lib/info/instance.json | grep true;
        then
        IS_MASTER=true
        else
        IS_MASTER=false
        fi
fi
sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/presto/plugin/queryeventlistener
sudo /usr/bin/aws s3 cp s3://replace-with-your-bucket/QueryEventListener.jar /tmp
sudo cp /tmp/QueryEventListener.jar /usr/lib/presto/plugin/queryeventlistener/
if [ "$IS_MASTER" = true ]; then
sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/presto/etc
sudo bash -c 'cat <<EOT >> /usr/lib/presto/etc/event-listener.properties
event-listener.name=event-listener
EOT'
fi

First, upload the JAR file created on the last section and update the s3 location in the bootstrap, s3://replace-with-your-bucket/QueryEventListener.jar, with the bucket name where the jar was placed.

You can always use the Jar we have generated in this Amazon Repository.

After updating the bootstrap with the S3 location for your JAR, upload that bootstrap to your own bucket.

The bootstrap action will copy the jar file with the custom EventListener implementation into all machines of the cluster. Moreover, the bootstrap action will create a file named event-listener.properties on the Amazon EMR Master node. This file will configure the coordinator to enable the custom logging plugin via property event-listener.name. The event-listener.name property is set to event-listener in the event-listener.properties file. As per Presto documentation, this property is used by Presto to find a registered EventListenerFactory based on the name returned by EventListenerFactory.getName().

Now that the bootstrap is ready, the following AWS CLI command can be used to create a new EMR cluster with the bootstrap:

aws emr create-cluster --name "ClusterWithPrestoLogging" --release-label emr-5.10.0 --applications Name=Hive Name=Presto --use-default-roles --instance-count 2 --instance-type m3.xlarge --ec2-attributes KeyName=replace-with-your-key  --log-uri s3://replace-with-your-bucket/ --bootstrap-actions Path=s3://replace-with-your-bucket-name/eventlistenerbootstrap.sh,Name=BootstrapActionPrestoLogging,Args=[]  --region us-east-1

A quick example with results

After we have implemented the Presto custom logging plugin and deployed it, we can run a test and see the output of the log files.

We first create a Hive table with the DDL below from the Hive Command Line (simply type Hive on the SSH terminal to the EMR Master to access the Hive Command Line):

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE wikistats (
language STRING,
page_title STRING,
hits BIGINT,
retrived_size BIGINT
)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ' '
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'
LOCATION 's3://support.elasticmapreduce/training/datasets/wikistats/';

Then, we access the presto command line by typing the following command on the terminal:

presto-cli --server localhost:8889 --catalog hive --schema default

Finally, we run a simple query:

Select * from wikistats limit 10;

We then go to the /var/log/presto directory and look at the contents of the log file queries-YYYY-MM-DDTHH\:MM\:SS.0.log. As depicted in the screenshot below, our QueryEventListener plugin captures the fields shown for the Query Created and Query Completed events. Moreover, if there are splits, the plugin will also capture split events.

Note: If you want to include the query text executed by the user for auditing and debugging purposes, add the field appropriately in the QueryEventListener class methods, as shown below:

For the queryCreatedEvent method, add it like so:

msg.append("Query Text:  ");		   
msg.append(queryCreatedEvent.getMetadata().getQuery().toString());

For the queryCompletedEvent method, add it like so:

msg.append("Query Text: ");
msg.append(queryCompletedEvent.getMetadata().getQuery().toString());

Because this is custom logging, you can capture as many fields as are available for the particular events. To find out the fields available for each of the events, see the Java Classes provided by Presto at this GitHub location.

Summary

In this post, you learned how to add custom logging to Presto on EMR to enhance your organization’s auditing capabilities and provide insights into performance.

If you have questions or suggestions, please leave a comment below.

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Visualize AWS Cloudtrail Logs using AWS Glue and Amazon Quicksight.

About the Authors

Zafar Kapadia is a Cloud Application Architect for AWS. He works on Application Development and Optimization projects. He is also an avid cricketer and plays in various local leagues.

Francisco Oliveira is a Big Data Engineer with AWS Professional Services. He focuses on building big data solutions with open source technology and AWS. In his free time, he likes to try new sports, travel and explore national parks.

Now Available: New Digital Training to Help You Learn About AWS Cloud Security

2017-12-14 Janna Pellegrino

Post Syndicated from Janna Pellegrino original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/now-available-new-digital-training-to-help-you-learn-about-aws-cloud-security/

Cloud security with scalability and innovation: at AWS, this is our top priority. To help you securely architect cloud solutions, AWS Training and Certification recently added new free digital training about security, including a new course about Amazon GuardDuty, a new managed threat-detection service.

These introductory courses, built by AWS experts, are suitable for users and decision makers alike. Each course lasts 10–15 minutes, and you can learn at your own pace.

Digital training courses about security

To find these free courses, navigate to the Security, Identity & Compliance page. I suggest the following introductory courses:

Introduction to Amazon Cloud Directory (10 minutes)
Learn how to use Amazon Cloud Directory to build flexible, cloud-native directories for organizing hierarchies of data along multiple dimensions.
Introduction to Amazon Cognito (10 minutes)
Learn how to use Amazon Cognito to add user sign-up and sign-in to your mobile and web applications.
Introduction to Amazon GuardDuty (10 minutes)
Learn how to use Amazon GuardDuty, a new AWS managed threat-detection service that continuously monitors your account to detect known and unknown threats.
Introduction to Amazon Macie (10 minutes)
Learn how Amazon Macie uses machine learning to automatically discover, classify, and protect sensitive data in the AWS Cloud.
Introduction to AWS Artifact (10 minutes)
Get a brief overview of this service, including the definition of an audit artifact and a demonstration of AWS Artifact.
Introduction to AWS Certificate Manager (10 minutes)
Get a high-level overview of how to use AWS Certificate Manager to issue and configure SSL certificates for your applications.
Introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management (10 minutes)
Learn how you can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for authentication and authorization to AWS services. Discussions about IAM policies and roles also are included.
Introduction to Amazon Inspector (15 minutes)
Get an overview of how you can use Amazon Inspector to analyze AWS resources and help identify potential security issues.
Introduction to AWS Organizations (10 minutes)
AWS Organizations offers policy-based management for multiple AWS accounts. In this course, learn how to access and use Organizations.
Introduction to AWS WAF (15 minutes)
Review common AWS WAF use cases and learn which conditions AWS WAF (a web application firewall) can detect. A brief demonstration shows how to configure AWS WAF filters and rules.

Go deeper with AWS security courses

To supplement your foundational training, take these security-focused courses:

AWS Security Fundamentals (3 hours) is a self-paced digital course. This course introduces you to fundamental cloud computing and AWS security concepts, including AWS access control and management, governance, logging, and encryption methods. The course also covers security-related compliance protocols and risk management strategies, as well as procedures related to auditing your AWS security infrastructure.
Security Operations on AWS (3 days) is an instructor-led course that offers in-depth classroom instruction. This course demonstrates how to use AWS security services to help remain secure and compliant in the AWS Cloud. The course focuses on AWS security best practices that you can implement to enhance the security of your data and systems in the cloud.

AWS Training and Certification continually evaluates and expands the training courses available to you, so be sure to visit the website regularly to explore the latest offerings.

– Janna

Introducing AWS Single Sign-On

2017-12-08 Anand Murugesan

Post Syndicated from Anand Murugesan original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/introducing-aws-single-sign-on/

Today, AWS introduced AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO), a service that makes it easy for you to centrally manage SSO access to multiple AWS accounts and business applications. AWS SSO provides a user portal so that your users can find and access all of their assigned accounts and applications from one place, using their existing corporate credentials. AWS SSO is integrated with AWS Organizations to enable you to manage access to AWS accounts in your organization. In addition, AWS SSO supports Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0, which means you can extend SSO access to your SAML-enabled applications by using the AWS SSO application configuration wizard. AWS SSO also includes built-in SSO integrations with many business applications, such as Salesforce, Box, and Office 365.

In this blog post, I help you get started with AWS SSO by answering three main questions:

What benefits does AWS SSO provide?
What are the key features of AWS SSO?
How do I get started?

1. What benefits does AWS SSO provide?

You can connect your corporate Microsoft Active Directory to AWS SSO so that your users can sign in to the user portal with their user names and passwords to access the AWS accounts and applications to which you have granted them access. The following screenshot shows an example of the AWS SSO user portal.

You can use AWS SSO to centrally assign, manage, and audit your users’ access to multiple AWS accounts and SAML-enabled business applications. You can add new users to the appropriate Active Directory group, which automatically gives them access to the AWS accounts and applications assigned for members of that group. AWS SSO also provides better visibility into which users accessed which accounts and applications from the user portal by recording all user portal sign-in activities in AWS CloudTrail. AWS SSO records details such as the IP address, user name, date, and time of the sign-in request. Any changes made by administrators in the AWS SSO console also are recorded in CloudTrail, and you can use security information and event management (SIEM) solutions such as Splunk to analyze the associated CloudTrail logs.

2. What are the key features of AWS SSO?

AWS SSO includes the following key features.

AWS SSO user portal: In the user portal, your users can easily find and access all applications and AWS accounts to which you have granted them access. Users can access the user portal with their corporate Active Directory credentials and access these applications without needing to enter their user name and password again.

Integration with AWS Organizations: AWS SSO is integrated with Organizations to enable you to manage access to all AWS accounts in your organization. When you enable AWS SSO in your organization’s master account, AWS SSO lists all the accounts managed in your organization for which you can enable SSO access to AWS consoles.

Integration with on-premises Active Directory: AWS SSO integrates with your on-premises Active Directory by using AWS Directory Service. Users can access AWS accounts and business applications by using their Active Directory credentials. You can manage which users or groups in your corporate directory can access which AWS accounts.

Centralized permissions management: With AWS SSO, you can centrally manage the permissions granted to users when they access AWS accounts via the AWS Management Console. You define users’ permissions as permission sets, which are collections of permissions that are based on a combination of AWS managed policies or AWS managed policies for job functions. AWS managed policies are designed to provide permissions for many common use cases, and AWS managed policies for job functions are designed to closely align with common job functions in the IT industry.

With AWS SSO, you can configure all the necessary user permissions to your AWS resources in your AWS accounts by applying permission sets. For example, you can grant database administrators broad permissions to Amazon Relational Database Service in your development accounts, but limit their permissions in your production accounts. As you change these permission sets, AWS SSO helps you keep them updated in all relevant AWS accounts, allowing you to manage permissions centrally.

Application configuration wizard: You can configure SSO access to any SAML-enabled business application by using the AWS SSO application configuration wizard.

Built-in SSO integrations: AWS SSO provides built-in SSO integrations and step-by-step configuration instructions for many commonly used business applications such as Office 365, Salesforce, and Box.

Centralized auditing: AWS SSO logs all sign-in and administrative activities in CloudTrail. You can send these logs to SIEM solutions such as Splunk to analyze them.

Highly available multi-tenant SSO infrastructure: AWS SSO is built on a highly available, AWS managed SSO infrastructure. The AWS SSO multi-tenant architecture enables you to start using the service quickly without needing to procure hardware or install software.

3. How do I get started?

To get started, connect your corporate Active Directory to AWS SSO by using AWS Directory Service. You have two choices to connect your corporate directory: use AD Connector, or configure an Active Directory trust with your on-premises Active Directory. After connecting your corporate directory, you can set up accounts and applications for SSO access. You also can use AWS Managed Microsoft AD in the cloud to manage your users and groups in the cloud, if you don’t have an on-premises Active Directory or don’t want to connect to on-premises Active Directory.

The preceding diagram shows how AWS SSO helps connect your users to the AWS accounts and business applications to which they need access. The numbers in the diagram correspond to the following use cases.

Use case 1: Manage SSO access to AWS accounts

With AWS SSO, you can grant your users access to AWS accounts in your organization. You can do this by adding your users to groups in your corporate Active Directory. In AWS SSO, specify which Active Directory groups can access which AWS accounts, and then pick a permission set to specify the level of SSO access you are granting these Active Directory groups. AWS SSO then sets up AWS account access for the users in the groups. Going forward, you can add new users to your Active Directory groups, and AWS SSO automatically provides the users access to the configured accounts. You also can grant Active Directory users direct access to AWS accounts (without needing to add users to Active Directory groups).

To configure AWS account access for your users:

Navigate to the AWS SSO console, and choose AWS accounts from the navigation pane. Choose which accounts you want users to access from the list of accounts. For this example, I am choosing three accounts from my MarketingBU organizational unit. I then choose Assign users.
Choose Users, start typing to search for users, and then choose Search connected directory. This search will return a list of users from your connected directory. You can also search for groups.
To select permission sets, you first have to create one. Choose Create new permission set.
You can use an existing job function policy to create a permission set. This type of policy allows you to apply predefined AWS managed policies to a permission set that are based on common job functions in the IT industry. Alternatively, you can create a custom permission set based on custom policies.
For this example, I choose the SecurityAudit job function policy and then choose Create. As a result, this permission set will be available for me to pick on the next screen.
Choose a permission set to indicate what level of access you want to grant your users. For this example, I assign the SecurityAudit permission set I created in the previous step to the users I chose. I then choose Finish.
Your users can sign in to the user portal and access the accounts to which you gave them access. AWS SSO automatically sets up the necessary trust between accounts to enable SSO. AWS SSO also sets up the necessary permissions in each account. This helps you scale your administrative tasks across multiple AWS accounts.
The users can choose an account and a permission set to sign in to that account without needing to provide a password again. For example, if you grant a user two permission sets—one that is more restrictive and one that is less restrictive—the user can choose which permission set to use for a specific session. In the following screenshot, John has signed in to the AWS SSO user portal. He can see all the accounts to which he has access. For example, he can sign in to the Production Account with SecurityAudit permissions.

Use case 2: Manage SSO access to business applications

AWS SSO has built-in support for SSO access to commonly used business applications such as Salesforce, Office 365, and Box. You can find these applications in the AWS SSO console and easily configure SSO access by using the application configuration wizard. After you configure an application for SSO access, you can grant users access by searching for users and groups in your corporate directory. For a complete list of supported applications, navigate to the AWS SSO console.

To configure SSO access to business applications:

Navigate to the AWS SSO console and choose Applications from the navigation pane.
Choose Add a new application and choose one or more of the applications in the list. For this example, I have chosen Dropbox.
Depending on which application you choose, you will be asked to complete step-by-step instructions to configure the application for SSO access. The instructions guide you to use the details provided in the AWS SSO metadata section to configure your application, and then to provide your application details in the Application metadata section. Choose Save changes when you are done.
Optionally, you can provide additional SAML attribute mappings by choosing the Attribute mappings tab. You need to do this only if you want to pass user attributes from your corporate directory to the application.
To give your users access to this application, choose the Assigned users tab. Choose Assign users to search your connected directory, and choose a user or group that can access this application.

Use case 3: Manage SSO access to custom SAML-enabled applications

You also can enable SSO access to your custom-built or partner-built SAML applications by using the AWS SSO application configuration wizard.

To configure SSO access to SAML-enabled applications:

Navigate to the AWS SSO console and choose Applications from the navigation pane.
Choose Add a new application, choose Custom SAML 2.0 application, and choose Add.
On the Custom SAML 2.0 application page, copy or download the AWS SSO metadata from the AWS SSO metadata section to configure your custom SAML-enabled application to recognize AWS SSO as an identity provider.
On the same page, complete the application configuration details in the Application metadata section, and choose Save changes.
You can provide additional SAML attribute mappings to be passed to your application in the SAML assertion by choosing the Attribute mappings tab. See the documentation for list of all available attributes.
To give your users access to this application, choose the Assigned users tab. Choose Assign users to search your connected directory, and choose a user or group that can access this application.

Summary

In this blog post, I introduced AWS SSO and explained its key features, benefits, and use cases. With AWS SSO, you can centrally manage and audit SSO access to all your AWS accounts, cloud applications, and custom applications. To start using AWS SSO, navigate to the AWS SSO console.

If you have feedback or questions about AWS SSO, start a new thread on the AWS SSO forum.

– Anand

How to Easily Apply Amazon Cloud Directory Schema Changes with In-Place Schema Upgrades

2017-12-07 Mahendra Chheda

Post Syndicated from Mahendra Chheda original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-easily-apply-amazon-cloud-directory-schema-changes-with-in-place-schema-upgrades/

Now, Amazon Cloud Directory makes it easier for you to apply schema changes across your directories with in-place schema upgrades. Your directory now remains available while Cloud Directory applies backward-compatible schema changes such as the addition of new fields. Without migrating data between directories or applying code changes to your applications, you can upgrade your schemas. You also can view the history of your schema changes in Cloud Directory by using version identifiers, which help you track and audit schema versions across directories. If you have multiple instances of a directory with the same schema, you can view the version history of schema changes to manage your directory fleet and ensure that all directories are running with the same schema version.

In this blog post, I demonstrate how to perform an in-place schema upgrade and use schema versions in Cloud Directory. I add additional attributes to an existing facet and add a new facet to a schema. I then publish the new schema and apply it to running directories, upgrading the schema in place. I also show how to view the version history of a directory schema, which helps me to ensure my directory fleet is running the same version of the schema and has the correct history of schema changes applied to it.

Note: I share Java code examples in this post. I assume that you are familiar with the AWS SDK and can use Java-based code to build a Cloud Directory code example. You can apply the concepts I cover in this post to other programming languages such as Python and Ruby.

Cloud Directory fundamentals

I will start by covering a few Cloud Directory fundamentals. If you are already familiar with the concepts behind Cloud Directory facets, schemas, and schema lifecycles, you can skip to the next section.

Facets: Groups of attributes. You use facets to define object types. For example, you can define a device schema by adding facets such as computers, phones, and tablets. A computer facet can track attributes such as serial number, make, and model. You can then use the facets to create computer objects, phone objects, and tablet objects in the directory to which the schema applies.

Schemas: Collections of facets. Schemas define which types of objects can be created in a directory (such as users, devices, and organizations) and enforce validation of data for each object class. All data within a directory must conform to the applied schema. As a result, the schema definition is essentially a blueprint to construct a directory with an applied schema.

Schema lifecycle: The four distinct states of a schema: Development, Published, Applied, and Deleted. Schemas in the Published and Applied states have version identifiers and cannot be changed. Schemas in the Applied state are used by directories for validation as applications insert or update data. You can change schemas in the Development state as many times as you need them to. In-place schema upgrades allow you to apply schema changes to an existing Applied schema in a production directory without the need to export and import the data populated in the directory.

How to add attributes to a computer inventory application schema and perform an in-place schema upgrade

To demonstrate how to set up schema versioning and perform an in-place schema upgrade, I will use an example of a computer inventory application that uses Cloud Directory to store relationship data. Let’s say that at my company, AnyCompany, we use this computer inventory application to track all computers we give to our employees for work use. I previously created a ComputerSchema and assigned its version identifier as 1. This schema contains one facet called ComputerInfo that includes attributes for SerialNumber, Make, and Model, as shown in the following schema details.

Schema: ComputerSchema
Version: 1

Facet: ComputerInfo
Attribute: SerialNumber, type: Integer
Attribute: Make, type: String
Attribute: Model, type: String

AnyCompany has offices in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. I have deployed the computer inventory application for each of these three locations. As shown in the lower left part of the following diagram, ComputerSchema is in the Published state with a version of 1. The Published schema is applied to SeattleDirectory, PortlandDirectory, and SanFranciscoDirectory for AnyCompany’s three locations. Implementing separate directories for different geographic locations when you don’t have any queries that cross location boundaries is a good data partitioning strategy and gives your application better response times with lower latency.

The following code example creates the schema in the Development state by using a JSON file, publishes the schema, and then creates directories for the Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco locations. For this example, I assume the schema has been defined in the JSON file. The createSchema API creates a schema Amazon Resource Name (ARN) with the name defined in the variable, SCHEMA_NAME. I can use the putSchemaFromJson API to add specific schema definitions from the JSON file.

// The utility method to get valid Cloud Directory schema JSON
String validJson = getJsonFile("ComputerSchema_version_1.json")

String SCHEMA_NAME = "ComputerSchema";

String developmentSchemaArn = client.createSchema(new CreateSchemaRequest()
        .withName(SCHEMA_NAME))
        .getSchemaArn();

// Put the schema document in the Development schema
PutSchemaFromJsonResult result = client.putSchemaFromJson(new PutSchemaFromJsonRequest()
        .withSchemaArn(developmentSchemaArn)
        .withDocument(validJson));

The following code example takes the schema that is currently in the Development state and publishes the schema, changing its state to Published.

String SCHEMA_VERSION = "1";
String publishedSchemaArn = client.publishSchema(
        new PublishSchemaRequest()
        .withDevelopmentSchemaArn(developmentSchemaArn)
        .withVersion(SCHEMA_VERSION))
        .getPublishedSchemaArn();

// Our Published schema ARN is as follows
// arn:aws:clouddirectory:us-west-2:XXXXXXXXXXXX:schema/published/ComputerSchema/1

The following code example creates a directory named SeattleDirectory and applies the published schema. The createDirectory API call creates a directory by using the published schema provided in the API parameters. Note that Cloud Directory stores a version of the schema in the directory in the Applied state. I will use similar code to create directories for PortlandDirectory and SanFranciscoDirectory.

String DIRECTORY_NAME = "SeattleDirectory"; 

CreateDirectoryResult directory = client.createDirectory(
        new CreateDirectoryRequest()
        .withName(DIRECTORY_NAME)
        .withSchemaArn(publishedSchemaArn));

String directoryArn = directory.getDirectoryArn();
String appliedSchemaArn = directory.getAppliedSchemaArn();

// This code section can be reused to create directories for Portland and San Francisco locations with the appropriate directory names

// Our directory ARN is as follows 
// arn:aws:clouddirectory:us-west-2:XXXXXXXXXXXX:directory/XX_DIRECTORY_GUID_XX

// Our applied schema ARN is as follows 
// arn:aws:clouddirectory:us-west-2:XXXXXXXXXXXX:directory/XX_DIRECTORY_GUID_XX/schema/ComputerSchema/1

Revising a schema

Now let’s say my company, AnyCompany, wants to add more information for computers and to track which employees have been assigned a computer for work use. I modify the schema to add two attributes to the ComputerInfo facet: Description and OSVersion (operating system version). I make Description optional because it is not important for me to track this attribute for the computer objects I create. I make OSVersion mandatory because it is critical for me to track it for all computer objects so that I can make changes such as applying security patches or making upgrades. Because I make OSVersion mandatory, I must provide a default value that Cloud Directory will apply to objects that were created before the schema revision, in order to handle backward compatibility. Note that you can replace the value in any object with a different value.

I also add a new facet to track computer assignment information, shown in the following updated schema as the ComputerAssignment facet. This facet tracks these additional attributes: Name (the name of the person to whom the computer is assigned), EMail (the email address of the assignee), Department, and department CostCenter. Note that Cloud Directory refers to the previously available version identifier as the Major Version. Because I can now add a minor version to a schema, I also denote the changed schema as Minor Version A.

Schema: ComputerSchema
Major Version: 1
Minor Version: A 

Facet: ComputerInfo
Attribute: SerialNumber, type: Integer 
Attribute: Make, type: String
Attribute: Model, type: Integer
Attribute: Description, type: String, required: NOT_REQUIRED
Attribute: OSVersion, type: String, required: REQUIRED_ALWAYS, default: "Windows 7"

Facet: ComputerAssignment
Attribute: Name, type: String
Attribute: EMail, type: String
Attribute: Department, type: String
Attribute: CostCenter, type: Integer

The following diagram shows the changes that were made when I added another facet to the schema and attributes to the existing facet. The highlighted area of the diagram (bottom left) shows that the schema changes were published.

The following code example revises the existing Development schema by adding the new attributes to the ComputerInfo facet and by adding the ComputerAssignment facet. I use a new JSON file for the schema revision, and for the purposes of this example, I am assuming the JSON file has the full schema including planned revisions.

// The utility method to get a valid CloudDirectory schema JSON
String schemaJson = getJsonFile("ComputerSchema_version_1_A.json")

// Put the schema document in the Development schema
PutSchemaFromJsonResult result = client.putSchemaFromJson(
        new PutSchemaFromJsonRequest()
        .withSchemaArn(developmentSchemaArn)
        .withDocument(schemaJson));

Upgrading the Published schema

The following code example performs an in-place schema upgrade of the Published schema with schema revisions (it adds new attributes to the existing facet and another facet to the schema). The upgradePublishedSchema API upgrades the Published schema with backward-compatible changes from the Development schema.

// From an earlier code example, I know the publishedSchemaArn has this value: "arn:aws:clouddirectory:us-west-2:XXXXXXXXXXXX:schema/published/ComputerSchema/1"

// Upgrade publishedSchemaArn to minorVersion A. The Development schema must be backward compatible with 
// the existing publishedSchemaArn. 

String minorVersion = "A"

UpgradePublishedSchemaResult upgradePublishedSchemaResult = client.upgradePublishedSchema(new UpgradePublishedSchemaRequest()
        .withDevelopmentSchemaArn(developmentSchemaArn)
        .withPublishedSchemaArn(publishedSchemaArn)
        .withMinorVersion(minorVersion));

String upgradedPublishedSchemaArn = upgradePublishedSchemaResult.getUpgradedSchemaArn();

// The Published schema ARN after the upgrade shows a minor version as follows 
// arn:aws:clouddirectory:us-west-2:XXXXXXXXXXXX:schema/published/ComputerSchema/1/A

Upgrading the Applied schema

The following diagram shows the in-place schema upgrade for the SeattleDirectory directory. I am performing the schema upgrade so that I can reflect the new schemas in all three directories. As a reminder, I added new attributes to the ComputerInfo facet and also added the ComputerAssignment facet. After the schema and directory upgrade, I can create objects for the ComputerInfo and ComputerAssignment facets in the SeattleDirectory. Any objects that were created with the old facet definition for ComputerInfo will now use the default values for any additional attributes defined in the new schema.

I use the following code example to perform an in-place upgrade of the SeattleDirectory to a Major Version of 1 and a Minor Version of A. Note that you should change a Major Version identifier in a schema to make backward-incompatible changes such as changing the data type of an existing attribute or dropping a mandatory attribute from your schema. Backward-incompatible changes require directory data migration from a previous version to the new version. You should change a Minor Version identifier in a schema to make backward-compatible upgrades such as adding additional attributes or adding facets, which in turn may contain one or more attributes. The upgradeAppliedSchema API lets me upgrade an existing directory with a different version of a schema.

// This upgrades ComputerSchema version 1 of the Applied schema in SeattleDirectory to Major Version 1 and Minor Version A
// The schema must be backward compatible or the API will fail with IncompatibleSchemaException

UpgradeAppliedSchemaResult upgradeAppliedSchemaResult = client.upgradeAppliedSchema(new UpgradeAppliedSchemaRequest()
        .withDirectoryArn(directoryArn)
        .withPublishedSchemaArn(upgradedPublishedSchemaArn));

String upgradedAppliedSchemaArn = upgradeAppliedSchemaResult.getUpgradedSchemaArn();

// The Applied schema ARN after the in-place schema upgrade will appear as follows
// arn:aws:clouddirectory:us-west-2:XXXXXXXXXXXX:directory/XX_DIRECTORY_GUID_XX/schema/ComputerSchema/1

// This code section can be reused to upgrade directories for the Portland and San Francisco locations with the appropriate directory ARN

Note: Cloud Directory has excluded returning the Minor Version identifier in the Applied schema ARN for backward compatibility and to enable the application to work across older and newer versions of the directory.

The following diagram shows the changes that are made when I perform an in-place schema upgrade in the two remaining directories, PortlandDirectory and SanFranciscoDirectory. I make these calls sequentially, upgrading PortlandDirectory first and then upgrading SanFranciscoDirectory. I use the same code example that I used earlier to upgrade SeattleDirectory. Now, all my directories are running the most current version of the schema. Also, I made these schema changes without having to migrate data and while maintaining my application’s high availability.

Schema revision history

I can now view the schema revision history for any of AnyCompany’s directories by using the listAppliedSchemaArns API. Cloud Directory maintains the five most recent versions of applied schema changes. Similarly, to inspect the current Minor Version that was applied to my schema, I use the getAppliedSchemaVersion API. The listAppliedSchemaArns API returns the schema ARNs based on my schema filter as defined in withSchemaArn.

I use the following code example to query an Applied schema for its version history.

// This returns the five most recent Minor Versions associated with a Major Version
ListAppliedSchemaArnsResult listAppliedSchemaArnsResult = client.listAppliedSchemaArns(new ListAppliedSchemaArnsRequest()
        .withDirectoryArn(directoryArn)
        .withSchemaArn(upgradedAppliedSchemaArn));

// Note: The listAppliedSchemaArns API without the SchemaArn filter returns all the Major Versions in a directory

The listAppliedSchemaArns API returns the two ARNs as shown in the following output.

arn:aws:clouddirectory:us-west-2:XXXXXXXXXXXX:directory/XX_DIRECTORY_GUID_XX/schema/ComputerSchema/1
arn:aws:clouddirectory:us-west-2:XXXXXXXXXXXX:directory/XX_DIRECTORY_GUID_XX/schema/ComputerSchema/1/A

The following code example queries an Applied schema for current Minor Version by using the getAppliedSchemaVersion API.

// This returns the current Applied schema's Minor Version ARN 

GetAppliedSchemaVersion getAppliedSchemaVersionResult = client.getAppliedSchemaVersion(new GetAppliedSchemaVersionRequest()
	.withSchemaArn(upgradedAppliedSchemaArn));

The getAppliedSchemaVersion API returns the current Applied schema ARN with a Minor Version, as shown in the following output.

arn:aws:clouddirectory:us-west-2:XXXXXXXXXXXX:directory/XX_DIRECTORY_GUID_XX/schema/ComputerSchema/1/A

If you have a lot of directories, schema revision API calls can help you audit your directory fleet and ensure that all directories are running the same version of a schema. Such auditing can help you ensure high integrity of directories across your fleet.

Summary

You can use in-place schema upgrades to make changes to your directory schema as you evolve your data set to match the needs of your application. An in-place schema upgrade allows you to maintain high availability for your directory and applications while the upgrade takes place. For more information about in-place schema upgrades, see the in-place schema upgrade documentation.

If you have comments about this blog post, submit them in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions about implementing the solution in this post, start a new thread in the Directory Service forum or contact AWS Support.

– Mahendra

Newly Updated Whitepaper: FERPA Compliance on AWS

2017-12-06 Chris Gile

Post Syndicated from Chris Gile original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/newly-updated-whitepaper-ferpa-compliance-on-aws/

One of the main tenets of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is the protection of student education records, including personally identifiable information (PII) and directory information. We recently updated our FERPA Compliance on AWS whitepaper to include AWS service-specific guidance for 24 AWS services. The whitepaper describes how these services can be used to help secure protected data. In conjunction with more detailed service-specific documentation, this updated information helps make it easier for you to plan, deploy, and operate secure environments to meet your compliance requirements in the AWS Cloud.

The updated whitepaper is especially useful for educational institutions and their vendors who need to understand:

AWS’s Shared Responsibility Model.
How AWS services can be used to help deploy educational and PII workloads securely in the AWS Cloud.
Key security disciplines in a security program to help you run a FERPA-compliant program (such as auditing, data destruction, and backup and disaster recovery).

In a related effort to help you secure PII, we also added to the whitepaper a mapping of NIST SP 800-122, which provides guidance for protecting PII, as well as a link to our NIST SP 800-53 Quick Start, a CloudFormation template that automatically configures AWS resources and deploys a multi-tier, Linux-based web application. To learn how this Quick Start works, see the Automate NIST Compliance in AWS GovCloud (US) with AWS Quick Start Tools video. The template helps you streamline and automate secure baselines in AWS—from initial design to operational security readiness—by incorporating the expertise of AWS security and compliance subject matter experts.

For more information about AWS Compliance and FERPA or to request support for your organization, contact your AWS account manager.

– Chris Gile, Senior Manager, AWS Security Assurance

In the Works – AWS IoT Device Defender – Secure Your IoT Fleet

2017-11-29 Jeff Barr

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-sepio-secure-your-iot-fleet/

Scale takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to IoT. Last year I was lucky enough to tour a gigantic factory that had, on average, one environment sensor per square meter. The sensors measured temperature, humidity, and air purity several times per second, and served as an early warning system for contaminants. I’ve heard customers express interest in deploying IoT-enabled consumer devices in the millions or tens of millions.

With powerful, long-lived devices deployed in a geographically distributed fashion, managing security challenges is crucial. However, the limited amount of local compute power and memory can sometimes limit the ability to use encryption and other forms of data protection.

To address these challenges and to allow our customers to confidently deploy IoT devices at scale, we are working on IoT Device Defender. While the details might change before release, AWS IoT Device Defender is designed to offer these benefits:

Continuous Auditing – AWS IoT Device Defender monitors the policies related to your devices to ensure that the desired security settings are in place. It looks for drifts away from best practices and supports custom audit rules so that you can check for conditions that are specific to your deployment. For example, you could check to see if a compromised device has subscribed to sensor data from another device. You can run audits on a schedule or on an as-needed basis.

Real-Time Detection and Alerting – AWS IoT Device Defender looks for and quickly alerts you to unusual behavior that could be coming from a compromised device. It does this by monitoring the behavior of similar devices over time, looking for unauthorized access attempts, changes in connection patterns, and changes in traffic patterns (either inbound or outbound).

Fast Investigation and Mitigation – In the event that you get an alert that something unusual is happening, AWS IoT Device Defender gives you the tools, including contextual information, to help you to investigate and mitigate the problem. Device information, device statistics, diagnostic logs, and previous alerts are all at your fingertips. You have the option to reboot the device, revoke its permissions, reset it to factory defaults, or push a security fix.

Stay Tuned
I’ll have more info (and a hands-on post) as soon as possible, so stay tuned!

— Jeff;

How to Patch, Inspect, and Protect Microsoft Windows Workloads on AWS—Part 2

2017-11-22 Koen van Blijderveen

Post Syndicated from Koen van Blijderveen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-patch-inspect-and-protect-microsoft-windows-workloads-on-aws-part-2/

Yesterday in Part 1 of this blog post, I showed you how to:

Launch an Amazon EC2 instance with an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role, an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume, and tags that Amazon EC2 Systems Manager (Systems Manager) and Amazon Inspector use.
Configure Systems Manager to install the Amazon Inspector agent and patch your EC2 instances.

Today in Steps 3 and 4, I show you how to:

Take Amazon EBS snapshots using Amazon EBS Snapshot Scheduler to automate snapshots based on instance tags.
Use Amazon Inspector to check if your EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows contain any common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).

To catch up on Steps 1 and 2, see yesterday’s blog post.

Step 3: Take EBS snapshots using EBS Snapshot Scheduler

In this section, I show you how to use EBS Snapshot Scheduler to take snapshots of your instances at specific intervals. To do this, I will show you how to:

Determine the schedule for EBS Snapshot Scheduler by providing you with best practices.
Deploy EBS Snapshot Scheduler by using AWS CloudFormation.
Tag your EC2 instances so that EBS Snapshot Scheduler backs up your instances when you want them backed up.

In addition to making sure your EC2 instances have all the available operating system patches applied on a regular schedule, you should take snapshots of the EBS storage volumes attached to your EC2 instances. Taking regular snapshots allows you to restore your data to a previous state quickly and cost effectively. With Amazon EBS snapshots, you pay only for the actual data you store, and snapshots save only the data that has changed since the previous snapshot, which minimizes your cost. You will use EBS Snapshot Scheduler to make regular snapshots of your EC2 instance. EBS Snapshot Scheduler takes advantage of other AWS services including CloudFormation, Amazon DynamoDB, and AWS Lambda to make backing up your EBS volumes simple.

Determine the schedule

As a best practice, you should back up your data frequently during the hours when your data changes the most. This reduces the amount of data you lose if you have to restore from a snapshot. For the purposes of this blog post, the data for my instances changes the most between the business hours of 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Pacific Time. During these hours, I will make snapshots hourly to minimize data loss.

In addition to backing up frequently, another best practice is to establish a strategy for retention. This will vary based on how you need to use the snapshots. If you have compliance requirements to be able to restore for auditing, your needs may be different than if you are able to detect data corruption within three hours and simply need to restore to something that limits data loss to five hours. EBS Snapshot Scheduler enables you to specify the retention period for your snapshots. For this post, I only need to keep snapshots for recent business days. To account for weekends, I will set my retention period to three days, which is down from the default of 15 days when deploying EBS Snapshot Scheduler.

Deploy EBS Snapshot Scheduler

In Step 1 of Part 1 of this post, I showed how to configure an EC2 for Windows Server 2012 R2 instance with an EBS volume. You will use EBS Snapshot Scheduler to take eight snapshots each weekday of your EC2 instance’s EBS volumes:

Navigate to the EBS Snapshot Scheduler deployment page and choose Launch Solution. This takes you to the CloudFormation console in your account. The Specify an Amazon S3 template URL option is already selected and prefilled. Choose Next on the Select Template page.
On the Specify Details page, retain all default parameters except for AutoSnapshotDeletion. Set AutoSnapshotDeletion to Yes to ensure that old snapshots are periodically deleted. The default retention period is 15 days (you will specify a shorter value on your instance in the next subsection).
Choose Next twice to move to the Review step, and start deployment by choosing the I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources check box and then choosing Create.

Tag your EC2 instances

EBS Snapshot Scheduler takes a few minutes to deploy. While waiting for its deployment, you can start to tag your instance to define its schedule. EBS Snapshot Scheduler reads tag values and looks for four possible custom parameters in the following order:

<snapshot time> – Time in 24-hour format with no colon.
<retention days> – The number of days (a positive integer) to retain the snapshot before deletion, if set to automatically delete snapshots.
<time zone> – The time zone of the times specified in <snapshot time>.
<active day(s)> – all, weekdays, or mon, tue, wed, thu, fri, sat, and/or sun.

Because you want hourly backups on weekdays between 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. Pacific Time, you need to configure eight tags—one for each hour of the day. You will add the eight tags shown in the following table to your EC2 instance.

Tag	Value
`scheduler:ebs-snapshot:0900`	`0900;3;utc;weekdays`
`scheduler:ebs-snapshot:1000`	`1000;3;utc;weekdays`
`scheduler:ebs-snapshot:1100`	`1100;3;utc;weekdays`
`scheduler:ebs-snapshot:1200`	`1200;3;utc;weekdays`
`scheduler:ebs-snapshot:1300`	`1300;3;utc;weekdays`
`scheduler:ebs-snapshot:1400`	`1400;3;utc;weekdays`
`scheduler:ebs-snapshot:1500`	`1500;3;utc;weekdays`
`scheduler:ebs-snapshot:1600`	`1600;3;utc;weekdays`

Next, you will add these tags to your instance. If you want to tag multiple instances at once, you can use Tag Editor instead. To add the tags in the preceding table to your EC2 instance:

Navigate to your EC2 instance in the EC2 console and choose Tags in the navigation pane.
Choose Add/Edit Tags and then choose Create Tag to add all the tags specified in the preceding table.
Confirm you have added the tags by choosing Save. After adding these tags, navigate to your EC2 instance in the EC2 console. Your EC2 instance should look similar to the following screenshot.
After waiting a couple of hours, you can see snapshots beginning to populate on the Snapshots page of the EC2 console.
To check if EBS Snapshot Scheduler is active, you can check the CloudWatch rule that runs the Lambda function. If the clock icon shown in the following screenshot is green, the scheduler is active. If the clock icon is gray, the rule is disabled and does not run. You can enable or disable the rule by selecting it, choosing Actions, and choosing Enable or Disable. This also allows you to temporarily disable EBS Snapshot Scheduler.

You can also monitor when EBS Snapshot Scheduler has run by choosing the name of the CloudWatch rule as shown in the previous screenshot and choosing Show metrics for the rule.

If you want to restore and attach an EBS volume, see Restoring an Amazon EBS Volume from a Snapshot and Attaching an Amazon EBS Volume to an Instance.

Step 4: Use Amazon Inspector

In this section, I show you how to you use Amazon Inspector to scan your EC2 instance for common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) and set up Amazon SNS notifications. To do this I will show you how to:

Install the Amazon Inspector agent by using EC2 Run Command.
Set up notifications using Amazon SNS to notify you of any findings.
Define an Amazon Inspector target and template to define what assessment to perform on your EC2 instance.
Schedule Amazon Inspector assessment runs to assess your EC2 instance on a regular interval.

Amazon Inspector can help you scan your EC2 instance using prebuilt rules packages, which are built and maintained by AWS. These prebuilt rules packages tell Amazon Inspector what to scan for on the EC2 instances you select. Amazon Inspector provides the following prebuilt packages for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2:

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures
Center for Internet Security Benchmarks
Runtime Behavior Analysis

In this post, I’m focused on how to make sure you keep your EC2 instances patched, backed up, and inspected for common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). As a result, I will focus on how to use the CVE rules package and use your instance tags to identify the instances on which to run the CVE rules. If your EC2 instance is fully patched using Systems Manager, as described earlier, you should not have any findings with the CVE rules package. Regardless, as a best practice I recommend that you use Amazon Inspector as an additional layer for identifying any unexpected failures. This involves using Amazon CloudWatch to set up weekly Amazon Inspector scans, and configuring Amazon Inspector to notify you of any findings through SNS topics. By acting on the notifications you receive, you can respond quickly to any CVEs on any of your EC2 instances to help ensure that malware using known CVEs does not affect your EC2 instances. In a previous blog post, Eric Fitzgerald showed how to remediate Amazon Inspector security findings automatically.

Install the Amazon Inspector agent

To install the Amazon Inspector agent, you will use EC2 Run Command, which allows you to run any command on any of your EC2 instances that have the Systems Manager agent with an attached IAM role that allows access to Systems Manager.

Choose Run Command under Systems Manager Services in the navigation pane of the EC2 console. Then choose Run a command.
To install the Amazon Inspector agent, you will use an AWS managed and provided command document that downloads and installs the agent for you on the selected EC2 instance. Choose AmazonInspector-ManageAWSAgent. To choose the target EC2 instance where this command will be run, use the tag you previously assigned to your EC2 instance, Patch Group, with a value of Windows Servers. For this example, set the concurrent installations to 1 and tell Systems Manager to stop after 5 errors.
Retain the default values for all other settings on the Run a command page and choose Run. Back on the Run Command page, you can see if the command that installed the Amazon Inspector agent executed successfully on all selected EC2 instances.

Set up notifications using Amazon SNS

Now that you have installed the Amazon Inspector agent, you will set up an SNS topic that will notify you of any findings after an Amazon Inspector run.

To set up an SNS topic:

In the AWS Management Console, choose Simple Notification Service under Messaging in the Services menu.
Choose Create topic, name your topic (only alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores are allowed) and give it a display name to ensure you know what this topic does (I’ve named mine Inspector). Choose Create topic.
To allow Amazon Inspector to publish messages to your new topic, choose Other topic actions and choose Edit topic policy.
For Allow these users to publish messages to this topic and Allow these users to subscribe to this topic, choose Only these AWS users. Type the following ARN for the US East (N. Virginia) Region in which you are deploying the solution in this post: arn:aws:iam::316112463485:root. This is the ARN of Amazon Inspector itself. For the ARNs of Amazon Inspector in other AWS Regions, see Setting Up an SNS Topic for Amazon Inspector Notifications (Console). Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) uniquely identify AWS resources across all of AWS.
To receive notifications from Amazon Inspector, subscribe to your new topic by choosing Create subscription and adding your email address. After confirming your subscription by clicking the link in the email, the topic should display your email address as a subscriber. Later, you will configure the Amazon Inspector template to publish to this topic.

Define an Amazon Inspector target and template

Now that you have set up the notification topic by which Amazon Inspector can notify you of findings, you can create an Amazon Inspector target and template. A target defines which EC2 instances are in scope for Amazon Inspector. A template defines which packages to run, for how long, and on which target.

To create an Amazon Inspector target:

Navigate to the Amazon Inspector console and choose Get started. At the time of writing this blog post, Amazon Inspector is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions.
For Amazon Inspector to be able to collect the necessary data from your EC2 instance, you must create an IAM service role for Amazon Inspector. Amazon Inspector can create this role for you if you choose Choose or create role and confirm the role creation by choosing Allow.
Amazon Inspector also asks you to tag your EC2 instance and install the Amazon Inspector agent. You already performed these steps in Part 1 of this post, so you can proceed by choosing Next. To define the Amazon Inspector target, choose the previously used Patch Group tag with a Value of Windows Servers. This is the same tag that you used to define the targets for patching. Then choose Next.
Now, define your Amazon Inspector template, and choose a name and the package you want to run. For this post, use the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures package and choose the default duration of 1 hour. As you can see, the package has a version number, so always select the latest version of the rules package if multiple versions are available.
Configure Amazon Inspector to publish to your SNS topic when findings are reported. You can also choose to receive a notification of a started run, a finished run, or changes in the state of a run. For this blog post, you want to receive notifications if there are any findings. To start, choose Assessment Templates from the Amazon Inspector console and choose your newly created Amazon Inspector assessment template. Choose the icon below SNS topics (see the following screenshot).
A pop-up appears in which you can choose the previously created topic and the events about which you want SNS to notify you (choose Finding reported).

Schedule Amazon Inspector assessment runs

The last step in using Amazon Inspector to assess for CVEs is to schedule the Amazon Inspector template to run using Amazon CloudWatch Events. This will make sure that Amazon Inspector assesses your EC2 instance on a regular basis. To do this, you need the Amazon Inspector template ARN, which you can find under Assessment templates in the Amazon Inspector console. CloudWatch Events can run your Amazon Inspector assessment at an interval you define using a Cron-based schedule. Cron is a well-known scheduling agent that is widely used on UNIX-like operating systems and uses the following syntax for CloudWatch Events.

All scheduled events use a UTC time zone, and the minimum precision for schedules is one minute. For more information about scheduling CloudWatch Events, see Schedule Expressions for Rules.

To create the CloudWatch Events rule:

Navigate to the CloudWatch console, choose Events, and choose Create rule.
On the next page, specify if you want to invoke your rule based on an event pattern or a schedule. For this blog post, you will select a schedule based on a Cron expression.
You can schedule the Amazon Inspector assessment any time you want using the Cron expression, or you can use the Cron expression I used in the following screenshot, which will run the Amazon Inspector assessment every Sunday at 10:00 P.M. GMT.
Choose Add target and choose Inspector assessment template from the drop-down menu. Paste the ARN of the Amazon Inspector template you previously created in the Amazon Inspector console in the Assessment template box and choose Create a new role for this specific resource. This new role is necessary so that CloudWatch Events has the necessary permissions to start the Amazon Inspector assessment. CloudWatch Events will automatically create the new role and grant the minimum set of permissions needed to run the Amazon Inspector assessment. To proceed, choose Configure details.
Next, give your rule a name and a description. I suggest using a name that describes what the rule does, as shown in the following screenshot.
Finish the wizard by choosing Create rule. The rule should appear in the Events – Rules section of the CloudWatch console.
To confirm your CloudWatch Events rule works, wait for the next time your CloudWatch Events rule is scheduled to run. For testing purposes, you can choose your CloudWatch Events rule and choose Edit to change the schedule to run it sooner than scheduled.
Now navigate to the Amazon Inspector console to confirm the launch of your first assessment run. The Start time column shows you the time each assessment started and the Status column the status of your assessment. In the following screenshot, you can see Amazon Inspector is busy Collecting data from the selected assessment targets.

You have concluded the last step of this blog post by setting up a regular scan of your EC2 instance with Amazon Inspector and a notification that will let you know if your EC2 instance is vulnerable to any known CVEs. In a previous Security Blog post, Eric Fitzgerald explained How to Remediate Amazon Inspector Security Findings Automatically. Although that blog post is for Linux-based EC2 instances, the post shows that you can learn about Amazon Inspector findings in other ways than email alerts.

Conclusion

In this two-part blog post, I showed how to make sure you keep your EC2 instances up to date with patching, how to back up your instances with snapshots, and how to monitor your instances for CVEs. Collectively these measures help to protect your instances against common attack vectors that attempt to exploit known vulnerabilities. In Part 1, I showed how to configure your EC2 instances to make it easy to use Systems Manager, EBS Snapshot Scheduler, and Amazon Inspector. I also showed how to use Systems Manager to schedule automatic patches to keep your instances current in a timely fashion. In Part 2, I showed you how to take regular snapshots of your data by using EBS Snapshot Scheduler and how to use Amazon Inspector to check if your EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows contain any common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).

If you have comments about today’s or yesterday’s post, submit them in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions about or issues implementing any part of this solution, start a new thread on the Amazon EC2 forum or the Amazon Inspector forum, or contact AWS Support.

– Koen

Automating Security Group Updates with AWS Lambda

2017-10-24 Ian Scofield

Post Syndicated from Ian Scofield original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/automating-security-group-updates-with-aws-lambda/

Customers often use public endpoints to perform cross-region replication or other application layer communication to remote regions. But a common problem is how do you protect these endpoints? It can be tempting to open up the security groups to the world due to the complexity of keeping security groups in sync across regions with a dynamically changing infrastructure.

Consider a situation where you are running large clusters of instances in different regions that all require internode connectivity. One approach would be to use a VPN tunnel between regions to provide a secure tunnel over which to send your traffic. A good example of this is the Transit VPC Solution, which is a published AWS solution to help customers quickly get up and running. However, this adds additional cost and complexity to your solution due to the newly required additional infrastructure.

Another approach, which I’ll explore in this post, is to restrict access to the nodes by whitelisting the public IP addresses of your hosts in the opposite region. Today, I’ll outline a solution that allows for cross-region security group updates, can handle remote region failures, and supports external actions such as manually terminating instances or adding instances to an existing Auto Scaling group.

Solution overview

The overview of this solution is diagrammed below. Although this post covers limiting access to your instances, you should still implement encryption to protect your data in transit.

If your entire infrastructure is running in a single region, you can reference a security group as the source, allowing your IP addresses to change without any updates required. However, if you’re going across the public internet between regions to perform things like application-level traffic or cross-region replication, this is no longer an option. Security groups are regional. When you go across regions it can be tempting to drop security to enable this communication.

Although using an Elastic IP address can provide you with a static IP address that you can define as a source for your security groups, this may not always be feasible, especially when automatic scaling is desired.

In this example scenario, you have a distributed database that requires full internode communication for replication. If you place a cluster in us-east-1 and us-west-2, you must provide a secure method of communication between the two. Because the database uses cloud best practices, you can add or remove nodes as the load varies.

To start the process of updating your security groups, you must know when an instance has come online to trigger your workflow. Auto Scaling groups have the concept of lifecycle hooks that enable you to perform custom actions as the group launches or terminates instances.

When Auto Scaling begins to launch or terminate an instance, it puts the instance into a wait state (Pending:Wait or Terminating:Wait). The instance remains in this state while you perform your various actions until either you tell Auto Scaling to Continue, Abandon, or the timeout period ends. A lifecycle hook can trigger a CloudWatch event, publish to an Amazon SNS topic, or send to an Amazon SQS queue. For this example, you use CloudWatch Events to trigger an AWS Lambda function that updates an Amazon DynamoDB table.

Component breakdown

Here’s a quick breakdown of the components involved in this solution:

• Lambda function
• CloudWatch event
• DynamoDB table

Lambda function

The Lambda function automatically updates your security groups, in the following way:

1. Determines whether a change was triggered by your Auto Scaling group lifecycle hook or manually invoked for a “true up” functionality, which I discuss later in this post.
2. Describes the instances in the Auto Scaling group and obtain public IP addresses for each instance.
3. Updates both local and remote DynamoDB tables.
4. Compares the list of public IP addresses for both local and remote clusters with what’s already in the local region security group. Update the security group.
5. Compares the list of public IP addresses for both local and remote clusters with what’s already in the remote region security group. Update the security group
6. Signals CONTINUE back to the lifecycle hook.

CloudWatch event

The CloudWatch event triggers when an instance passes through either the launching or terminating states. When the Lambda function gets invoked, it receives an event that looks like the following:

{
	"account": "123456789012",
	"region": "us-east-1",
	"detail": {
		"LifecycleHookName": "hook-launching",
		"AutoScalingGroupName": "",
		"LifecycleActionToken": "33965228-086a-4aeb-8c26-f82ed3bef495",
		"LifecycleTransition": "autoscaling:EC2_INSTANCE_LAUNCHING",
		"EC2InstanceId": "i-017425ec54f22f994"
	},
	"detail-type": "EC2 Instance-launch Lifecycle Action",
	"source": "aws.autoscaling",
	"version": "0",
	"time": "2017-05-03T02:20:59Z",
	"id": "cb930cf8-ce8b-4b6c-8011-af17966eb7e2",
	"resources": [
		"arn:aws:autoscaling:us-east-1:123456789012:autoScalingGroup:d3fe9d96-34d0-4c62-b9bb-293a41ba3765:autoScalingGroupName/"
	]
}

DynamoDB table

You use DynamoDB to store lists of remote IP addresses in a local table that is updated by the opposite region as a failsafe source of truth. Although you can describe your Auto Scaling group for the local region, you must maintain a list of IP addresses for the remote region.

To minimize the number of describe calls and prevent an issue in the remote region from blocking your local scaling actions, we keep a list of the remote IP addresses in a local DynamoDB table. Each Lambda function in each region is responsible for updating the public IP addresses of its Auto Scaling group for both the local and remote tables.

As with all the infrastructure in this solution, there is a DynamoDB table in both regions that mirror each other. For example, the following screenshot shows a sample DynamoDB table. The Lambda function in us-east-1 would update the DynamoDB entry for us-east-1 in both tables in both regions.

By updating a DynamoDB table in both regions, it allows the local region to gracefully handle issues with the remote region, which would otherwise prevent your ability to scale locally. If the remote region becomes inaccessible, you have a copy of the latest configuration from the table that you can use to continue to sync with your security groups. When the remote region comes back online, it pushes its updated public IP addresses to the DynamoDB table. The security group is updated to reflect the current status by the remote Lambda function.

Walkthrough

Note: All of the following steps are performed in both regions. The Launch Stack buttons will default to the us-east-1 region.

Here’s a quick overview of the steps involved in this process:

1. An instance is launched or terminated, which triggers an Auto Scaling group lifecycle hook, triggering the Lambda function via CloudWatch Events.
2. The Lambda function retrieves the list of public IP addresses for all instances in the local region Auto Scaling group.
3. The Lambda function updates the local and remote region DynamoDB tables with the public IP addresses just received for the local Auto Scaling group.
4. The Lambda function updates the local region security group with the public IP addresses, removing and adding to ensure that it mirrors what is present for the local and remote Auto Scaling groups.
5. The Lambda function updates the remote region security group with the public IP addresses, removing and adding to ensure that it mirrors what is present for the local and remote Auto Scaling groups.

Prerequisites

To deploy this solution, you need to have Auto Scaling groups, launch configurations, and a base security group in both regions. To expedite this process, this CloudFormation template can be launched in both regions.

Step 1: Launch the AWS SAM template in the first region

To make the deployment process easy, I’ve created an AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) template, which is a new specification that makes it easier to manage and deploy serverless applications on AWS. This template creates the following resources:

• A Lambda function, to perform the various security group actions
• A DynamoDB table, to track the state of the local and remote Auto Scaling groups
• Auto Scaling group lifecycle hooks for instance launching and terminating
• A CloudWatch event, to track the EC2 Instance-Launch Lifecycle-Action and EC2 Instance-terminate Lifecycle-Action events
• A pointer from the CloudWatch event to the Lambda function, and the necessary permissions

Download the template from here or click to launch.

Upon launching the template, you’ll be presented with a list of parameters which includes the remote/local names for your Auto Scaling Groups, AWS region, Security Group IDs, DynamoDB table names, as well as where the code for the Lambda function is located. Because this is the first region you’re launching the stack in, fill out all the parameters except for the RemoteTable parameter as it hasn’t been created yet (you fill this in later).

Step 2: Test the local region

After the stack has finished launching, you can test the local region. Open the EC2 console and find the Auto Scaling group that was created when launching the prerequisite stack. Change the desired number of instances from 0 to 1.

For both regions, check your security group to verify that the public IP address of the instance created is now in the security group.

Local region:

Remote region:

Now, change the desired number of instances for your group back to 0 and verify that the rules are properly removed.

Local region:

Remote region:

Step 3: Launch in the remote region

When you deploy a Lambda function using CloudFormation, the Lambda zip file needs to reside in the same region you are launching the template. Once you choose your remote region, create an Amazon S3 bucket and upload the Lambda zip file there. Next, go to the remote region and launch the same SAM template as before, but make sure you update the CodeBucket and CodeKey parameters. Also, because this is the second launch, you now have all the values and can fill out all the parameters, specifically the RemoteTable value.

Step 4: Update the local region Lambda environment variable

When you originally launched the template in the local region, you didn’t have the name of the DynamoDB table for the remote region, because you hadn’t created it yet. Now that you have launched the remote template, you can perform a CloudFormation stack update on the initial SAM template. This populates the remote DynamoDB table name into the initial Lambda function’s environment variables.

In the CloudFormation console in the initial region, select the stack. Under Actions, choose Update Stack, and select the SAM template used for both regions. Under Parameters, populate the remote DynamoDB table name, as shown below. Choose Next and let the stack update complete. This updates your Lambda function and completes the setup process.

Step 5: Final testing

You now have everything fully configured and in place to trigger security group changes based on instances being added or removed to your Auto Scaling groups in both regions. Test this by changing the desired capacity of your group in both regions.

True up functionality
If an instance is manually added or removed from the Auto Scaling group, the lifecycle hooks don’t get triggered. To account for this, the Lambda function supports a “true up” functionality in which the function can be manually invoked. If you paste in the following JSON text for your test event, it kicks off the entire workflow. For added peace of mind, you can also have this function fire via a CloudWatch event with a CRON expression for nearly continuous checking.

{
	"detail": {
		"AutoScalingGroupName": "<your ASG name>"
	},
	"trueup":true
}

Extra credit

Now that all the resources are created in both regions, go back and break down the policy to incorporate resource-level permissions for specific security groups, Auto Scaling groups, and the DynamoDB tables.

Although this post is centered around using public IP addresses for your instances, you could instead use a VPN between regions. In this case, you would still be able to use this solution to scope down the security groups to the cluster instances. However, the code would need to be modified to support private IP addresses.

Conclusion

At this point, you now have a mechanism in place that captures when a new instance is added to or removed from your cluster and updates the security groups in both regions. This ensures that you are locking down your infrastructure securely by allowing access only to other cluster members.

Keep in mind that this architecture (lifecycle hooks, CloudWatch event, Lambda function, and DynamoDB table) requires that the infrastructure to be deployed in both regions, to have synchronization going both ways.

Because this Lambda function is modifying security group rules, it’s important to have an audit log of what has been modified and who is modifying them. The out-of-the-box function provides logs in CloudWatch for what IP addresses are being added and removed for which ports. As these are all API calls being made, they are logged in CloudTrail and can be traced back to the IAM role that you created for your lifecycle hooks. This can provide historical data that can be used for troubleshooting or auditing purposes.

Security is paramount at AWS. We want to ensure that customers are protecting access to their resources. This solution helps you keep your security groups in both regions automatically in sync with your Auto Scaling group resources. Let us know if you have any questions or other solutions you’ve come up with!

The Full List of the Security, Compliance, and Identity Sessions, Workshops, and Chalk Talks Being Offered at AWS re:Invent 2017

2017-10-24 Craig Liebendorfer

Post Syndicated from Craig Liebendorfer original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/a-full-list-of-the-security-compliance-and-identity-sessions-workshops-and-chalk-talks-available-at-aws-reinvent-2017/

Now that you can reserve seating in AWS re:Invent 2017 breakout sessions, workshops, chalk talks, and other events, the time is right to review the list of introductory, advanced, and expert content being offered this year. To learn more about breakout content types and levels, see Breakout Content.

Jump to: Advanced level | Expert level

Introductory level

SID201 – IAM for Enterprises: How Vanguard Strikes the Balance Between Agility, Governance, and Security
For Vanguard, managing the creation of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) objects is key to balancing developer velocity and compliance. In this session, you learn how Vanguard designs IAM roles to control the blast radius of AWS resources and maintain simplicity for developers. Vanguard will also share best practices to help you manage governance and improve your visibility across your AWS resources.

SID202 – Deep dive about how Capital One automates the delivery of directory services across AWS accounts
Traditional solutions for using Microsoft Active Directory across on-premises and AWS Cloud Windows workloads can require complex networking or syncing identities across multiple systems. AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed AD, offers you actual Microsoft Active Directory in the AWS Cloud as a managed service. In this session, you will learn how Capital One uses AWS Managed AD to provide highly available authentication and authorization services for its Windows workloads, such as Amazon RDS for SQL Server.

SID205 – Building the Largest Repo for Serverless Compliance-as-Code
When you use the cloud to enable speed and agility, how do you know if you’ve done it correctly? We are on a mission to help builders follow industry best practices within security guardrails by creating the largest compliance-as-code repository, available to all. Compliance-as-code is the idea to translate best practices, guardrails, policies, and standards into codified unit testing. Apply this to your AWS environment to provide insights about what can or must be improved. Learn why compliance-as-code matters to gain speed (by getting developers, architects, and security pros on the same page), how it is currently used (demo), and how to start using it or being part of building it.

SID206 – Best Practices for Managing Security Operation on AWS
To help prevent unexpected access to your AWS resources, it is critical to maintain strong identity and access policies and track, detect, and react to changes. In this session, you will learn how to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access to AWS resources and integrate your existing authentication system with IAM. We will cover how to deploy and control AWS infrastructure using code templates, including change management policies with AWS CloudFormation.

SID207 – Feedback Security in the Cloud
Like many security teams, Riot has been challenged by new paradigms that came with the move to the cloud. We discuss how our security team has developed a security culture based on feedback and self-service to best thrive in the cloud. We detail how the team assessed the security gaps and challenges in our move to AWS, and then describe how the team works within Riot’s unique feedback culture.

SID208 – Less (Privilege) Is More: Getting Least Privilege Right in AWS
AWS services are designed to enable control through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Join us in this chalk talk to learn how to apply these toward the security principal of least privilege for applications and data and how to practically integrate them in your security operations.

SID209 – Designing and Deploying an AWS Account Factory
AWS customers start off with one AWS account, but quickly realize the benefits of having multiple AWS accounts. A common learning curve for customers is how to securely baseline and set up new accounts at scale. This talk helps you understand how to use AWS Organizations, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS CloudFormation, and other tools to baseline new accounts, set them up for federation, and make a secure and repeatable account factory to create new AWS accounts. Walk away with demos and tools to use in your own environment.

SID210 – A CISO’s Journey at Vonage: Achieving Unified Security at Scale
Making sense of the risks of IT deployments that sit in hybrid environments and span multiple countries is a major challenge. When you add in multiple toolsets and global compliance requirements, including GDPR, it can get overwhelming. Listen to Vonage’s Chief Information Security Officer, Johan Hybinette, share his experiences tackling these challenges.

SID212 – Maximizing Your Move to AWS – Five Key Lessons from Vanguard and Cloud Technology Partners
CTP’s Robert Christiansen and Mike Kavis describe how to maximize the value of your AWS initiative. From building a Minimum Viable Cloud to establishing a cloud robust security and compliance posture, we walk through key client success stories and lessons learned. We also explore how CTP has helped Vanguard, the leading provider of investor communications and technology, take advantage of AWS to delight customers, drive new revenue streams, and transform their business.

SID213 – Managing Regulator Expectations – Lessons Learned on Positioning AWS Services from an Audit Perspective
Cloud migration in highly regulated industries can stall without a solid understanding of how (and when) to address regulatory expectations. This session provides a guide to explaining the aspects of AWS services that are most frequently the subject of an internal or regulatory audit. Because regulatory agencies and internal auditors might not share a common understanding of the cloud, this session is designed to help you to help them, regardless of their level of technical fluency.

SID214 – Best Security Practices in the Intelligence Community
Executives from the Intelligence community discuss cloud security best practices in a field where security is imperative to operations. CIA security cloud chief John Nicely and NGA security cloud chief Scot Kaplan share success stories of migrating mass data to the cloud from a security perspective. Hear how they migrated their IT portfolios while managing their organizations’ unique blend of constraints, budget issues, politics, culture, and security pressures. Learn how these institutions overcame barriers to migration, and ask these panelists what actions you can take to better prepare yourself for the journey of mass migration to the cloud.

SID216 – Defending Diverse Applications Against Common Threats
In this session, you learn how to adapt application defenses and operational responses based on your unique requirements. You also hear directly from customers about how they architected their applications on AWS to protect their applications. There are many ways to build secure, high-availability applications in the cloud. Services such as Amazon API Gateway, Amazon VPC, ALB, ELB, and Amazon EC2 are the basic building blocks that enable you to address a wide range of use cases. Best practices for defending your applications against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, exploitation attempts, and bad bots can vary with your choices in architecture.

Advanced level

SID301 – Using AWS Lambda as a Security Team
Operating a security practice on AWS brings many new challenges that haven’t been faced in data center environments. The dynamic nature of infrastructure, the relationship between development team members and their applications, and the architecture paradigms have all changed as a result of building software on top of AWS. In this session, learn how your security team can leverage AWS Lambda as a tool to monitor, audit, and enforce your security policies within an AWS environment.

SID302 – Force Multiply Your Security Team with Automation and Alexa
Adversaries automate. Who says the good guys can’t as well? By combining AWS offerings like AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Cloudwatch, AWS Config, and AWS Lambda with the power of Amazon Alexa, you can do more security tasks faster, with fewer resources. Force multiplying your security team is all about automation! Last year, we showed off penetration testing at the push of an (AWS IoT) button, and surprise-previewed how to ask Alexa to run Inspector as-needed. Want to see other ways to ask Alexa to be your cloud security sidekick? We have crazy new demos at the ready to show security geeks how to sling security automation solutions for their AWS environments (and impress and help your boss, too).

SID303 – How You Can Use AWS’s Identity Services to be Successful on Your AWS Cloud Journey
Every journey to the AWS Cloud is unique. Some customers are migrating existing applications, while others are building new applications using cloud-native services. Along each of these journeys, identity and access management helps customers protect their applications and resources. In this session, you will learn how AWS’s identity services provide you a secure, flexible, and easy solution for managing identities and access on the AWS Cloud. With AWS’’s Identity Services, you do not have to adapt to AWS. Instead, you have a choice of services designed to meet you anywhere along your journey to the AWS Cloud. Every journey to the AWS Cloud is unique. Some customers are migrating existing applications, while others are building new applications using cloud-native services.

SID304 – SecOps 2021 Today: Using AWS Services to Deliver SecOps
This talk dives deep on how to build end-to-end security capabilities using AWS. Our goal is orchestrating AWS Security services with other AWS building blocks to deliver enhanced security. We cover working with AWS CloudWatch Events as a queueing mechanism for processing security events, using Amazon DynamoDB to provide a stateful layer to provide tailored response to events and other ancillary functions, using DynamoDB as an attack signature engine, and the use of analytics to derive tailored signatures for detection with AWS Lambda.

SID305 – How CrowdStrike Built a Real-time Security Monitoring Service on AWS
The CrowdStrike motto is “We Stop Breaches.” To do that, it needed to build a real-time security monitoring service to detect threats. Join this session to learn how Crowdstrike uses Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS to help its customers identify vulnerabilities before they become large-scale problems.

SID306 – How Chick-fil-A Embraces DevSecOps on AWS
As Chick-fil-A became a cloud-first organization, their security team didn’t want to become the bottleneck for agility. But the security team also wanted to raise the bar for their security posture on AWS. Robert Davis, security architect at Chick-fil-A, provides an overview about how he and his team recognized that writing code was the best way for their security policies to scale across the many AWS accounts that Chick-fil-A operates.

SID307 – Serverless for Security Officers: Paradigm Walkthrough and Comprehensive Security Best Practices
For security practitioners, serverless represents a context switch from the familiar servers and networks to a decentralized set of code snippets and AWS platform constructs. This new ecosystem also represents new operational teams, data flows, security tooling, and faster-then-ever change velocity. In this talk, we perform live demos and provide code samples for a wide array of security best practices aligned to industry standards such as NIST 800-53 and ISO 27001.

SID308 – Multi-Account Strategies
We will explore a multi-account architecture and how to approach the design/thought process around it. This chalk talk will allow attendees to dive deep into the topic and discuss the nuances of the architecture as well as provide feedback around the approach.

SID309 – Credentials, Credentials, Credentials, Oh My!
For new and experienced customers alike, understanding the various credential forms and exchange mechanisms within AWS can be a daunting exercise. In this chalk talk, we clear up the confusion by performing a cartography exercise. We visually depict the right source credentials (for example, enterprise user name and password, IAM keys, AWS STS tokens, and so on) and transformation mechanisms (for example, AssumeRole and so on) to use depending on what you’re trying to do and where you’re coming from.

SID310 – Moving from the Shadows to the Throne
What do you do when leadership embraces what was called “shadow IT” as the new path forward? How do you onboard new accounts while simultaneously pushing policy to secure all existing accounts? This session walks through Cisco’s journey consolidating over 700 existing accounts in the Cisco organization, while building and applying Cisco’s new cloud policies.

SID311 – Designing Security and Governance Across a Multi-Account Strategy
When organizations plan their journey to cloud adoption at scale, they quickly encounter questions such as: How many accounts do we need? How do we share resources? How do we integrate with existing identity solutions? In this workshop, we present best practices and give you the hands-on opportunity to test and develop best practices. You will work in teams to set up and create an AWS environment that is enterprise-ready for application deployment and integration into existing operations, security, and procurement processes. You will get hands-on experience with cross-account roles, consolidated logging, account governance and other challenges to solve.

SID312 – DevSecOps Capture the Flag
In this Capture the Flag workshop, we divide groups into teams and work on AWS CloudFormation DevSecOps. The AWS Red Team supplies an AWS DevSecOps Policy that needs to be enforced via CloudFormation static analysis. Participant Blue Teams are provided with an AWS Lambda-based reference architecture to be used to inspect CloudFormation templates against that policy. Interesting items need to be logged, and made visible via ChatOps. Dangerous items need to be logged, and recorded accurately as a template fail. The secondary challenge is building a CloudFormation template to thwart the controls being created by the other Blue teams.

SID313 – Continuous Compliance on AWS at Scale
In cloud migrations, the cloud’s elastic nature is often touted as a critical capability in delivering on key business initiatives. However, you must account for it in your security and compliance plans or face some real challenges. Always counting on a virtual host to be running, for example, causes issues when that host is rebooted or retired. Managing security and compliance in the cloud is continuous, requiring forethought and automation. Learn how a leading, next generation managed cloud provider uses automation and cloud expertise to manage security and compliance at scale in an ever-changing environment.

SID314 – IAM Policy Ninja
Are you interested in learning how to control access to your AWS resources? Have you wondered how to best scope permissions to achieve least-privilege permissions access control? If your answer is “yes,” this session is for you. We look at the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy language, starting with the basics of the policy language and how to create and attach policies to IAM users, groups, and roles. We explore policy variables, conditions, and tools to help you author least privilege policies. We cover common use cases, such as granting a user secure access to an Amazon S3 bucket or to launch an Amazon EC2 instance of a specific type.

SID315 – Security and DevOps: Agility and Teamwork
In this session, you learn pragmatic steps to integrate security controls into DevOps processes in your AWS environment at scale. Cybersecurity expert and founder of Alert Logic Misha Govshteyn shares insights from high performing teams who are embracing the reality that an agile security program can enable faster and more secure workload deployments. Joining Misha is Joey Peloquin, Director of Cloud Security Operations at Citrix, who discusses Citrix’s DevOps experiences and how they manage their cybersecurity posture within the AWS Cloud. Session sponsored by Alert Logic.

SID316 – Using Access Advisor to Strike the Balance Between Security and Usability
AWS provides a killer feature for security operations teams: Access Advisor. In this session, we discuss how Access Advisor shows the services to which an IAM policy grants access and provides a timestamp for the last time that the role authenticated against that service. At Netflix, we use this valuable data to automatically remove permissions that are no longer used. By continually removing excess permissions, we can achieve a balance of empowering developers and maintaining a best-practice, secure environment.

SID317 – Automating Security and Compliance Testing of Infrastructure-as-Code for DevSecOps
Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) has emerged as an essential element of organizational DevOps practices. Tools such as AWS CloudFormation and Terraform allow software-defined infrastructure to be deployed quickly and repeatably to AWS. But the agility of CI/CD pipelines also creates new challenges in infrastructure security hardening. This session provides a foundation for how to bring proven software hardening practices into the world of infrastructure deployment. We discuss how to build security and compliance tests for infrastructure analogous to unit tests for application code, and showcase how security, compliance and governance testing fit in a modern CI/CD pipeline.

SID318 – From Obstacle to Advantage: The Changing Role of Security & Compliance in Your Organization
A surprising trend is starting to emerge among organizations who are progressing through the cloud maturity lifecycle: major improvements in revenue growth, customer satisfaction, and mission success are being directly attributed to improvements in security and compliance. At one time thought of as speed bumps in the path to deployment, security and compliance are now seen as critical ingredients that help organizations differentiate their offerings in the market, win more deals, and achieve mission-critical goals faster. This session explores how organizations like Jive Software and the National Geospatial Agency use the Evident Security Platform, AWS, and AWS Quick Starts to automate security and compliance processes in their organization to accomplish more, do it faster, and deliver better results.

SID319 – Incident Response in the Cloud
In this session, we walk you through a hypothetical incident response managed on AWS. Learn how to apply existing best practices as well as how to leverage the unique security visibility, control, and automation that AWS provides. We cover how to set up your AWS environment to prevent a security event and how to build a cloud-specific incident response plan so that your organization is prepared before a security event occurs. This session also covers specific environment recovery steps available on AWS.

SID320 – Fraud Prevention, Detection, Lessons Learned, and Best Practices
Fighting fraud means countering human actors that quickly adapt to whatever you do to stop them. In this presentation, we discuss the key components of a fraud prevention program in the cloud. Additionally, we provide techniques for detecting known and unknown fraud activity and explore different strategies for effectively preventing detected patterns. Finally, we discuss lessons learned from our own prevention activities as well as the best practices that you can apply to manage risk.

SID321 – How Capital One Applies AWS Organizations Best Practices to Manage Multiple AWS Accounts
In this session, we review best practices for managing multiple AWS accounts using AWS Organizations. We cover how to think about the master account and your account strategy, as well as how to roll out changes. You learn how Capital One applies these best practices to manage its AWS accounts, which number over 160, and PCI workloads.

SID322 – The AWS Philosophy of Security
AWS distinguished engineer Eric Brandwine speaks with hundreds of customers each year, and noticed one question coming up more than any other, “How does AWS operationalize its own security?” In this session, Eric details both strategic and tactical considerations, along with an insider’s look at AWS tooling and processes.

SID324 – Automating DDoS Response in the Cloud
If left unmitigated, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have the potential to harm application availability or impair application performance. DDoS attacks can also act as a smoke screen for intrusion attempts or as a harbinger for attacks against non-cloud infrastructure. Accordingly, it’s crucial that developers architect for DDoS resiliency and maintain robust operational capabilities that allow for rapid detection and engagement during high-severity events. In this session, you learn how to build a DDoS-resilient application and how to use services like AWS Shield and Amazon CloudWatch to defend against DDoS attacks and automate response to attacks in progress.

SID325 – Amazon Macie: Data Visibility Powered by Machine Learning for Security and Compliance Workloads
In this session, Edmunds discusses how they create workflows to manage their regulated workloads with Amazon Macie, a newly-released security and compliance management service that leverages machine learning to classify your sensitive data and business-critical information. Amazon Macie uses recurrent neural networks (RNN) to identify and alert potential misuse of intellectual property. They do a deep dive into machine learning within the security ecosystem.

SID326 – AWS Security State of the Union
Steve Schmidt, chief information security officer at AWS, addresses the current state of security in the cloud, with a particular focus on feature updates, the AWS internal “secret sauce,” and what’s on horizon in terms of security, identity, and compliance tooling.

SID327 – How Zocdoc Achieved Security and Compliance at Scale With Infrastructure as Code
In less than 12 months, Zocdoc became a cloud-first organization, diversifying their tech stack and liberating data to help drive rapid product innovation. Brian Lozada, CISO at Zocdoc, and Zhen Wang, Director of Engineering, provide an overview on how their teams recognized that infrastructure as code was the most effective approach for their security policies to scale across their AWS infrastructure. They leveraged tools such as AWS CloudFormation, hardened AMIs, and hardened containers. The use of DevSecOps within Zocdoc has enhanced data protection with the use of AWS services such as AWS KMS and AWS CloudHSM and auditing capabilities, and event-based policy enforcement with Amazon Elasticsearch Service and Amazon CloudWatch, all built on top of AWS.

SID328 – Cloud Adoption in Regulated Financial Services
Macquarie, a global provider of financial services, identified early on that it would require strong partnership between its business, technology and risk teams to enable the rapid adoption of AWS cloud technologies. As a result, Macquarie built a Cloud Governance Platform to enable its risk functions to move as quickly as its development teams. This platform has been the backbone of Macquarie’s adoption of AWS over the past two years and has enabled Macquarie to accelerate its use of cloud technologies for the benefit of clients across multiple global markets. This talk will outline the strategy that Macquarie embarked on, describe the platform they built, and provide examples of other organizations who are on a similar journey.

SID329 – A Deep Dive into AWS Encryption Services
AWS Encryption Services provide an easy and cost-effective way to protect your data in AWS. In this session, you learn about leveraging the latest encryption management features to minimize risk for your data.

SID330 – Best Practices for Implementing Your Encryption Strategy Using AWS Key Management Service
AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and manage the encryption keys used to encrypt your data. In this session, we will dive deep into best practices learned by implementing AWS KMS at AWS’s largest enterprise clients. We will review the different capabilities described in the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) Security Perspective and how to implement these recommendations using AWS KMS. In addition to sharing recommendations, we will also provide examples that will help you protect sensitive information on the AWS Cloud.

SID331 – Architecting Security and Governance Across a Multi-Account Strategy
Whether it is per business unit or per application, many AWS customers use multiple accounts to meet their infrastructure isolation, separation of duties, and billing requirements. In this session, we discuss considerations, limitations, and security patterns when building out a multi-account strategy. We explore topics such as identity federation, cross-account roles, consolidated logging, and account governance. Thomson Reuters shared their journey and their approach to a multi-account strategy. At the end of the session, we present an enterprise-ready, multi-account architecture that you can start leveraging today.

SID332 – Identity Management for Your Users and Apps: A Deep Dive on Amazon Cognito
Learn how to set up an end-user directory, secure sign-up and sign-in, manage user profiles, authenticate and authorize your APIs, federate from enterprise and social identity providers, and use OAuth to integrate with your app—all without any server setup or code. With clear blueprints, we show you how to leverage Amazon Cognito to administer and secure your end users and enable identity for the applied patterns of mobile, web, and enterprise apps.

SID333 – Security at Scale: How Autodesk Leverages Native AWS Technologies to Provide Uniformly Scalable Security Capabilities
Learn how Autodesk implemented security at scale, moved to native AWS security products and features, as well as attained SOC certification.

SID334 – How Amazon Business Uses Amazon Cloud Directory as the Data Store for Its Account Management Platform
Join the Amazon Business team to learn how it uses Amazon Cloud Directory as the data store for its account management platform. You will learn how Amazon Business uses Amazon DynamoDB with Cloud Directory to manage user authorization and business process workflows. You also will learn how Cloud Directory helps to manage hierarchical datasets and how to get started modeling these datasets in Cloud Directory.

SID335 – Implementing Security and Governance across a Multi-Account Strategy
As existing or new organizations expand their AWS footprint, managing multiple accounts while maintaining security quickly becomes a challenge. In this chalk talk, we will demonstrate how AWS Organizations, IAM roles, identity federation, and cross-account manager can be combined to build a scalable multi-account management platform. By the end of this session, attendees will have the understanding and deployment patterns to bring a secure, flexible and automated multi-account management platform to their organizations.

SID336 – Use AWS to Effectively Manage GDPR Compliance
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is considered to be the most stringent privacy regulation ever enacted. Complying with GDPR could be a challenge for organizations, and AWS services can help get you ahead of the May 2018 enforcement deadline. In this chalk talk, the Legal and Compliance GDPR leadership at AWS discusses what enforcement of GDPR might mean for you and your customer’s compliance programs.

SID337 – Best Practices for Managing Access to AWS Resources Using IAM Roles
In this chalk talk, we discuss why using temporary security credentials to manage access to your AWS resources is an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practice. IAM roles help you follow this best practice by delivering and rotating temporary credentials automatically. We discuss the different types of IAM roles, the assume role functionality, and how to author fine-grained trust and access policies that limit the scope of IAM roles. We then show you how to attach IAM roles to your AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances and AWS Lambda functions. We also discuss migrating applications that use long-term AWS access keys to temporary credentials managed by IAM roles.

SID338 – [email protected]
Once a customer achieves success with using AWS in a few pilot projects, most look to rapidly adopt an “all-in” enterprise migration strategy. Along this journey, several new challenges emerge that quickly become blockers and slow down migrations if they are not addressed properly. At this scale, customers will deal with the governance of hundreds of accounts, as well as thousands of IT resources residing within those accounts. Humans and traditional IT management processes cannot scale at the same pace and inevitably challenging questions emerge. In this session, we discuss those questions about governance at scale.

SID339 – Deep Dive on AWS CloudHSM
Organizations building applications that handle confidential or sensitive data are subject to many types of regulatory requirements and often rely on hardware security modules (HSMs) to provide validated control of encryption keys and cryptographic operations. AWS CloudHSM is a cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) that enables you to easily generate and use your own encryption keys on the AWS Cloud using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated HSMs. This chalk talk will provide you a deep-dive on CloudHSM, and demonstrate how you can quickly and easily use CloudHSM to help secure your data and meet your compliance requirements.

SID340 – Using Infrastructure as Code to Inject Security Best Practices as Part of the Software Deployment Lifecycle
A proactive approach to security is key to securing your applications as part of software deployment. In this chalk talk, T. Rowe Price, a financial asset management institution, outlines how they built their security automation process in enabling their numerous developer teams to rapidly and securely build and deploy applications at scale on AWS. Learn how they use services like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), HashiCorp tools, Terraform for automation, and Vault for secrets management, and incorporate certificate management and monitoring as part of the deployment process. T. Rowe Price discusses lessons learned and best practices to move from a tightly controlled legacy environment to an agile, automated software development process on AWS.

SID341 – Using AWS CloudTrail Logs for Scalable, Automated Anomaly Detection
This workshop gives you an opportunity to develop a solution that can continuously monitor for and detect a realistic threat by analyzing AWS CloudTrail log data. Participants are provided with a CloudTrail data source and some clues to get started. Then you have to design a system that can process the logs, detect the threat, and trigger an alarm. You can make use of any AWS services that can assist in this endeavor, such as AWS Lambda for serverless detection logic, Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon SNS for alarming and notification, Amazon S3 for data and configuration storage, and more.

SID342 – Protect Your Web Applications from Common Attack Vectors Using AWS WAF
As attacks and attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in web applications become more sophisticated, having an effective web request filtering solution becomes key to keeping your users’ data safe. In this workshop, discover how the OWASP Top 10 list of application security risks can help you secure your web applications. Learn how to use AWS services, such as AWS WAF, to mitigate vulnerabilities. This session includes hands-on labs to help you build a solution. Key learning goals include understanding the breadth and complexity of vulnerabilities customers need to protect from, understanding the AWS tools and capabilities that can help mitigate vulnerabilities, and learning how to configure effective HTTP request filtering rules using AWS WAF.

SID343 – User Management and App Authentication with Amazon Cognito
Are you curious about how to authenticate and authorize your applications on AWS? Have you thought about how to integrate AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) with your app authentication? Have you tried to integrate third-party SAML providers with your app authentication? Look no further. This workshop walks you through step by step to configure and create Amazon Cognito user pools and identity pools. This workshop presents you with the framework to build an application using Java, .NET, and serverless. You choose the stack and build the app with local users. See the service being used not only with mobile applications but with other stacks that normally don’t include Amazon Cognito.

SID344 – Soup to Nuts: Identity Federation for AWS
AWS offers customers multiple solutions for federating identities on the AWS Cloud. In this session, we will embark on a tour of these solutions and the use cases they support. Along the way, we will dive deep with demonstrations and best practices to help you be successful managing identities on the AWS Cloud. We will cover how and when to use Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML), OpenID Connect (OIDC), and other AWS native federation mechanisms. You will learn how these solutions enable federated access to the AWS Management Console, APIs, and CLI, AWS Infrastructure and Managed Services, your web and mobile applications running on the AWS Cloud, and much more.

SID345 – AWS Encryption SDK: The Busy Engineer’s Guide to Client-Side Encryption
You know you want client-side encryption for your service but you don’t know exactly where to start. Join us for a hands-on workshop where we review some of your client-side encryption options and explore implementing client-side encryption using the AWS Encryption SDK. In this session, we cover the basics of client-side encryption, perform encrypt and decrypt operations using AWS KMS and the AWS Encryption SDK, and discuss security and performance considerations when implementing client-side encryption in your service.

Expert level

SID401 – Let’s Dive Deep Together: Advancing Web Application Security
Beginning with a recap of best practices in CloudFront, AWS WAF, Route 53, and Amazon VPC security, we break into small teams to work together on improving the security of a typical web application. How can we creatively use the services? What additional features would help us? This technically advanced chalk talk requires certification at the solutions architect associate level or greater.

SID402 – An AWS Security Odyssey: Implementing Security Controls in the World of Internet, Big Data, IoT and E-Commerce Platforms
This workshop will give participants the opportunity to take a security-focused journey across various AWS services and implement automated controls along the way. You will learn how to apply AWS security controls to services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, and Amazon VPC. In short, you will learn how to use the cloud to protect the cloud. We will talk about how to: Adopt a workload-centric approach to your security strategy, Address security issues in a cost-effective manner Automate your security responses to promote maturity and auditability. In order to complete this workshop, attendees will need a laptop with wireless access, an AWS account and an IAM user that has full administrative privileges within their account. AWS credits will be provided as attendees depart the session to cover the cost of running the workshop in their own account.

SID404 – Amazon Inspector – Automating the “Sec” in DevSecOps
Adopting DevSecOps can be challenging using traditional security tools that are designed for on-premises infrastructure. Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps you adopt DevSecOps by integrating security assessments directly into the development process of applications running on Amazon EC2. We dive deep on how to use Inspector to automate host security assessments. We show you how to integrate Inspector with other AWS Cloud services to provide automated security assessments throughout your development process. We demo installing the AWS agent, setting up assessment targets and templates, and running assessments. We review the findings and discuss how you can automate the management and remediation of those findings with your available AWS services.

SID405 – Five New Security Automation Improvements You Can Make by Using Amazon CloudWatch Events and AWS Config Rules
This presentation will include a deep dive into the code behind multiple security automation and remediation functions. This session will consider potential use cases, as well as feature a demonstration of a proposed script, and then walk through the code set to explain the various challenges and solutions of the intended script. All examples of code will be previously unreleased and will feature integration with services such as Trusted Advisor and Macie. All code will be released as OSS after re:Invent.

– Craig

Noise

Tag Archives: auditing

On Financial Fraud

Securing Elections

coWPAtty Download – Audit Pre-shared WPA Keys

In the Works – AWS IoT Device Defender – Secure Your IoT Fleet

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