Tag Archives: auditing

On Financial Fraud

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.

Securing Elections

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.

Dolby Labs Sues Adobe For Copyright Infringement

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/dolby-labs-sues-adobe-for-copyright-infringement-180314/

Adobe has some of the most recognized software products on the market today, including Photoshop which has become a household name.

While the company has been subjected to more than its fair share of piracy over the years, a new lawsuit accuses the software giant itself of infringement.

Dolby Laboratories is best known as a company specializing in noise reduction and audio encoding and compression technologies. Its reversed double ‘D’ logo is widely recognized after appearing on millions of home hi-fi systems and film end credits.

In a complaint filed this week at a federal court in California, Dolby Labs alleges that after supplying its products to Adobe for 15 years, the latter has failed to live up to its licensing obligations and is guilty of copyright infringement and breach of contract.

“Between 2002 and 2017, Adobe designed and sold its audio-video content creation and editing software with Dolby’s industry-leading audio processing technologies,” Dolby’s complaint reads.

“The basic terms of Adobe’s licenses for products containing Dolby technologies are clear; when Adobe granted its customer a license to any Adobe product that contained Dolby technology, Adobe was contractually obligated to report the sale to Dolby and pay the agreed-upon royalty.”

Dolby says that Adobe promised it wouldn’t sell its any of its products (such as Audition, After Effects, Encore, Lightroom, and Premiere Pro) outside the scope of its licenses with Dolby. Those licenses included clauses which grant Dolby the right to inspect Adobe’s records through a third-party audit, in order to verify the accuracy of Adobe’s sales reporting and associated payment of royalties.

Over the past several years, however, things didn’t go to plan. The lawsuit claims that when Dolby tried to audit Adobe’s books, Adobe refused to “engage in even basic auditing and information sharing practices,” a rather ironic situation given the demands that Adobe places on its own licensees.

Dolby’s assessment is that Adobe spent years withholding this information in an effort to hide the full scale of its non-compliance.

“The limited information that Dolby has reviewed to-date demonstrates that Adobe included Dolby technologies in numerous Adobe software products and collections of products, but refused to report each sale or pay the agreed-upon royalties owed to Dolby,” the lawsuit claims.

Due to the lack of information in Dolby’s possession, the company says it cannot determine the full scope of Adobe’s infringement. However, Dolby accuses Adobe of multiple breaches including bundling licensed products together but only reporting one sale, selling multiple products to one customer but only paying a single license, failing to pay licenses on product upgrades, and even selling products containing Dolby technology without paying a license at all.

Dolby entered into licensing agreements with Adobe in 2003, 2012 and 2013, with each agreement detailing payment of royalties by Adobe to Dolby for each product licensed to Adobe’s customers containing Dolby technology. In the early days when the relationship between the companies first began, Adobe sold either a physical product in “shrink-wrap” form or downloads from its website, a position which made reporting very easy.

In late 2011, however, Adobe began its transition to offering its Creative Cloud (SaaS model) under which customers purchase a subscription to access Adobe software, some of which contains Dolby technology. Depending on how much the customer pays, users can select up to thirty Adobe products. At this point, things appear to have become much more complex.

On January 15, 2015, Dolby tried to inspect Adobe’s books for the period 2012-2014 via a third-party auditing firm. But, according to Dolby, over the next three years “Adobe employed various tactics to frustrate Dolby’s right to audit Adobe’s inclusion of Dolby Technologies in Adobe’s products.”

Dolby points out that under Adobe’s own licensing conditions, businesses must allow Adobe’s auditors to allow the company to inspect their records on seven days’ notice to confirm they are not in breach of Adobe licensing terms. Any discovered shortfalls in licensing must then be paid for, at a rate higher than the original license. This, Dolby says, shows that Adobe is clearly aware of why and how auditing takes place.

“After more than three years of attempting to audit Adobe’s Sales of products containing Dolby Technologies, Dolby still has not received the information required to complete an audit for the full time period,” Dolby explains.

But during this period, Adobe didn’t stand still. According to Dolby, Adobe tried to obtain new licensing from Dolby at a lower price. Dolby stood its ground and insisted on an audit first but despite an official demand, Adobe didn’t provide the complete set of books and records requested.

Eventually, Dolby concluded that Adobe had “no intention to fully comply with its audit obligations” so called in its lawyers to deal with the matter.

“Adobe’s direct and induced infringements of Dolby Licensing’s copyrights in the Asserted Dolby Works are and have been knowing, deliberate, and willful. By its unauthorized copying, use, and distribution of the Asserted Dolby Works and the Adobe Infringing Products, Adobe has violated Dolby Licensing’s exclusive rights..,” the lawsuit reads.

Noting that Adobe has profited and gained a commercial advantage as a result of its alleged infringement, Dolby demands injunctive relief restraining the company from any further breaches in violation of US copyright law.

“Dolby now brings this action to protect its intellectual property, maintain fairness across its licensing partnerships, and to fund the next generations of technology that empower the creative community which Dolby serves,” the company concludes.

Dolby’s full complaint can be found here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN discounts, offers and coupons

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

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:

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

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

  1. On the scheduling page, for Frequency, choose Run on demand.
  2. 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.)
  3. Follow the remaining steps using the default values to create a crawler.

  1. 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.

  1. (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

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

Option 2: From the AWS CLI

  1. 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"
    }
  }
]

 

  1. 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_90
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

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

Features

Engine Versions & Features

Regional Support

Instance Support

Price Reductions

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

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

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

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

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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?”
  3. 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.
  4. Service Organization Controls (SOC) 3 Report – This publicly available report describes internal AWS security controls, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
  5. 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.
  6. AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency – This whitepaper covers techniques to mitigate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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

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 Download – Audit Pre-shared WPA Keys

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

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.

 

 

 

 

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

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.

Diagram of ComputerSchema in Published state and applied to three directories

Legend for the diagrams in this post

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.

Diagram showing that 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.

Diagram of the in-place schema upgrade for the SeattleDirectory directory

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.

Diagram showing the changes that are made with an in-place schema upgrade in the two remaining directories

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

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

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

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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:

  1. Take Amazon EBS snapshots using Amazon EBS Snapshot Scheduler to automate snapshots based on instance tags.
  2. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. 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:

  1. Navigate to your EC2 instance in the EC2 console and choose Tags in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose Add/Edit Tags and then choose Create Tag to add all the tags specified in the preceding table.
  3. 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.
    Screenshot of how your EC2 instance should look in the console
  4. After waiting a couple of hours, you can see snapshots beginning to populate on the Snapshots page of the EC2 console.Screenshot of snapshots beginning to populate on the Snapshots page of the EC2 console
  5. 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.Screenshot of checking to see if EBS Snapshot Scheduler is active
  1. 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.Screenshot of monitoring when EBS Snapshot Scheduler has run by choosing the name of the CloudWatch 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.

  1. Choose Run Command under Systems Manager Services in the navigation pane of the EC2 console. Then choose Run a command.
    Screenshot of choosing "Run a command"
  2. 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.
    Screenshot of installing the Amazon Inspector agent
  3. 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.
    Screenshot showing that 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:

  1. In the AWS Management Console, choose Simple Notification Service under Messaging in the Services menu.
  2. 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.
    "Create new topic" page
  3. To allow Amazon Inspector to publish messages to your new topic, choose Other topic actions and choose Edit topic policy.
  4. 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.
    Screenshot of editing the topic policy
  5. 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.
    Screenshot of subscribing to the new 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
    Screenshot of creating an IAM service role for Amazon Inspector
  3. 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.
    Screenshot of defining the Amazon Inspector target
  4. 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.
    Screenshot of defining an assessment template
  5. 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).
    Screenshot of choosing an assessment template
  6. 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).
    Screenshot of choosing the previously created topic and the events about which you want SNS to notify you

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.

Image of Cron schedule

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:

  1. Navigate to the CloudWatch console, choose Events, and choose Create rule.
    Screenshot of starting to create a rule in the CloudWatch Events console
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
    Screenshot of scheduling an Amazon Inspector assessment with a Cron expression
  4. 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.
    Screenshot of adding a target
  5. 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.
  6. Finish the wizard by choosing Create rule. The rule should appear in the Events – Rules section of the CloudWatch console.
    Screenshot of completing the creation of the rule
  7. 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.
    Screenshot of confirming the CloudWatch Events rule works
  8. 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.
    Screenshot of confirming the launch of the first assessment run

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

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!