Sometimes I hear from tech leads that they would like to improve visibility and governance over their generative artificial intelligence applications. How do you monitor and govern the usage and generation of data to address issues regarding security, resilience, privacy, and accuracy or to validate against best practices of responsible AI, among other things? Beyond simply taking these into account during the implementation phase, how do you maintain long-term observability and carry out compliance checks throughout the software’s lifecycle?
Today, we are launching an update to the AWS Audit Manager generative AI best practice framework on AWS Audit Manager. This framework simplifies evidence collection and enables you to continually audit and monitor the compliance posture of your generative AI workloads through 110 standard controls which are pre-configured to implement best practice requirements. Some examples include gaining visibility into potential personally identifiable information (PII) data that may not have been anonymized before being used for training models, validating that multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enforced to gain access to any datasets used, and periodically testing backup versions of customized models to ensure they are reliable before a system outage, among many others. These controls perform their tasks by fetching compliance checks from AWS Config and AWS Security Hub, gathering user activity logs from AWS CloudTrail and capturing configuration data by making application programming interface (API) calls to relevant AWS services. You can also create your own custom controls if you need that level of flexibility.
Previously, the standard controls included with v1 were pre-configured to work with Amazon Bedrock and now, with this new version, Amazon SageMaker is also included as a data source so you may gain tighter control and visibility of your generative AI workloads on both Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker with less effort.
Enforcing best practices for generative AI workloads The standard controls included in the “AWS generative AI best practices framework v2” are organized under domains named accuracy, fair, privacy, resilience, responsible, safe, secure and sustainable.
Controls may perform automated or manual checks or a mix of both. For example, there is a control which covers the enforcement of periodic reviews of a model’s accuracy over time. It automatically retrieves a list of relevant models by calling the Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker APIs, but then it requires manual evidence to be uploaded at certain times showing that a review has been conducted for each of them.
You can also customize the framework by including or excluding controls or customizing the pre-defined ones. This can be really helpful when you need to tailor the framework to meet regulations in different countries or update them as they change over time. You can even create your own controls from scratch though I would recommend you search the Audit Manager control library first for something that may be suitable or close enough to be used as a starting point as it could save you some time.
The control library where you can browse and search for common, standard and custom controls.
To get started you first need to create an assessment. Let’s walk through this process.
Step 1 – Assessment Details Start by navigating to Audit Manager in the AWS Management Console and choose “Assessments”. Choose “Create assessment”; this takes you to the set up process.
Give your assessment a name. You can also add a description if you desire.
Choose a name for this assessment and optionally add a description.
Next, pick an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket where Audit Manager stores the assessment reports it generates. Note that you don’t have to select a bucket in the same AWS Region as the assessment, however, it is recommended since your assessment can collect up to 22,000 evidence items if you do so, whereas if you use a cross-Region bucket then that quota is significantly reduced to 3,500 items.
Choose the S3 bucket where AWS Audit Manager can store reports.
Next, we need to pick the framework we want to use. A framework effectively works as a template enabling all of its controls for use in your assessment.
In this case, we want to use the “AWS generative AI best practices framework v2” framework. Use the search box and click on the matched result that pops up to activate the filter.
Use the search box to find the “AWS generative AI best practices framework V2”
You then should see the framework’s card appear .You can choose the framework’s title, if you wish, to learn more about it and browse through all the included controls.
Select it by choosing the radio button in the card.
Check the radio button to select the framework.
You now have an opportunity to tag your assessment. Like any other resources, I recommend you tag this with meaningful metadata so review Best Practices for Tagging AWS Resources if you need some guidance.
Step 2 – Specify AWS accounts in scope This screen is quite straight-forward. Just pick the AWS accounts that you want to be continuously evaluated by the controls in your assessment. It displays the AWS account that you are currently using, by default. Audit Manager does support running assessments against multiple accounts and consolidating the report into one AWS account, however, you must explicitly enable integration with AWS Organizations first, if you would like to use that feature.
Select the AWS accounts that you want to include in your assessment.
I select my own account as listed and choose “Next”
Step 3 – Specify audit owners Now we just need to select IAM users who should have full permissions to use and manage this assessment. It’s as simple as it sounds. Pick from a list of identity and access management (IAM) users or roles available or search using the box. It’s recommended that you use the AWSAuditManagerAdministratorAccess policy.
You must select at least one, even if it’s yourself which is what I do here.
Select IAM users or roles who will have full permissions over this assessment and act as owners.
Step 4 – Review and create All that is left to do now is review your choices and click on “Create assessment” to complete the process.
Once the assessment is created, Audit Manager starts collecting evidence in the selected AWS accounts and you start generating reports as well as surfacing any non-compliant resources in the summary screen. Keep in mind that it may take up to 24 hours for the first evaluation to show up.
You can visit the assessment details screen at any time to inspect the status for any of the controls.
Conclusion The “AWS generative AI best practices framework v2” is available today in the AWS Audit Manager framework library in all AWS Regions where Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker are available.
You can check whether Audit Manager is available in your preferred Region by visiting AWS Services by Region.
Today, I am happy to announce in preview the generative artificial intelligence (generative AI)–powered natural language query generation in AWS CloudTrail Lake, which is a managed data lake for capturing, storing, accessing, and analyzing AWS CloudTrail activity logs to meet compliance, security, and operational needs. You can ask a question using natural language about these activity logs (management and data events) stored in CloudTrail Lake without having the technical expertise to write a SQL query or spend time to decode the exact structure of activity events. For example, you might ask, “Tell me how many database instances are deleted without a snapshot”, and the feature will convert that question to a CloudTrail Lake query, which you can run as-is or modify to get the requested event information. Natural language query generation makes the process of exploration of AWS activity logs simpler.
Now, let me show you how to start using natural language query generation.
Getting started with natural language query generation The natural language query generator uses generative AI to produce a ready-to-use SQL query from your prompt, which you can then choose to run in the query editor of CloudTrail Lake.
In the AWS CloudTrail console, I choose Query under Lake. The query generator can only generate queries for event data stores that collect CloudTrail management and data events. I choose an event data store for my CloudTrail Lake query from the dropdown list in Event data store. In the Query generator, I enter the following prompt in the Prompt field using natural language:
How many errors were logged during the past month?
Then, I choose Generate query. The following SQL query is automatically generated:
SELECT COUNT(*) AS error_count
FROM 8a6***
WHERE eventtime >= '2024-04-21 00:00:00'
AND eventtime <= '2024-05-21 23:59:59'
AND (
errorcode IS NOT NULL
OR errormessage IS NOT NULL
)
I choose Run to see the results.
This is interesting, but I want to know more details. I want to see which services had the most errors and why these actions were erroring out. So I enter the following prompt to request additional details:
How many errors were logged during the past month for each service and what was the cause of each error?
I choose Generate query, and the following SQL query is generated:
SELECT eventsource,
errorcode,
errormessage,
COUNT(*) AS errorCount
FROM 8a6***
WHERE eventtime >= '2024-04-21 00:00:00'
AND eventtime <= '2024-05-21 23:59:59'
AND (
errorcode IS NOT NULL
OR errormessage IS NOT NULL
)
GROUP BY 1,
2,
3
ORDER BY 4 DESC;
I choose Run to see the results.
In the results, I see that my account experiences most number of errors related to Amazon S3, and top errors are related to CORS and object level configuration. I can continue to dig deeper to see more details by asking further questions. But now let me give natural language query generator another instruction. I enter the following prompt in the Prompt field:
What are the top 10 AWS services that I used in the past month? Include event name as well.
I choose Generate query, and the following SQL query is generated. This SQL statement retrieves the field names (eventSource, eventName, COUNT(*) AS event_count), restricts the rows with the date interval of the past month in the WHERE clause, groups the rows by eventSource and eventName, sorts them by the usage count, and limit the result to 10 rows as I requested in a natural language.
SELECT eventSource,
eventName,
COUNT(*) AS event_count
FROM 8a6***
WHERE eventTime >= timestamp '2024-04-21 00:00:00'
AND eventTime <= timestamp '2024-05-21 23:59:59'
GROUP BY 1,
2
ORDER BY 3 DESC
LIMIT 10;
Again, I choose Run to see the results.
I now have a better understanding of how many errors were logged during the past month, what service the error was for, and what caused the error. You can try asking questions in plain language and run the generated queries over your logs to see how this feature works with your data.
Join the preview Natural language query generation is available in preview in the US East (N. Virginia) Region as part of CloudTrail Lake.
You can use natural language query generation in preview for no additional cost. CloudTrail Lake query charges apply when running the query to generate results. For more information, visit AWS CloudTrail Pricing.
Now, you can continuously evaluate new objects uploaded to S3 buckets for malware and take action to isolate or eliminate any malware found. Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection uses multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) developed and industry-leading third-party malware scanning engines to provide malware detection without degrading the scale, latency, and resiliency profile of Amazon S3.
With GuardDuty Malware Protection for Amazon S3, you can use built-in malware and antivirus protection on your designated S3 buckets to help you remove the operational complexity and cost overhead associated with automating malicious file evaluation at scale. Unlike many existing tools used for malware analysis, this managed solution from GuardDuty does not require you to manage your own isolated data pipelines or compute infrastructure in each AWS account and AWS Region where you want to perform malware analysis.
Your development and security teams can work together to configure and oversee malware protection throughout your organization for select buckets where new uploaded data from untrusted entities is required to be scanned for malware. You can configure post-scan action in GuardDuty, such as object tagging, to inform downstream processing, or consume the scan status information provided through Amazon EventBridge to implement isolation of malicious uploaded objects.
Getting started with GuardDuty Malware Protection for your S3 bucket To get started, in the GuardDuty console, select Malware Protection for S3 and choose Enable.
Enter the S3 bucket name or choose Browse S3 to select an S3 bucket name from a list of buckets that belong to the currently selected Region. You can select All the objects in the S3 bucket when you want GuardDuty to scan all the newly uploaded objects in the selected bucket. Or you can also select Objects beginning with a specific prefix when you want to scan the newly uploaded objects that belong to a specific prefix.
After scanning a newly uploaded S3 object, GuardDuty can add a predefined tag with the key as GuardDutyMalwareScanStatus and the value as the scan status:
NO_THREATS_FOUND – No threat found in the scanned object.
THREATS_FOUND – Potential threat detected during scan.
UNSUPPORTED – GuardDuty cannot scan this object because of size.
When you want GuardDuty to add tags to your scanned S3 objects, select Tag objects. If you use tags, you can create policies to prevent objects from being accessed before the malware scan completes and prevent your application from accessing malicious objects.
EventBridge actions to create and manage the EventBridge managed rule so that Malware Protection for S3 can listen to your S3 Event Notifications.
Amazon S3 and EventBridge actions to send S3 Event Notifications to EventBridge for all events in this bucket.
Amazon S3 actions to access the uploaded S3 object and add a predefined tag to the scanned S3 object.
AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key actions to access the object before scanning and putting a test object on buckets with the supported DSSE-KMS and SSE-KMS
To add these permissions, choose View permissions and copy the policy template and trust relationship template. These templates include placeholder values that you should replace with the appropriate values associated with your bucket and AWS account. You should also replace the placeholder value for the AWS KMS key ID.
Now, choose Attach permissions, which opens the IAM console in a new tab. You can choose to create a new IAM role or update an existing IAM role with the permissions from the copied templates. If you want to create or update your IAM role in advance, visit Prerequisite – Create or update IAM PassRole policy in the AWS documentation.
Finally, go back to the GuardDuty browser tab that has the IAM console open, choose your created or updated IAM role, and choose Enable.
Now, you will see Active in the protection Status column for this protected bucket.
Choose View all S3 malware findings to see the generated GuardDuty findings associated with your scanned S3 bucket. If you see the finding type S3Object:S3/MaliciousFile, GuardDuty has detected the listed S3 object as malicious. Choose the Threats detected section in the Findings details panel and follow the recommended remediation steps. To learn more, visit Remediating a potentially malicious S3 object in the AWS documentation.
Things to know You can set up GuardDuty Malware Protection for your S3 buckets even without GuardDuty enabled for your AWS account. However, if you enable GuardDuty in your account, you can use the full monitoring of foundational sources, such as AWS CloudTrail management events, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Flow Logs, and DNS query logs, as well as malware protection features. You can also have security findings sent to AWS Security Hub and Amazon Detective for further investigation.
GuardDuty can scan files belonging to the following synchronous Amazon S3 storage classes: S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, S3 One Zone-IA, and Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval. It will scan the file formats known to be used to spread or contain malware. At the launch, the feature supports file sizes up to 5 GB, including archive files with up to five levels and 1,000 files per level after it is decompressed.
As I said, GuardDuty will send scan metrics to your EventBridge for each protected S3 bucket. You can set up alarms and define post-scan actions, such as tagging the object or moving the malicious object to a quarantine bucket. To learn more about other monitoring options, such as Amazon CloudWatch metrics and S3 object tagging, visit Monitoring S3 object scan status in the AWS documentation.
Now available Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection for Amazon S3 is generally available today in all AWS Regions where GuardDuty is available, excluding China Regions and GovCloud (US) Regions.
The pricing is based on the GB volume of the objects scanned and number of objects evaluated per month. This feature comes with a limited AWS Free Tier, which includes 1,000 requests and 1 GB each month, pursuant to conditions for the first 12 months of account creation for new AWS accounts, or until June 11, 2025, for existing AWS accounts. To learn more, visit the Amazon GuardDuty pricing page.
We are making IAM Access Analyzer even more powerful, extending custom policy checks and adding easy access to guidance that will help you to fine-tune your IAM policies. Both of these new features build on the Custom Policy Checks and the Unused Access analysis that were launched at re:Invent 2023. Here’s what we are launching:
New Custom Policy Checks – Using the power of automated reasoning, the new checks help you to detect policies that grant access to specific, critical AWS resources, or that grant any type of public access. Both of the checks are designed to be used ahead of deployment, possibly as part of your CI/CD pipeline, and will help you proactively detect updates that do not conform to your organization’s security practices and policies.
Guided Revocation – IAM Access Analyzer now gives you guidance that you can share with your developers so that they can revoke permissions that grant access that is not actually needed. This includes unused roles, roles with unused permissions, unused access keys for IAM users, and unused passwords for IAM users. The guidance includes the steps needed to either remove the extra items or to replace them with more restrictive ones.
New Custom Policy Checks The new policy checks can be invoked from the command line or by calling an API function. The checks examine a policy document that is supplied as part of the request and return a PASS or FAIL value. In both cases, PASS indicates that the policy document properly disallows the given access, and FAIL indicates that the policy might allow some or all of the permissions. Here are the new checks:
Check No Public Access – This check operates on a resource policy, and checks to see if the policy grants public access to a specified resource type. For example, you can check a policy to see if it allows public access to an S3 bucket by specifying the AWS::S3::Bucket resource type. Valid resource types include DynamoDB tables and streams, EFS file systems, OpenSearch domains, Kinesis streams and stream consumers, KMS keys, Lambda functions, S3 buckets and access points, S3 Express directory buckets, S3 Outposts buckets and access points, Glacier, Secrets Manager secrets, SNS topics and queues, and IAM policy documents that assume roles. The list of valid resource types will expand over time and can be found in the CheckNoPublicAccess documentation,
{
"result": "FAIL",
"message": "The resource policy grants public access for the given resource type.",
"reasons": [
{
"description": "Public access granted in the following statement with sid: SqsResourcePolicy.",
"statementIndex": 0,
"statementId": "SqsResourcePolicy"
}
]
}
I edit the policy to remove the access grant and try again, and this time the check passes:
{
"result": "PASS",
"message": "The resource policy does not grant public access for the given resource type."
}
Check Access Not Granted – This check operates on a single resource policy or identity policy at a time. It also accepts an list of actions and resources, both in the form that are acceptable as part of an IAM policy. The check sees if the policy grants unintended access to any of the resources in the list by way of the listed actions. For example, this check could be used to make sure that a policy does not allow a critical CloudTrail trail to be deleted:
IAM Access Analyzer indicates that the check fails:
{
"result": "FAIL",
"message": "The policy document grants access to perform one or more of the listed actions or resources.",
"reasons": [
{
"description": "One or more of the listed actions or resources in the statement with index: 0.",
"statementIndex": 0
}
]
}
I fix the policy and try again, and this time the check passes, indicating that the policy does not grant access to the listed resources:
{
"result": "PASS",
"message": "The policy document does not grant access to perform the listed actions or resources."
}
Guided Revocation In my earlier post I showed you how IAM Access Analyzer discovers and lists IAM items that grant access which is not actually needed. With today’s launch, you now get guidance to help you (or your developer team) to resolve these findings. Here are the latest findings from my AWS account:
Some of these are leftovers from times when I was given early access to a service so that I could use and then blog about it; others are due to my general ineptness as a cloud admin! Either way, I need to clean these up. Let’s start with the second one, Unused access key. I click on the item and can see the new Recommendations section at the bottom:
I can follow the steps and delete the access key or I can click Archive to remove the finding from the list of active findings and add it to the list of archived ones. I can also create an archive rule that will do the same for similar findings in the future. Similar recommendations are provided for unused IAM users, IAM roles, and passwords.
Now let’s take a look at a finding of Unused permissions:
The recommendation is to replace the existing policy with a new one. I can preview the new policy side-by-side with the existing one:
As in the first example I can follow the steps or I can archive the finding.
The findings and the recommendations are also available from the command line. I generate the recommendation by specifying an analyzer and a finding from it:
Security is our top priority at Amazon Web Services (AWS), and today, we’re launching two capabilities to help you strengthen the security posture of your AWS accounts:
Second, we started to enforce MFA on your root users, starting with the most sensitive one: the root user of your management account in an AWS Organization. We will continue to roll out this change on your other accounts during the rest of the year.
MFA is one of the simplest and most effective ways to enhance account security, offering an additional layer of protection to help prevent unauthorized individuals from gaining access to systems or data.
MFA with passkey for your root and IAM users Passkey is a general term used for the credentials created for FIDO2 authentication.
A passkey is a pair of cryptographic keys generated on your client device when you register for a service or a website. The key pair is bound to the web service domain and unique for each one.
The public part of the key is sent to the service and stored on their end. The private part of the key is either stored in a secured device, such as a security key, or securely shared across your devices connected to your user account when you use cloud services, such as iCloud Keychain, Google accounts, or a password manager such as 1Password.
Typically, the access to the private part of the key is protected by a PIN code or a biometric authentication, such as Apple Face ID or Touch ID or Microsoft Hello, depending on your devices.
When I try to authenticate on a service protected with passkeys, the service sends a challenge to my browser. The browser then requests my device sign the challenge with my private key. This triggers a PIN or biometric authentication to access the secured storage where the private key is stored. The browser returns the signature to the service. When the signature is valid, it confirms I own the private key that matches the public key stored on the service, and the authentication succeeds.
Passkeys can be used to replace passwords. However, for this initial release, we choose to use passkeys as a second factor authentication, in addition to your password. The password is something you know, and the passkey is something you have.
Passkeys are more resistant to phishing attacks than passwords. First, it’s much harder to gain access to a private key protected by your fingerprint, face, or a PIN code. Second, passkeys are bound to a specific web domain, reducing the scope in case of unintentional disclosure.
As an end user, you will benefit from the convenience of use and easy recoverability. You can use the built-in authenticators in your phones and laptops to unlock a cryptographically secured credential to your AWS sign-in experience. And when using a cloud service to store the passkey (such as iCloud keychain, Google accounts, or 1Password), the passkey can be accessed from any of your devices connected to your passkey provider account. This helps you to recover your passkey in the unfortunate case of losing a device.
How to enable passkey MFA for an IAM user To enable passkey MFA, I navigate to the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) section of the console. I select a user, and I scroll down the page to the Multi-factor authentication (MFA) section. Then, I select Assign MFA device.
On the next page, I enter an MFA device name, and I select Passkey or security key. Then, I select next.
When using a password manager application that supports passkeys, it will pop up and ask if you want to generate and store a passkey using that application. Otherwise, your browser will present you with a couple of options. The exact layout of the screen depends on the operating system (macOS or Windows) and the browser you use. Here is the screen I see on macOS with a Chromium-based browser.
The rest of the experience depends on your selection. iCloud Keychain will prompt you for a Touch ID to generate and store the passkey.
In the context of this demo, I want to show you how to bootstrap the passkey on another device, such as a phone. I therefore select Use a phone, tablet, or security key instead. The browser presents me with a QR code. Then, I use my phone to scan the QR code. The phone authenticates me with Face ID and generates and stores the passkey.
This QR code-based flow allows a passkey from one device to be used to sign in on another device (a phone and my laptop in my demo). It is defined by the FIDO specification and known as cross device authentication (CDA).
When everything goes well, the passkey is now registered with the IAM user.
Note that we don’t recommend using IAM users to authenticate human beings to the AWS console. We recommend configuring single sign-on (SSO) with AWS IAM Identity Center instead.
What’s the sign-in experience? Once MFA is enabled and configured with a passkey, I try to sign in to my account.
The user experience differs based on the operating system, browser, and device you use.
For example, on macOS with iCloud Keychain enabled, the system prompts me for a touch on the Touch ID key. For this demo, I registered the passkey on my phone using CDA. Therefore, the system asks me to scan a QR code with my phone. Once scanned, the phone authenticates me with Face ID to unlock the passkey, and the AWS console terminates the sign-in procedure.
Verifying that the most privileged users in AWS are protected with MFA is just the latest step in our commitment to continuously enhance the security posture of AWS customers.
We started with your most sensitive account: your management account for AWS Organizations. The deployment of the policy is progressive, with just a few thousand accounts at a time. Over the coming months, we will progressively deploy the MFA enforcement policy on root users for the majority of the AWS accounts.
When you don’t have MFA enabled on your root user account, and your account is updated, a new message will pop up when you sign in, asking you to enable MFA. You will have a grace period, after which the MFA becomes mandatory.
You can start to use passkeys for multi-factor authentication today in all AWS Regions, except in China.
We’re enforcing the use of multi-factor authentication in all AWS Regions, except for the two regions in China (Beijing, Ningxia) and for AWS GovCloud (US), because the AWS accounts in these Regions have no root user.
Join us in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on June 10–12, 2024, for AWS re:Inforce, a security learning conference where you can enhance your skills and confidence in cloud security, compliance, identity, and privacy. As an attendee, you will have access to hundreds of technical and non-technical sessions, an Expo featuring Amazon Web Services (AWS) experts and AWS Security Competency Partners, and keynote sessions led by industry leaders. AWS re:Inforce offers a comprehensive focus on six key areas, including Application Security.
The Application Security track helps you understand and implement best practices for securing your applications throughout the development lifecycle. This year, we are focusing on several key themes:
Building a culture of security – Learn how to define and influence organizational behavior to speed up application development, while reducing overall security risk through implementing best practices, training your internal teams, and defining ownership.
Security of the pipeline – Discover how to embed governance and guardrails to allow developer agility, while maintaining security across your continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
Security in the pipeline – Explore tooling and automation to reduce the mean time of security reviews and embed continuous security into each stage of the development pipeline.
Supply chain security – Gain improved awareness of how risks are introduced by extension, track dependencies, and identify vulnerabilities used in your software.
Additionally, this year the Application Security track will have sessions focused on generative AI (gen AI), covering how to secure gen AI applications and use gen AI for development. Join these sessions to deepen your knowledge and up-level your skills, so that you can build modern applications that are robust, resilient, and secure.
Breakout sessions, chalk talks, lightning talks, and code talks
APS201 | Breakout session | Accelerate securely: The Generative AI Security Scoping Matrix As generative AI ignites business innovation, cybersecurity teams need to keep up with the accelerating domain. Security leaders are seeking tools and answers to help drive requirements around governance, compliance, legal, privacy, threat mitigations, resiliency, and more. This session introduces you to the Generative AI Security Scoping Matrix, which is designed to provide a common language and thought model for approaching generative AI security. Leave the session with a framework, techniques, and best practices that you can use to support responsible adoption of generative AI solutions designed to help your business move at an ever-increasing pace.
APS301 | Breakout session | Enhance AppSec: Generative AI integration in AWS testing This session presents an in-depth look at the AWS Security Testing program, emphasizing its scaling efforts to help ensure new products and services meet a high security bar pre-launch. With a focus on integrating generative AI into its testing framework, the program showcases how AWS anticipates and mitigates complex security threats to maintain cloud security. Learn about AWS’s proactive approaches to collaboration across teams and mitigating vulnerabilities, enriched by case studies that highlight the program’s flexibility and dedication to security excellence. Ideal for security experts and cloud architects, this session offers valuable insights into safeguarding cloud computing technologies.
APS302 | Breakout session | Building a secure MLOps pipeline, featuring PathAI DevOps and MLOps are both software development strategies that focus on collaboration between developers, operations, and data science teams. In this session, learn how to build modern, secure MLOps using AWS services and tools for infrastructure and network isolation, data protection, authentication and authorization, detective controls, and compliance. Discover how AWS customer PathAI, a leading digital pathology and AI company, uses seamless DevOps and MLOps strategies to run their AISight intelligent image management system and embedded AI products to support anatomic pathology labs and bio-pharma partners globally.
APS401 | Breakout session | Keeping your code secure Join this session to dive deep into how AWS implemented generative AI tooling in our developer workflows. Learn about the AWS approach to creating the underlying code scanning and remediation engines that AWS uses internally. Also, explore how AWS integrated these tools into the services we offer through reactive and proactive security features. Leave this session with a better understanding of how you can use AWS to secure code and how the code offered to you through AWS generative AI services is designed to be secure.
APS402 | Breakout session | Verifying code using automated reasoning In this session, AWS principal applied scientists discuss how they use automated reasoning to certify bug-free code mathematically and help secure underlying infrastructure. Explore how to use Kani, an AWS created open source engine that analyzes, verifies, and detects errors in safe and unsafe Rust code. Hear how AWS built and implemented Kani internally with examples taken from real-world AWS open source code. Leave this session with the tools you need to get started using this Rust verification engine for your own workloads.
APS232 | Chalk talk | Successful security team patterns It’s more common to hear what a security team does than to hear how the security team does it, or with whom the security team works rather than how it was designed to work. Organizational design is often demoted to a secondary consideration behind the goals of a security team, despite intentional design generally being what empowers, or hinders, security teams from achieving their goals. Security must work across the organization, not in isolation. This chalk talk focuses on designing effective security teams for organizations moving to the cloud, which necessitates outlining both what the security team works on and how it achieves that work.
APS331 | Chalk talk | Verifiable and auditable security inside the pipeline In this chalk talk, explore platform engineering best practices at AWS. AWS deploys more than 150 million times per year while maintaining 143 different compliance framework attestations and certifications. Internally, AWS has learned how to make security easier for builder teams. Learn key risks associated with operating pipelines at scale and Amazonian mechanisms to make security controls inside the pipeline verifiable and auditable so that you can shift compliance and auditing left into the pipeline.
APS233 | Chalk talk | Threat modeling your generative AI workload to evaluate security risk As the capabilities and possibilities of machine learning continue to expand with advances in generative AI, understanding the security risks introduced by these advances is essential for protecting your valuable AWS workloads. This chalk talk guides you through a practical threat modeling approach, empowering you to create a threat model for your own generative AI applications. Gain confidence to build your next generative AI workload securely on AWS with the help of threat modeling and leave with actionable steps you can take to get started.
APS321 | Lightning talk | Using generative AI to create more secure applications Generative AI revolutionizes application development by enhancing security and efficiency. This lightning talk explores how Amazon Q, your generative AI assistant, empowers you to build, troubleshoot, and transform applications securely. Discover how its capabilities streamline the process, allowing you to focus on innovation while ensuring robust security measures. Unlock the power of generative AI for helping build secure, cutting-edge applications.
APS341 | Code talk | Shifting left, securing right: Container supply chain security Supply chain security for containers helps ensure you can detect software security risks in third-party packages and remediate them during the container image build process. This prevents container images with vulnerabilities from being pushed to your container registry and causing potential harm to your production systems. In this code talk, learn how you can apply a shift-left approach to container image security testing in your deployment pipelines.
Hands-on sessions
APS373 | Workshop | Build a more secure generative AI chatbot with security guardrails Generative AI is an emerging technology that is disrupting multiple industries. An early generative AI use case is interactive chat in customer service applications. As users interact with generative AI chatbots, there are security risks, such as prompt injection and jailbreaking resulting from specially crafted inputs sent to large language models. In this workshop, learn how to build an AI chatbot using Amazon Bedrock and protect it using Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock. You must bring your laptop to participate.
APS351 | Builders’ session | Implement controls for the OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications In this builders’ session, learn how to implement security controls that address the OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications on AWS. Experts guide you through the use of AWS security tooling to provide practical insights and solutions to mitigate the most critical security risks outlined by OWASP. Discover technical options and choices you can make in cloud infrastructure and large-scale enterprise environments augmented by AWS generative AI technology. You must bring your laptop to participate.
APS271 | Workshop | Threat modeling for builders In this workshop, learn threat modeling core concepts and how to apply them through a series of group exercises. Key topics include threat modeling personas, key phases, data flow diagrams, STRIDE, and risk response strategies as well as the introduction of a “threat grammar rule” with an associated tool. In exercises, identify threats and mitigations through the lens of each threat modeling persona. Assemble in groups and walk through a case study, with AWS threat modeling experts on hand to guide you and provide feedback. You must bring your laptop to participate.
APS371 | Workshop | Integrating open source security tools with AWS code services AWS, open source, and partner tooling work together to accelerate your software development lifecycle. In this workshop, learn how to use the Automated Security Helper (ASH), an open source application security tool, to quickly integrate various security testing tools into your software build and deployment flows. AWS experts guide you through the process of security testing locally on your machines and within the AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline services. In addition, discover how to identify potential security issues in your applications through static analysis, software composition analysis, and infrastructure-as-code testing. You must bring your laptop to participate.
This blog post highlighted some of the unique sessions in the Application Security track at the upcoming re:Inforce 2024 conference in Philadelphia. If these sessions pique your interest, register for re:Inforce 2024 to attend them, along with the numerous other Application Security sessions offered at the conference. For a comprehensive overview of sessions across all tracks, explore the AWS re:Inforce catalog preview.
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A full conference pass is $1,099. Register today with the code flashsale150 to receive a limited time $150 discount, while supplies last.
We’re counting down to AWS re:Inforce, our annual cloud security event! We are thrilled to invite security enthusiasts and builders to join us in Philadelphia, PA, from June 10–12 for an immersive two-and-a-half-day journey into cloud security learning. This year, we’ve expanded the event by half a day to give you more opportunities to delve into the latest security trends and technologies. At AWS re:Inforce, you’ll have the chance to explore the breadth of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) security landscape, learn how to operationalize security services, and enhance your skills and confidence in cloud security to improve your organization’s security posture. As an attendee, you will have access to over 250 sessions across multiple topic tracks, including data protection; identity and access management; threat detection and incident response; network and infrastructure security; generative AI; governance, risk, and compliance; and application security. Plus, get ready to be inspired by our lineup of customer speakers, who will share their firsthand experiences of innovating securely on AWS.
In this post, we’ll provide an overview of the key sessions that include lecture-style presentations featuring real-world use cases from our customers, as well as the interactive small-group sessions led by AWS experts that guide you through practical problems and solutions.
The threat detection and incident response track is designed to demonstrate how to detect and respond to security risks to help protect workloads at scale. AWS experts and customers will present key topics such as threat detection, vulnerability management, cloud security posture management, threat intelligence, operationalization of AWS security services, container security, effective security investigation, incident response best practices, and strengthening security through the use of generative AI and securing generative AI workloads.
Breakout sessions, chalk talks, and lightning talks
TDR201 | Breakout session | How NatWest uses AWS services to manage vulnerabilities at scale As organizations move to the cloud, rapid change is the new normal. Safeguarding against potential security threats demands continuous monitoring of cloud resources and code that are constantly evolving. In this session, NatWest shares best practices for monitoring their AWS environment for software and configuration vulnerabilities at scale using AWS security services like Amazon Inspector and AWS Security Hub. Learn how security teams can automate the identification and prioritization of critical security insights to manage alert fatigue and swiftly collaborate with application teams for remediation.
TDR301 | Breakout session | Developing an autonomous framework with Security Lake & Torc Robotics Security teams are increasingly seeking autonomy in their security operations. Amazon Security Lake is a powerful solution that allows organizations to centralize their security data across AWS accounts and Regions. In this session, learn how Security Lake simplifies centralizing and operationalizing security data. Then, hear from Torc Robotics, a leading autonomous trucking company, as they share their experience and best practices for using Security Lake to establish an autonomous security framework.
TDR302 | Breakout session | Detecting and responding to threats in generative AI workloads While generative AI is an emerging technology, many of the same services and concepts can be used for threat detection and incident response. In this session, learn how you can build out threat detection and incident response capabilities for a generative AI workload that uses Amazon Bedrock. Find out how to effectively monitor this workload using Amazon Bedrock, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Security Hub. The session also covers best practices for responding to and remediating security issues that may come up.
TDR303 | Breakout session | Innovations in AWS detection and response services In this session, learn about the latest advancements and recent AWS launches in the field of detection and response. This session focuses on use cases like threat detection, workload protection, automated and continual vulnerability management, centralized monitoring, continuous cloud security posture management, unified security data management, and discovery and protection of workloads and data. Through these use cases, gain a deeper understanding of how you can seamlessly integrate AWS detection and response services to help protect your workloads at scale, enhance your security posture, and streamline security operations across your entire AWS environment.
TDR304 | Breakout session | Explore cloud workload protection with GuardDuty, feat. Booking.com Monitoring your workloads at runtime allows you to detect unexpected activity sooner—before it escalates to broader business-impacting security issues. Amazon GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring offers fully managed threat detection that gives you end-to-end visibility across your AWS environment. GuardDuty’s unique detection capabilities are guided by AWS’s visibility into the cloud threat landscape. In this session, learn why AWS built the Runtime Monitoring feature and how it works. Also discover how Booking.com used GuardDuty for runtime protection, supporting their mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
TDR305 | Breakout session | Cyber threat intelligence sharing on AWS Real-time, contextual, and comprehensive visibility into security issues is essential for resilience in any organization. In this session, join the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) as they present their Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing (CTIS) program, built on AWS. With the aim to improve the cyber resilience of the Australian community and help make Australia the most secure place to connect online, the ACSC protects Australia from thousands of threats every day. Learn the technical fundamentals that can help you apply best practices for real-time, bidirectional sharing of threat intelligence across all sectors.
TDR331 | Chalk talk | Unlock OCSF: Turn raw logs into insights with generative AI So, you have security data stored using the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF)—now what? In this chalk talk, learn how to use AWS analytics tools to mine data stored using the OCSF and leverage generative AI to consume insights. Discover how services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon Q in QuickSight, and Amazon Bedrock can extract, process, and visualize security insights from OCSF data. Gain practical skills to identify trends, detect anomalies, and transform your OCSF data into actionable security intelligence that can help your organization respond more effectively to cybersecurity threats.
TDR332 | Chalk talk | Anatomy of a ransomware event targeting data within AWS Ransomware events can interrupt operations and cost governments, nonprofits, and businesses billions of dollars. Early detection and automated responses are important mechanisms that can help mitigate your organization’s exposure. In this chalk talk, learn about the anatomy of a ransomware event targeting data within AWS including detection, response, and recovery. Explore the AWS services and features that you can use to protect against ransomware events in your environment, and learn how you can investigate possible ransomware events if they occur.
TDR333 | Chalk talk | Implementing AWS security best practices: Insights and strategies Have you ever wondered if you are using AWS security services such as Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, AWS WAF, and others to the best of their ability? Do you want to dive deep into common use cases to better operationalize AWS security services through insights developed via thousands of deployments? In this chalk talk, learn tips and tricks from AWS experts who have spent years talking to users and documenting guidance outlining AWS security services best practices.
TDR334 | Chalk talk | Unlock your security superpowers with generative AI Generative AI can accelerate and streamline the process of security analysis and response, enhancing the impact of your security operations team. Its unique ability to combine natural language processing with large existing knowledge bases and agent-based architectures that can interact with your data and systems makes it an ideal tool for augmenting security teams during and after an event. In this chalk talk, explore how generative AI will shape the future of the SOC and lead to new capabilities in incident response and cloud security posture management.
TDR431 | Chalk talk | Harnessing generative AI for investigation and remediation To help businesses move faster and deliver security outcomes, modern security teams need to identify opportunities to automate and simplify their workflows. One way of doing so is through generative AI. Join this chalk talk to learn how to identify use cases where generative AI can help with investigating, prioritizing, and remediating findings from Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and AWS Security Hub. Then find out how you can develop architectures from these use cases, implement them, and evaluate their effectiveness. The talk offers tenets for generative AI and security that can help you safely use generative AI to reduce cognitive load and increase focus on novel, high-value opportunities.
TDR432 | Chalk talk | New tactics and techniques for proactive threat detection This insightful chalk talk is led by the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT), the team responsible for swiftly responding to security events on the customer side of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. Discover the latest trends in threat tactics and techniques observed by the CIRT, along with effective detection and mitigation strategies. Gain valuable insights into emerging threats and learn how to safeguard your organization’s AWS environment against evolving security risks.
TDR433 | Chalk talk | Incident response for multi-account and federated environments In this chalk talk, AWS security experts guide you through the lifecycle of a compromise involving federation and third-party identity providers. Learn how AWS detects unauthorized access and which approaches can help you respond to complex situations involving organizations with multiple accounts. Discover insights into how you can contain and recover from security events and discuss strong IAM policies, appropriately restrictive service control policies, and resource termination for security event containment. Also, learn how to build resiliency in an environment with IAM permission refinement, organizational strategy, detective controls, chain of custody, and IR break-glass models.
TDR227 | Lightning talk | How Razorpay scales threat detection using AWS Discover how Razorpay, a leading payment aggregator solution provider authorized by the Reserve Bank of India, efficiently manages millions of business transactions per minute through automated security operations using AWS security services. Join this lightning talk to explore how Razorpay’s security operations team uses AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, and Amazon Inspector to monitor their critical workloads on AWS. Learn how they orchestrate complex workflows, automating responses to security events, and reduce the time from detection to remediation.
TDR321 | Lightning talk | Scaling incident response with AWS developer tools In incident response, speed matters. Responding to incidents at scale can be challenging as the number of resources in your AWS accounts increases. In this lightning talk, learn how to use SDKs and the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to rapidly run commands across your estate so you can quickly retrieve data, identify issues, and resolve security-related problems.
TDR322 | Lightning talk | How Snap Inc. secures its services with Amazon GuardDuty In this lightning talk, discover how Snap Inc. established a secure multi-tenant compute platform on AWS and mitigated security challenges within shared Kubernetes clusters. Snap uses Amazon GuardDuty and the OSS tool Falco for runtime protection across build time, deployment time, and runtime phases. Explore Snap’s techniques for facilitating one-time cluster access through AWS IAM Identity Center. Find out how Snap has implemented isolation strategies between internal tenants using the Pod Security Standards (PSS) and network policies enforced by the Amazon VPC Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin.
TDR326 | Lightning talk | Streamlining security auditing with generative AI For identifying and responding to security-related events, collecting and analyzing logs is only the first step. Beyond this initial phase, you need to utilize tools and services to parse through logs, understand baseline behaviors, identify anomalies, and create automated responses based on the type of event. In this lightning talk, learn how to effectively parse security logs, identify anomalies, and receive response runbooks that you can implement within your environment.
Interactive sessions (builders’ sessions, code talks, and workshops)
TDR351 | Builders’ session | Accelerating incident remediation with IR playbooks & Amazon Detective In this builders’ session, learn how to investigate incidents more effectively and discover root cause with Amazon Detective. Amazon Detective provides finding-group summaries by using generative AI to automatically analyze finding groups. Insights in natural language then help you accelerate security investigations. Find out how you can create your own incident response playbooks and test them by handling multi-event security issues.
TDR352 | Builders’ session | How to automate containment and forensics for Amazon EC2 Automated Forensics Orchestrator for Amazon EC2 deploys a mechanism that uses AWS services to orchestrate and automate key digital forensics processes and activities for Amazon EC2 instances in the event of a potential security issue being detected. In this builders’ session, learn how to deploy and scale this self-service AWS solution. Explore the prerequisites, learn how to customize it for your environment, and experience forensic analysis on live artifacts to identify what potential unauthorized users could do in your environment.
TDR353 | Builders’ session | Preventing top misconfigurations associated with security events Have you ever wondered how you can prevent top misconfigurations that could lead to a security event? Join this builders’ session, where the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) reviews some of the most commonly observed misconfigurations that can lead to security events. Then learn how to build mechanisms using AWS Security Hub and other AWS services that can help detect and prevent these issues.
TDR354 | Builders’ session | Insights in your inbox: Build email reporting with AWS Security Hub AWS Security Hub provides you with a comprehensive view of the security state of your AWS resources by collecting security data from across AWS accounts, AWS Regions, and AWS services. In this builders’ session, learn how to set up a customizable and automated summary email that distills security posture information, insights, and critical findings from Security Hub. Get hands-on with the Security Hub console and discover easy-to-implement code examples that you can use in your own organization to drive security improvements.
TDR355 | Builders’ session | Detecting ransomware and suspicious activity in Amazon RDS In this builders’ session, acquire skills that can help you detect and respond to threats targeting AWS databases. Using services such as AWS Cloud9 and AWS CloudFormation, simulate real-world intrusions on Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora and use Amazon Athena to detect unauthorized activities. The session also covers strategies from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) for rapid incident response and configuring essential security settings to enhance your database defenses. The session provides practical experience in configuring audit logging and enabling termination protection to ensure robust database security measures.
TDR451 | Builders’ session | Create a generative AI runbook to resolve security findings Generative AI has the potential to accelerate and streamline security analysis, response, and recovery, enhancing the effectiveness of human engagement. In this builders’ session, learn how to use Amazon SageMaker notebooks and Amazon Bedrock to quickly resolve security findings in your AWS account. You rely on runbooks for the day-to-day operations, maintenance, and troubleshooting of AWS services. With generative AI, you can gain deeper insights into security findings and take the necessary actions to streamline security analysis and response.
TDR441 | Code talk | How to use generative AI to gain insights in Amazon Security Lake In this code talk, explore how you can use generative AI to gather enhanced security insights within Amazon Security Lake by integrating Amazon SageMaker Studio and Amazon Bedrock. Learn how AI-powered analytics can help rapidly identify and respond to security threats. By using large language models (LLMs) within Amazon Bedrock to process natural language queries and auto-generate SQL queries, you can expedite security investigations, focusing on relevant data sources within Security Lake. The talk includes a threat analysis exercise to demonstrate the effectiveness of LLMs in addressing various security queries. Learn how you can streamline security operations and gain actionable insights to strengthen your security posture and mitigate risks effectively within AWS environments.
TDR442 | Code talk | Security testing, the practical way Join this code talk for a practical demonstration of how to test security capabilities within AWS. The talk can help you evaluate and quantify your detection and response effectiveness against key metrics like mean time to detect and mean time to resolution. Explore testing techniques that use open source tools alongside AWS services such as Amazon GuardDuty and AWS WAF. Gain insights into testing your security configurations in your environment and uncover best practices tailored to your testing scenarios. This talk equips you with actionable strategies to enhance your security posture and establish robust defense mechanisms within your AWS environment.
TDR443 | Code talk | How to conduct incident response in your Amazon EKS environment Join this code talk to gain insights from both adversaries’ and defenders’ perspectives as AWS experts simulate a live security incident within an application across multiple Amazon EKS clusters, invoking an alert in Amazon GuardDuty. Witness the incident response process as experts demonstrate detection, containment, and recovery procedures in near real time. Through this immersive experience, learn how you can effectively respond to and recover from Amazon EKS–specific incidents, and gain valuable insights into incident handling within cloud environments. Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance your incident response capabilities and learn how to more effectively safeguard your AWS infrastructure.
TDR444 | Code talk | Identity forensics in the realm of short-term credentials AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) is a common way for users to access AWS services and allows you to utilize role chaining for navigating AWS accounts. When investigating security incidents, understanding the history and potential impact is crucial. Examining a single session is often insufficient because the initial abused credential may be different than the one that precipitated the investigation, and other tokens might be generated. Also, a single session investigation may not encompass all permissions that the adversary controls, due to trust relationships between the roles. In this code talk, learn how you can construct identity forensics capabilities using Amazon Detective and create a custom graph database using Amazon Neptune.
TDR371-R | Workshop | Threat detection and response on AWS Join AWS experts for an immersive threat detection and response workshop using Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon Detective. This workshop simulates security events for different types of resources and behaviors and illustrates both manual and automated responses with AWS Lambda. Dive in and learn how to improve your security posture by operationalizing threat detection and response on AWS.
TDR372-R | Workshop | Container threat detection and response with AWS security services Join AWS experts for an immersive container security workshop using AWS threat detection and response services. This workshop simulates scenarios and security events that may arise while using Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS. The workshop also demonstrates how to use different AWS security services to detect and respond to potential security threats, as well as suggesting how you can improve your security practices. Dive in and learn how to improve your security posture when running workloads on AWS container orchestration services.
TDR373-R | Workshop | Vulnerability management with Amazon Inspector and Jenkins Join AWS experts for an immersive vulnerability management workshop using Amazon Inspector and Jenkins for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). This workshop takes you through approaches to vulnerability management with Amazon Inspector for EC2 instances, container images residing in Amazon ECR and within CI/CD tools, and AWS Lambda functions. Explore the integration of Amazon Inspector with Jenkins, and learn how to operationalize vulnerability management on AWS.
Browse the full re:Inforce catalog to learn more about sessions in other tracks, plus gamified learning, innovation sessions, partner sessions, and labs.
Our comprehensive track content is designed to help arm you with the knowledge and skills needed to securely manage your workloads and applications on AWS. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to stay updated with the latest best practices in threat detection and incident response. Join us in Philadelphia for re:Inforce 2024 by registering today. We can’t wait to welcome you!
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Join us in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on June 10–12, 2024 for AWS re:Inforce, a security learning conference where you can gain skills and confidence in cloud security, compliance, identity, and privacy. As an attendee, you have access to hundreds of technical and non-technical sessions, an Expo featuring Amazon Web Services (AWS) experts and AWS Security Competency Partners, and keynote and leadership sessions featuring Security leadership.
AWS re:Inforce features content in the following six areas:
Data Protection
Governance, Risk, and Compliance
Identity and Access Management
Network and Infrastructure Security
Threat Detection and Incident Response
Application Security
This post will highlight some of the Data Protection sessions that you can add to your agenda. The data protection content showcases best practices for data in transit, at rest, and in use. Learn how AWS, customers, and AWS Partners work together to protect data across industries like financial services, healthcare, and the public sector. You will learn from AWS leaders about how customers innovate in the cloud, use the latest generative AI tools, and raise the bar on data security, resilience, and privacy.
Breakout sessions, chalk talks, and lightning talks
DAP221: Secure your healthcare generative AI workloads on Amazon EKS Many healthcare organizations have been modernizing their applications using containers on Amazon EKS. Today, they are increasingly adopting generative AI models to innovate in areas like patient care, drug discovery, and medical imaging analysis. In addition, these organizations must comply with healthcare security and privacy regulations. In this lightning talk, learn how you can work backwards from expected healthcare data protection outcomes. This talk offers guidance on extending healthcare organizations’ standardization of containerized applications on Amazon EKS to build more secure and resilient generative AI workloads.
DAP232: Innovate responsibly: Deep dive into data protection for generative AI AWS solutions such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q are helping organizations across industries boost productivity and create new ways of operating. Despite all of the excitement, organizations often pause to ask, “How do these new services handle and manage our data?” AWS has designed these services with data privacy in mind and many security controls enabled by default, such as encryption of data at rest and in transit. In this chalk talk, dive into the data flows of these new generative AI services to learn how AWS prioritizes security and privacy for your sensitive data requirements.
DAP301: Building resilient event-driven architectures, feat. United Airlines United Airlines plans to accept a delivery of 700 new planes by 2032. With this growing fleet comes more destinations, passengers, employees, and baggage—and a big increase in data, the lifeblood of airline operations. United Airlines is using event-driven architecture (EDA) to build a system that scales with their operations and evolves with their hybrid cloud throughout this journey. In this session, learn how United Airlines built a hybrid operations management system by modernizing from mainframes to AWS. Using Amazon MSK, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS KMS, and event mesh AWS ISV Partner Solace, they were able to design a well-crafted EDA to address their needs.
DAP302: Capital One’s approach for secure and resilient applications Join this session to learn about Capital One’s strategic AWS Secrets Manager implementation that has helped ensure unified security across environments. Discover the key principles that can guide consistent use, with real-world examples to showcase the benefits and challenges faced. Gain insights into achieving reliability and resilience in financial services applications on AWS, including methods for maintaining system functionality amidst failures and scaling operations safely. Find out how you can implement chaos engineering and site reliability engineering using multi-Region services such as Amazon Route 53, AWS Auto Scaling, and Amazon DynamoDB.
DAP321: Securing workloads using data protection services, feat. Fannie Mae Join this lightning talk to discover how Fannie Mae employs a comprehensive suite of AWS data protection services to securely manage their own keys, certificates, and application secrets. Fannie Mae demonstrates how they utilized services such as AWS Secrets Manager, AWS KMS, and AWS Private Certificate Authority to empower application teams to build securely and align with their organizational and compliance expectations.
DAP331: Encrypt everything: How different AWS services help you protect data Encryption is supported by every AWS service that stores data. However, not every service implements encryption and key management identically. In this chalk talk, learn in detail how different AWS services such as Amazon S3 or Amazon Bedrock use encryption and manage keys. These insights can help you model threats to your applications and be better prepared to respond to questions about adherence to security standards and compliance requirements. Also, find out about some of the methodologies AWS uses when designing for encryption and key management at scale in a diverse set of services.
Hands-on sessions (builders’ sessions, code talks, and workshops)
DAP251: Build a privacy-enhancing healthcare data collaboration solution In this builders’ session, learn how to build a privacy-enhanced environment to analyze datasets from multiple sources using AWS Clean Rooms. Build a solution for a fictional life sciences company that is researching a new drug and needs to perform analyses with a hospital system. Find out how you can help protect sensitive data using SQL query controls to limit how the data can be queried, Cryptographic Computing for Clean Rooms (C3R) to keep the data encrypted at all times, and differential privacy to quantifiably safeguard patients’ personal information in the datasets. You must bring your laptop to participate.
DAP341: Data protection controls for your generative AI applications on AWS Generative AI is one of the most disruptive technologies of our generation and has the potential to revolutionize all industries. Cloud security data protection strategies need to evolve to meet the changing needs of businesses as they adopt generative AI. In this code talk, learn how you can implement various data protection security controls for your generative AI applications using Amazon Bedrock and AWS data protection services. Discover best practices and reference architectures that can help you enforce fine-grained data protection controls to scale your generative AI applications on AWS.
DAP342: Leveraging developer platforms to improve secrets management at scale In this code talk, learn how you can leverage AWS Secrets Manager and Backstage.io to give developers the freedom to deploy secrets close to their applications while maintaining organizational standards. Explore how using a developer portal can remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting of creating secrets that have consistent naming, tagging, access controls, and encryption. This talk touches on cross-Region replication, cross-account IAM permissions and policies, and access controls and integration with AWS KMS. Also find out about secrets rotation as well as new AWS Secrets Manager features such as BatchGetSecretValue and managed rotation.
DAP371: Encryption in transit Encryption in transit is a fundamental aspect of data protection. In this workshop, walk through multiple ways to accomplish encryption in transit on AWS. Find out how to enable HTTPS connections between microservices on Amazon ECS and AWS Lambda via Amazon VPC Lattice, enforce end-to-end encryption in Amazon EKS, and use AWS Private Certificate Authority to issue TLS certificates for private applications. You must bring your laptop to participate.
If these sessions look interesting to you, join us in Philadelphia by registering for re:Inforce 2024. We look forward to seeing you there!
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.
As the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at AWS, I’m personally committed to helping security teams of all skill levels and sizes navigate security for generative artificial intelligence (AI). As a former AWS customer, I know the value of hands-on security learning and talking in-person to the people who build and run AWS security. That’s why I’m excited for you to join me at AWS re:Inforce 2024, our annual cloud security event, where you can collaborate with experts, partners, and the builders who are driving the future of security in the generative AI era.
Whether you want to build deep technical expertise, understand how to prioritize your security investments, or learn how to apply foundational security best practices, re:Inforce is a great opportunity to dive deep into the convergence of security and AI. AI and machine learning (ML) have been a focus for Amazon for more than 25 years. It’s inspiring to take advantage of and adapt to the impact generative AI is having on the world.
AWS re:Inforce isn’t just a conference—it’s a catalyst for innovation and collaboration in the realm of cloud security. This year, we’re coming together June 10–12 in Pennsylvania for 2.5 days of immersive cloud security learning designed to help drive your business initiatives. At AWS, we’ve always believed that security is a business enabler. Security reduces risk, reinforces resilience, and empowers confident innovation. Security helps organizations use new technologies such as generative AI quickly and safely, creating better experiences for customers, partners, and employees.
Here’s a bit of what you can expect:
How we secure AWS today and my vision for the future AWS re:Inforce 2024 will begin with my keynote on Tuesday, June 11, 2024 at 9:00 AM EST. By the time re:Inforce comes around, I will have been the CISO of AWS for nearly a year. It’s incredible to think about all the innovations that have happened within AWS Security during that time. You’ll hear about these innovations, what we learned from them, and how we use them to secure AWS. I’ll also share my vision for the future of AWS Security. Steve Schmidt, CSO of Amazon, will take the stage to share his thoughts on how a strong culture of security supports the safe use of generative AI.
Navigate security for generative AI and other emerging trends Now is the time for security teams to empower their builders to confidently innovate with generative AI. Be the first to hear about the latest AWS security advances around generative AI and have access to interactive sessions where you can learn how to implement AI workloads securely, explore use cases from other customers, and see demos from AWS and our partners of AI-driven security in action. Be sure to check out our Innovation Talks, where AWS security experts will give in-depth talks on essential topics including cryptography, generative AI, and building a culture of security.
This year, we’ve extended the event by half a day to give you more learning opportunities. At re:Inforce, you can personalize your agenda by choosing from more than 250 different sessions spanning data protection; identity and access management; threat detection and incident response; network and infrastructure security; governance, risk, and compliance; and application security. And we have an inspiring line-up of customer speakers this year who will share their firsthand experience innovating securely on AWS. More than 90 of our trusted security partners will also be there to help you simplify and integrate your security portfolio, and those of you looking to deepen security expertise will find more than 70 percent of re:Inforce sessions are advanced or expert level.
Take advantage of the latest innovations in AWS security You’ll hear about our latest announcements and product launches and learn how to operationalize these security innovations in over 100 interactive-format sessions. In response to customer feedback, we’ve added more interactive session formats, including chalk talks, code talks, workshops, and builders’ sessions. Don’t miss this chance to connect directly with AWS experts to learn how you can get more out of the security tools you already have.
Connect with AWS experts, partners, and your peers The opportunity to come together with other members of the security community is something that really energizes me. Coming together in person gives us all the opportunity to connect with peers, find mentors, and learn from each other. You can advance your career development goals with attendee-matchmaking tools, explore the Expo to connect with trusted partners, and join lounges and activities designed for specific interest groups in the security community.
Meet up with AWS Security Heroes, security professionals, IT leaders, educators, and developers with a shared mission to foster excellence in the practice and profession of cybersecurity and digital identity. Or, connect with members of the AWS Community Builders program, AWS technical enthusiasts and emerging thought leaders who are passionate about sharing knowledge and connecting with the security community. There’s no better opportunity to make new connections with the diverse AWS security community.
Register today with the code SECBLOfnakb to receive a limited time $150 USD discount, while supplies last.
If you’re in the first five years of your cloud security career, you might qualify for the All Builders Welcome Grant. This grant removes the financial barrier to attend AWS re:Inforce for underrepresented technologists as part of our commitment to creating a cybersecurity community that is inclusive, diverse, and equitable.
Thank you to everyone who participated in AWS re:Inforce 2023, both virtually and in-person. The conference featured a lineup of over 250 engaging sessions and hands-on labs, in collaboration with more than 80 AWS partner sponsors, over two days of immersive cloud security learning. The keynote was delivered by CJ Moses, AWS Chief Information Security Officer, Becky Weiss, AWS Senior Principal Engineer, and Debbie Wheeler, Delta Air Lines Chief Information Security Officer. They shared the latest innovations in cloud security from AWS and provided insights on how to foster a culture of security in your organization.
If you couldn’t join us or would like to revisit the insightful themes discussed, we’ve put together this blog post for you. It provides a comprehensive summary of all the key announcements made and includes information on where you can watch the keynote and sessions at your convenience.
Key announcements
Here are some of the top announcements that we made at AWS re:Inforce 2023:
Amazon Verified Permissions — Verified Permissions is a scalable permissions management and fine-grained authorization service for the applications you build. The service helps your developers build secure applications faster by externalizing authorization and centralizing policy management and administration. Developers can align their application access with Zero Trust principles by implementing least privilege and continual verification within applications. Security and audit teams can better analyze and audit who has access to what within applications. Amazon Verified Permissions uses Cedar, an open-source policy language for access control that empowers developers and admins to define policy-based access controls using roles and attributes for context-aware access control.
Amazon Inspector code scanning of Lambda functions —Amazon Inspector now supports code scanning of AWS Lambda functions, expanding the existing capability to scan Lambda functions and associated layers for software vulnerabilities in application package dependencies. Amazon Inspector code scanning of Lambda functions scans custom proprietary application code you write within Lambda functions for security vulnerabilities such as injection flaws, data leaks, weak cryptography, or missing encryption. Upon detecting code vulnerabilities within the Lambda function or layer, Amazon Inspector generates actionable security findings that provide several details, such as security detector name, impacted code snippets, and remediation suggestions to address vulnerabilities. The findings are aggregated in the Amazon Inspector console and integrated with AWS Security Hub and Amazon EventBridge for streamlined workflow automation.
Amazon Inspector SBOM export — Amazon Inspector now offers the ability to export a consolidated Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) for resources that it monitors across your organization in multiple industry-standard formats, including CycloneDx and Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX). With this new capability, you can use automated and centrally managed SBOMs to gain visibility into key information about your software supply chain. This includes details about software packages used in the resource, along with associated vulnerabilities. SBOMs can be exported to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket and downloaded for analyzing with Amazon Athena or Amazon QuickSight to visualize software supply chain trends. This functionality is available with a few clicks in the Amazon Inspector console or using Amazon Inspector APIs.
Amazon CodeGuru Security —Amazon CodeGuru Security offers a comprehensive set of APIs that are designed to seamlessly integrate with your existing pipelines and tooling. CodeGuru Security serves as a static application security testing (SAST) tool that uses machine learning to help you identify code vulnerabilities and provide guidance you can use as part of remediation. CodeGuru Security also provides in-context code patches for certain classes of vulnerabilities, helping you reduce the effort required to fix code.
Amazon EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint — Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) announced support for connectivity to instances using SSH or RDP in private subnets over the Amazon EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint (EIC Endpoint). With this capability, you can connect to your instances by using SSH or RDP from the internet without requiring a public IPv4 address.
AWS built-in partner solutions —AWS built-in partner solutions are co-built with AWS experts, helping to ensure that AWS Well-Architected security reference architecture guidelines and best security practices were rigorously followed. AWS built-in partner solutions can save you valuable time and resources by getting the building blocks of cloud development right when you begin a migration or modernization initiative. AWS built-in solutions also automate deployments and can reduce installation time from months or weeks to a single day. Customers often look to our partners for innovation and help with “getting cloud right.” Now, partners with AWS built-in solutions can help you be more efficient and drive business value for both partner software and AWS native services.
AWS Cyber Insurance Partners — AWS has worked with leading cyber insurance partners to help simplify the process of obtaining cyber insurance. You can now reduce business risk by finding and procuring cyber insurance directly from validated AWS cyber insurance partners. To reduce the amount of paperwork and save time, download and share your AWS Foundational Security Best Practices Standard detailed report from AWS Security Hub and share the report with the AWS Cyber Insurance Partner of your choice. With AWS vetted cyber insurance partners, you can have confidence that these insurers understand AWS security posture and are evaluating your environment according to the latest AWS Security Best Practices. Now you can get a full cyber insurance quote in just two business days.
AWS Global Partner Security Initiative — With the AWS Global Partner Security Initiative, AWS will jointly develop end-to-end security solutions and managed services, leveraging the capabilities, scale, and deep security knowledge of our Global System Integrators (GSI) partners.
Amazon Detective finding groups —Amazon Detective expands its finding groups capability to include Amazon Inspector findings, in addition to Amazon GuardDuty findings. Using machine learning, this extension of the finding groups feature significantly streamlines the investigation process, reducing the time spent and helping to improve identification of the root cause of security incidents. By grouping findings from Amazon Inspector and GuardDuty, you can use Detective to answer difficult questions such as “was this EC2 instance compromised because of a vulnerability?” or “did this GuardDuty finding occur because of unintended network exposure?” Furthermore, Detective maps the identified findings and their corresponding tactics, techniques, and procedures to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, enhancing the overall effectiveness and alignment of security measures.
[Pre-announce] AWS Private Certificate Authority Connector for Active Directory –—AWS Private CA will soon launch a Connector for Active Directory (AD). The Connector for AD will help to reduce upfront public key infrastructure (PKI) investment and ongoing maintenance costs with a fully managed serverless solution. This new feature will help reduce PKI complexity by replacing on-premises certificate authorities with a highly secure hardware security module (HSM)-backed AWS Private CA. You will be able to automatically deploy certificates using auto-enrollment to on-premises AD and AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory.
AWS Payment Cryptography — The day before re:Inforce, AWS Payment Cryptography launched with general availability. This service simplifies cryptography operations in cloud-hosted payment applications. AWS Payment Cryptography simplifies your implementation of the cryptographic functions and key management used to secure data and operations in payment processing in accordance with various PCI standards.
AWS WAF Fraud Control launches account creation fraud prevention — AWS WAF Fraud Control announces Account Creation Fraud Prevention, a managed protection for AWS WAF that’s designed to prevent creation of fake or fraudulent accounts. Fraudsters use fake accounts to initiate activities, such as abusing promotional and sign-up bonuses, impersonating legitimate users, and carrying out phishing tactics. Account Creation Fraud Prevention helps protect your account sign-up or registration pages by allowing you to continuously monitor requests for anomalous digital activity and automatically block suspicious requests based on request identifiers and behavioral analysis.
AWS Security Hub automation rules —AWS Security Hub, a cloud security posture management service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts, and facilitates automated remediation, now features a capability to automatically update or suppress findings in near real time. You can now use automation rules to automatically update various fields in findings, suppress findings, update finding severity and workflow status, add notes, and more.
Amazon S3 announces dual-layer server-side encryption — Amazon S3 is the only cloud object storage service where you can apply two layers of encryption at the object level and control the data keys used for both layers. Dual-layer server-side encryption with keys stored in AWS Key Management Service (DSSE-KMS) is designed to adhere to National Security Agency Committee on National Security Systems Policy (CNSSP) 15 for FIPS compliance and Data-at-Rest Capability Package (DAR CP) Version 5.0 guidance for two layers of MFS U/00/814670-15 Commercial National Security Algorithm (CNSA) encryption.
AWS CloudTrail Lake dashboards — AWS CloudTrail Lake, a managed data lake that lets organizations aggregate, immutably store, visualize, and query their audit and security logs, announces the general availability of CloudTrail Lake dashboards. CloudTrail Lake dashboards provide out-of-the-box visualizations and graphs of key trends from your audit and security data directly within the CloudTrail console. It also offers the flexibility to drill down on additional details, such as specific user activity, for further analysis and investigation using CloudTrail Lake SQL queries.
AWS Well-Architected Profiles — AWS Well-Architected introduces Profiles, which allows you to tailor your Well-Architected reviews based on your business goals. This feature creates a mechanism for continuous improvement by encouraging you to review your workloads with certain goals in mind first, and then complete the remaining Well-Architected review questions.
Watch on demand
Leadership sessions — You can watch the leadership sessions to learn from AWS security experts as they talk about essential topics, including open source software (OSS) security, Zero Trust, compliance, and proactive security.
Breakout sessions, lightning talks, and more — Explore our content across these six tracks:
Application Security— Discover how AWS, customers, and AWS Partners move fast while understanding the security of the software they build.
Data Protection — Learn how AWS, customers, and AWS Partners work together to protect data. Get insights into trends in data management, cryptography, data security, data privacy, encryption, and key rotation and storage.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance — Dive into the latest hot topics in governance and compliance for security practitioners, and discover how to automate compliance tools and services for operational use.
Identity and Access Management — Learn how AWS, customers, and AWS Partners use AWS Identity Services to manage identities, resources, and permissions securely and at scale. Discover how to configure fine-grained access controls for your employees, applications, and devices and deploy permission guardrails across your organization.
Network and Infrastructure Security — Gain practical expertise on the services, tools, and products that AWS, customers, and partners use to protect the usability and integrity of their networks and data.
Threat Detection and Incident Response — Discover how AWS, customers, and AWS Partners get the visibility they need to improve their security posture, reduce the risk profile of their environments, identify issues before they impact business, and implement incident response best practices.
Session presentation downloads are also available on the AWS Events Content page. If you’re interested in further in-person security learning opportunities, consider registering for AWS re:Invent 2023, which will be held from November 27 to December 1 in Las Vegas, NV. We look forward to seeing you there!
If you would like to discuss how these new announcements can help your organization improve its security posture, AWS is here to help. Contact your AWS account team today.
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The threat detection and incident response track showcased how AWS customers can get the visibility they need to help improve their security posture, identify issues before they impact business, and investigate and respond quickly to security incidents across their environment.
With dozens of service and feature announcements—and innumerable best practices shared by AWS experts, customers, and partners—distilling highlights is a challenge. From an incident response perspective, three key themes emerged.
Proactively detect, contextualize, and visualize security events
When it comes to effectively responding to security events, rapid detection is key. Among the launches announced during the keynote was the expansion of Amazon Detective finding groups to include Amazon Inspector findings in addition to Amazon GuardDuty findings.
Detective, GuardDuty, and Inspector are part of a broad set of fully managed AWS security services that help you identify potential security risks, so that you can respond quickly and confidently.
Using machine learning, Detective finding groups can help you conduct faster investigations, identify the root cause of events, and map to the MITRE ATT&CK framework to quickly run security issues to ground. The finding group visualization panel shown in the following figure displays findings and entities involved in a finding group. This interactive visualization can help you analyze, understand, and triage the impact of finding groups.
Figure 1: Detective finding groups visualization panel
With the expanded threat and vulnerability findings announced at re:Inforce, you can prioritize where to focus your time by answering questions such as “was this EC2 instance compromised because of a software vulnerability?” or “did this GuardDuty finding occur because of unintended network exposure?”
In the session Streamline security analysis with Amazon Detective, AWS Principal Product Manager Rich Vorwaller, AWS Senior Security Engineer Rima Tanash, and AWS Program Manager Jordan Kramer demonstrated how to use graph analysis techniques and machine learning in Detective to identify related findings and resources, and investigate them together to accelerate incident analysis.
In addition to Detective, you can also use Amazon Security Lake to contextualize and visualize security events. Security Lake became generally available on May 30, 2023, and several re:Inforce sessions focused on how you can use this new service to assist with investigations and incident response.
As detailed in the following figure, Security Lake automatically centralizes security data from AWS environments, SaaS providers, on-premises environments, and cloud sources into a purpose-built data lake stored in your account. Security Lake makes it simpler to analyze security data, gain a more comprehensive understanding of security across an entire organization, and improve the protection of workloads, applications, and data. Security Lake automates the collection and management of security data from multiple accounts and AWS Regions, so you can use your preferred analytics tools while retaining complete control and ownership over your security data. Security Lake has adopted the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), an open standard. With OCSF support, the service normalizes and combines security data from AWS and a broad range of enterprise security data sources.
Figure 2: How Security Lake works
To date, 57 AWS security partners have announced integrations with Security Lake, and we now have more than 70 third-party sources, 16 analytics subscribers, and 13 service partners.
In Gaining insights from Amazon Security Lake, AWS Principal Solutions Architect Mark Keating and AWS Security Engineering Manager Keith Gilbert detailed how to get the most out of Security Lake. Addressing questions such as, “How do I get access to the data?” and “What tools can I use?,” they demonstrated how analytics services and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions can connect to and use data stored within Security Lake to investigate security events and identify trends across an organization. They emphasized how bringing together logs in multiple formats and normalizing them into a single format empowers security teams to gain valuable context from security data, and more effectively respond to events. Data can be queried with Amazon Athena, or pulled by Amazon OpenSearch Service or your SIEM system directly from Security Lake.
Build your security data lake with Amazon Security Lake featured AWS Product Manager Jonathan Garzon, AWS Product Solutions Architect Ross Warren, and Global CISO of Interpublic Group (IPG) Troy Wilkinson demonstrating how Security Lake helps address common challenges associated with analyzing enterprise security data, and detailing how IPG is using the service. Wilkinson noted that IPG’s objective is to bring security data together in one place, improve searches, and gain insights from their data that they haven’t been able to before.
“With Security Lake, we found that it was super simple to bring data in. Not just the third-party data and Amazon data, but also our on-premises data from custom apps that we built.” — Troy Wilkinson, global CISO, Interpublic Group
Use automation and machine learning to reduce mean time to response
Incident response automation can help free security analysts from repetitive tasks, so they can spend their time identifying and addressing high-priority security issues.
LLA operates in over 20 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean. After completing multiple acquisitions, LLA needed a centralized security operations team to handle incidents and notify the teams responsible for each AWS account. They used GuardDuty, Security Hub, and Systems Manager Incident Manager to automate and streamline detection and response, and they configured the services to initiate alerts whenever there was an issue requiring attention.
Speaking alongside AWS Principal Solutions Architect Jesus Federico and AWS Principal Product Manager Sarah Holberg, LLA Senior Manager of Cloud Services Joaquin Cameselle noted that when GuardDuty identifies a critical issue, it generates a new finding in Security Hub. This finding is then forwarded to Systems Manager Incident Manager through an Amazon EventBridge rule. This configuration helps ensure the involvement of the appropriate individuals associated with each account.
“We have deployed a security framework in Liberty Latin America to identify security issues and streamline incident response across over 180 AWS accounts. The framework that leverages AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Security Hub enabled us to detect and respond to incidents with greater efficiency. As a result, we have reduced our reaction time by 90%, ensuring prompt engagement of the appropriate teams for each AWS account and facilitating visibility of issues for the central security team.” — Joaquin Cameselle, senior manager, cloud services, Liberty Latin America
After describing the four phases of the incident response process — preparation and prevention; detection and analysis; containment, eradication, and recovery; and post-incident activity—AWS ProServe Global Financial Services Senior Engagement Manager Harikumar Subramonion noted that, to fully benefit from the cloud, you need to embrace automation. Automation benefits the third phase of the incident response process by speeding up containment, and reducing mean time to response.
Citibank Head of Cloud Security Operations Elvis Velez and Vice President of Cloud Security Damien Burks described how Citi built the Cloud Containment Automation Framework (CCAF) from the ground up by using AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda, enabling them to respond to events 24/7 without human error, and reduce the time it takes to contain resources from 4 hours to 15 minutes. Velez described how Citi uses adversary emulation exercises that use the MITRE ATT&CK Cloud Matrix to simulate realistic attacks on AWS environments, and continuously validate their ability to effectively contain incidents.
Innovate and do more with less
Security operations teams are often understaffed, making it difficult to keep up with alerts. According to data from CyberSeek, there are currently 69 workers available for every 100 cybersecurity job openings.
Effectively evaluating security and compliance posture is critical, despite resource constraints. In Centralizing security at scale with Security Hub and Intuit’s experience, AWS Senior Solutions Architect Craig Simon, AWS Senior Security Hub Product Manager Dora Karali, and Intuit Principal Software Engineer Matt Gravlin discussed how to ease security management with Security Hub. Fortune 500 financial software provider Intuit has approximately 2,000 AWS accounts, 10 million AWS resources, and receives 20 million findings a day from AWS services through Security Hub. Gravlin detailed Intuit’s Automated Compliance Platform (ACP), which combines Security Hub and AWS Config with an internal compliance solution to help Intuit reduce audit timelines, effectively manage remediation, and make compliance more consistent.
“By using Security Hub, we leveraged AWS expertise with their regulatory controls and best practice controls. It helped us keep up to date as new controls are released on a regular basis. We like Security Hub’s aggregation features that consolidate findings from other AWS services and third-party providers. I personally call it the super aggregator. A key component is the Security Hub to Amazon EventBridge integration. This allowed us to stream millions of findings on a daily basis to be inserted into our ACP database.” — Matt Gravlin, principal software engineer, Intuit
At AWS re:Inforce, we launched a new Security Hub capability for automating actions to update findings. You can now use rules to automatically update various fields in findings that match defined criteria. This allows you to automatically suppress findings, update the severity of findings according to organizational policies, change the workflow status of findings, and add notes. With automation rules, Security Hub provides you a simplified way to build automations directly from the Security Hub console and API. This reduces repetitive work for cloud security and DevOps engineers and can reduce mean time to response.
In Continuous innovation in AWS detection and response services, AWS Worldwide Security Specialist Senior Manager Himanshu Verma and GuardDuty Senior Manager Ryan Holland highlighted new features that can help you gain actionable insights that you can use to enhance your overall security posture. After mapping AWS security capabilities to the core functions of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, Verma and Holland provided an overview of AWS threat detection and response services that included a technical demonstration.
Bolstering incident response with AWS Wickr enterprise integrations highlighted how incident responders can collaborate securely during a security event, even on a compromised network. AWS Senior Security Specialist Solutions Architect Wes Wood demonstrated an innovative approach to incident response communications by detailing how you can integrate the end-to-end encrypted collaboration service AWS Wickr Enterprise with GuardDuty and AWS WAF. Using Wickr Bots, you can build integrated workflows that incorporate GuardDuty and third-party findings into a more secure, out-of-band communication channel for dedicated teams.
In the AWS Security Profile series, we interview Amazon Web Services (AWS) thought leaders who help keep our customers safe and secure. This interview features Matt Campagna, Senior Principal, Security Engineering, AWS Cryptography, and re:Inforce 2023 session speaker, who shares thoughts on data protection, cloud security, post-quantum cryptography, and more. Matthew was first profiled on the AWS Security Blog in 2019. This is part 1 of 3 in a series of interviews with our AWS Cryptography team.
What do you do in your current role and how long have you been at AWS?
I started at Amazon in 2013 as the first cryptographer at AWS. Today, my focus is on the cryptographic security of our customers’ data. I work across AWS to make sure that our cryptographic engineering meets our most sensitive customer needs. I lead our migration to quantum-resistant cryptography, and help make privacy-preserving cryptography techniques part of our security model.
How did you get started in the data protection and cryptography space? What about it piqued your interest?
I first learned about public-key cryptography (for example, RSA) during a math lesson about group theory. I found the mathematics intriguing and the idea of sending secret messages using only a public value astounding. My undergraduate and graduate education focused on group theory, and I started my career at the National Security Agency (NSA) designing and analyzing cryptologics. But what interests me most about cryptography is its ability to enable business by reducing risks. I look at cryptography as a financial instrument that affords new business cases, like e-commerce, digital currency, and secure collaboration. What enables Amazon to deliver for our customers is rooted in cryptography; our business exists because cryptography enables trust and confidentiality across the internet. I find this the most intriguing aspect of cryptography.
AWS has invested in the migration to post-quantum cryptography by contributing to post-quantum key agreement and post-quantum signature schemes to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of customer data. What should customers do to prepare for post-quantum cryptography?
Our focus at AWS is to help ensure that customers can migrate to post-quantum cryptography as fast as prudently possible. This work started with inventorying our dependencies on algorithms that aren’t known to be quantum-resistant, like integer-factorization-based cryptography, and discrete-log-based cryptography, like ECC. Customers can rely on AWS to assist with transitioning to post-quantum cryptography for their cloud computing needs.
We recommend customers begin inventorying their dependencies on algorithms that aren’t quantum-resistant, and consider developing a migration plan, to understand if they can migrate directly to new post-quantum algorithms or if they should re-architect them. For the systems that are provided by a technology provider, customers should ask what their strategy is for post-quantum cryptography migration.
AWS offers post-quantum TLS endpoints in some security services. Can you tell us about these endpoints and how customers can use them?
Our open source TLS implementation, s2n-TLS, includes post-quantum hybrid key exchange (PQHKEX) in its mainline. It’s deployed everywhere that s2n is deployed. AWS Key Management Service, AWS Secrets Manager, and AWS Certificate Manager have enabled PQHKEX cipher suites in our commercial AWS Regions. Today customers can use the AWS SDK for Java 2.0 to enable PQHKEX on their connection to AWS, and on the services that also have it enabled, they will negotiate a post-quantum key exchange method. As we enable these cipher suites on additional services, customers will also be able to connect to these services using PQHKEX.
You are a frequent contributor to the Amazon Science Blog. What were some of your recent posts about?
In 2022, we published a post on preparing for post-quantum cryptography, which provides general information on the broader industry development and deployment of post-quantum cryptography. The post links to a number of additional resources to help customers understand post-quantum cryptography. The AWS Post-Quantum Cryptography page and the Science Blog are great places to start learning about post-quantum cryptography.
We also published a post highlighting the security of post-quantum hybrid key exchange. Amazon believes in evidencing the cryptographic security of the solutions that we vend. We are actively participating in cryptographic research to validate the security that we provide in our services and tools.
What’s been the most dramatic change you’ve seen in the data protection and post-quantum cryptography landscape since we talked to you in 2019?
Since 2019, there have been two significant advances in the development of post-quantum cryptography.
First, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced their selection of PQC algorithms for standardization. NIST expects to finish the standardization of a post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism (Kyber) and digital signature scheme (Dilithium) by 2024 as part of the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS). NIST will also work on standardization of two additional signature standards (FALCON and SPHINCS+), and continue to consider future standardization of the key encapsulation mechanisms BIKE, HQC, and Classical McEliece.
Second, the NSA announced their Commercial National Security Algorithm (CNSA) Suite 2.0, which includes their timelines for National Security Systems (NSS) to migrate to post-quantum algorithms. The NSA will begin preferring post-quantum solutions in 2025 and expect that systems will have completed migration by 2033. Although this timeline might seem far away, it’s an aggressive strategy. Experience shows that it can take 20 years to develop and deploy new high-assurance cryptographic algorithms. If technology providers are not already planning to migrate their systems and services, they will be challenged to meet this timeline.
What makes cryptography exciting to you?
Cryptography is a dynamic area of research. In addition to the business applications, I enjoy the mathematics of cryptography. The state-of-the-art is constantly progressing in terms of new capabilities that cryptography can enable, and the potential risks to existing cryptographic primitives. This plays out in the public sphere of cryptographic research across the globe. These advancements are made public and are accessible for companies like AWS to innovate on behalf of our customers, and protect our systems in advance of the development of new challenges to our existing crypto algorithms. This is happening now as we monitor the advancements of quantum computing against our ability to define and deploy new high-assurance quantum-resistant algorithms. For me, it doesn’t get more exciting than this.
Where do you see the cryptography and post-quantum cryptography space heading to in the future?
While NIST transitions from their selection process to standardization, the broader cryptographic community will be more focused on validating the cryptographic assurances of these proposed schemes for standardization. This is a critical part of the process. I’m optimistic that we will enter 2025 with new cryptographic standards to deploy.
There is a lot of additional cryptographic research and engineering ahead of us. Applying these new primitives to the cryptographic applications that use classical asymmetric schemes still needs to be done. Some of this work is happening in parallel, like in the IETF TLS working group, and in the ETSI Quantum-Safe Cryptography Technical Committee. The next five years should see the adoption of PQHKEX in protocols like TLS, SSH, and IKEv2 and certification of new FIPS hardware security modules (HSMs) for establishing new post-quantum, long-lived roots of trust for code-signing and entity authentication.
I expect that the selected primitives for standardization will also be used to develop novel uses in fields like secure multi-party communication, privacy preserving machine learning, and cryptographic computing.
With AWS re:Inforce 2023 around the corner, what will your session focus on? What do you hope attendees will take away from your session?
Session DAP302 – “Post-quantum cryptography migration strategy for cloud services” is about the challenge quantum computers pose to currently used public-key cryptographic algorithms and how the industry is responding. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) offers a solution to this challenge, providing security to help protect against quantum computer cybersecurity events. We outline current efforts in PQC standardization and migration strategies. We want our customers to leave with a better understanding of the importance of PQC and the steps required to migrate to it in a cloud environment.
Is there something you wish customers would ask you about more often?
The question I am most interested in hearing from our customers is, “when will you have a solution to my problem?” If customers have a need for a novel cryptographic solution, I’m eager to try to solve that with them.
How about outside of work, any hobbies?
My main hobbies outside of work are biking and running. I wish I was as consistent attending to my hobbies as I am to my work desk. I am happier being able to run every day for a constant speed and distance as opposed to running faster or further tomorrow or next week. Last year I was fortunate enough to do the Cycle Oregon ride. I had registered for it twice before without being able to find the time to do it.
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In the AWS Security Profile series, we interview Amazon Web Services (AWS) experts who help keep our customers safe and secure. This interview features Valerie Lambert, Senior Software Development Engineer, Crypto Tools, and upcoming AWS re:Inforce 2023 speaker, who shares thoughts on data protection, cloud security, cryptography tools, and more.
What do you do in your current role and how long have you been at AWS? I’m a Senior Software Development Engineer on the AWS Crypto Tools team in AWS Cryptography. My team focuses on building open source, client-side encryption solutions, such as the AWS Encryption SDK. I’ve been working in this space for the past four years.
How did you get started in cryptography? What about it piqued your interest? When I started on this team back in 2019, I knew very little about the specifics of cryptography. I only knew its importance for securing our customers’ data and that security was our top priority at AWS. As a developer, I’ve always taken security and data protection very seriously, so when I learned about this particular team from one of my colleagues, I was immediately interested and wanted to learn more. It also helped that I’m a very math-oriented person. I find this domain endlessly interesting, and love that I have the opportunity to work with some truly amazing cryptography experts.
Why do cryptography tools matter today? Customers need their data to be secured, and builders need to have tools they can rely on to help provide that security. It’s well known that no one should cobble together their own encryption scheme. However, even if you use well-vetted, industry-standard cryptographic primitives, there are still many considerations when applying those primitives correctly. By using tools that are simple to use and hard to misuse, builders can be confident in protecting their customers’ most sensitive data, without cryptographic expertise required.
What’s been the most dramatic change you’ve seen in the data protection and cryptography space? In the past few years, I’ve seen more and more formal verification used to help prove various properties about complex systems, as well as build confidence in the correctness of our libraries. In particular, the AWS Crypto Tools team is using Dafny, a formal verification-aware programming language, to implement the business logic for some of our libraries. Given the high bar for correctness of cryptographic libraries, having formal verification as an additional tool in the toolbox has been invaluable. I look forward to how these tools mature in the next couple years.
You are speaking in Anaheim June 13-14 at AWS re:Inforce 2023 — what will your session focus on? Our team has put together a workshop (DAP373) that will focus on strategies to use client-side encryption with Amazon DynamoDB, specifically focusing on solutions for effectively searching on data that has been encrypted on the client side. I hope that attendees will see that, with a bit of forethought put into their data access patterns, they can still protect their data on the client side.
Where do you see the cryptography tools space heading in the future? More and more customers have been coming to us with use cases that involve client-side encryption with different database technologies. Although my team currently vends an out-of-the-box solution for DynamoDB, customers working with other database technologies have to build their own solutions to help keep their data safe. There are many, many considerations that come with encrypting data on the client side for use in a database, and it’s very expensive for customers to design, build, and maintain these solutions. The AWS Crypto Tools team is actively investigating this space—both how we can expand the usability of client-side encrypted data in DynamoDB, and how to bring our tools to more database technologies.
Is there something you wish customers would ask you about more often? Customers shouldn’t need to understand the cryptographic details that underpin the security properties that our tools provide to protect their end users’ data. However, I love when our customers are curious and ask questions and are themselves interested in the nitty-gritty details of our solutions.
How about outside of work, any hobbies? A couple years ago, I picked up aerial circus arts as a hobby. I’m still not very good, but it’s a lot of fun to play around on silks and trapeze. And it’s great exercise!
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In the AWS Security Profile series, we interview Amazon Web Services (AWS) thought leaders who help keep our customers safe and secure. This interview features Ritesh Desai, General Manager, AWS Secrets Manager, and re:Inforce 2023 session speaker, who shares thoughts on data protection, cloud security, secrets management, and more.
What do you do in your current role and how long have you been at AWS?
I’ve been in the tech industry for more than 20 years and joined AWS about three years ago. Currently, I lead our Secrets Management organization, which includes the AWS Secrets Manager service.
How did you get started in the data protection and secrets management space? What about it piqued your interest?
I’ve always been excited at the prospect of solving complex customer problems with simple technical solutions. Working across multiple small to large organizations in the past, I’ve seen similar challenges with secret sprawl and lack of auditing and monitoring tools. Centralized secrets management is a challenge for customers. As organizations evolve from start-up to enterprise level, they can end up with multiple solutions across organizational units to manage their secrets.
Being part of the Secrets Manager team gives me the opportunity to learn about our customers’ unique needs and help them protect access to their most sensitive digital assets in the cloud, at scale.
Why does secrets management matter to customers today?
Customers use secrets like database passwords and API keys to protect their most sensitive data, so it’s extremely important for them to invest in a centralized secrets management solution. Through secrets management, customers can securely store, retrieve, rotate, and audit secrets.
What’s been the most dramatic change you’ve seen in the data protection and secrets management space?
Secrets management is becoming increasingly important for customers, but customers now have to deal with complex environments that include single cloud providers like AWS, multi-cloud setups, hybrid (cloud and on-premises) environments, and only on-premises instances.
Customers tell us that they want centralized secrets management solutions that meet their expectations across these environments. They have two distinct goals here. First, they want a central secrets management tool or service to manage their secrets. Second, they want their secrets to be available closer to the applications where they’re run. IAM Roles Anywhere provides a secure way for on-premises servers to obtain temporary AWS credentials and removes the need to create and manage long-term AWS credentials. Now, customers can use IAM Roles Anywhere to access their Secrets Manager secrets from workloads running outside of AWS. Secrets Manager also launched a program in which customers can manage secrets in third-party secrets management solutions to replicate secrets to Secrets Manager for their AWS workloads. We’re continuing to invest in these areas to make it simpler for customers to manage their secrets in their tools of choice, while providing access to their secrets closer to where their applications are run.
With AWS re:Inforce 2023 around the corner, what will your session focus on? What do you hope attendees will take away from your session?
I’m speaking in a session called “Using AWS data protection services for innovation and automation” (DAP305) alongside one of our senior security specialist solutions architects on the topic of secrets management at scale. In the session, we’ll walk through a sample customer use case that highlights how to use data protection services like AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA), and Secrets Manager to help build securely and help meet organizational security and compliance expectations. Attendees will walk away with a clear picture of the services that AWS offers to protect sensitive data, and how they can use these services together to protect secrets at scale.
Where do you see the secrets management space heading in the future?
Traditionally, secrets management was addressed after development, rather than being part of the design and development process. This placement created an inherent clash between development teams who wanted to put the application in the hands of end users, and the security admins who wanted to verify that the application met security expectations. This resulted in longer timelines to get to market. Involving security in the mix only after development is complete, is simply too late. Security should enable business, not restrict it.
Organizations are slowly adopting the culture that “Security is everyone’s responsibility.” I expect more and more organizations will take the step to “shift-left” and embed security early in the development lifecycle. In the near future, I expect to see organizations prioritize the automation of security capabilities in the development process to help detect, remediate, and eliminate potential risks by taking security out of human hands.
Is there something you wish customers would ask you about more often?
I’m always happy to talk to customers to help them think through how to incorporate secure-by-design in their planning process. There are many situations where decisions could end up being expensive to reverse. AWS has a lot of experience working across a multitude of use cases for customers as they adopt secrets management solutions. I’d love to talk more to customers early in their cloud adoption journey, about the best practices that they should adopt and potential pitfalls to avoid, when they make decisions about secrets management and data protection.
How about outside of work—any hobbies?
I’m an avid outdoors person, and living in Seattle has given me and my family the opportunity to trek and hike through the beautiful landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. I’ve also been a consistent Tough Mudder-er for the last 5 years. The other thing that I spend my time on is working as an amateur actor for a friend’s nonprofit theater production, helping in any way I can.
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AWS re:Inforce is back, and we can’t wait to welcome security builders to Anaheim, CA, on June 13 and 14. AWS re:Inforce is a security learning conference where you can gain skills and confidence in cloud security, compliance, identity, and privacy. As an attendee, you will have access to hundreds of technical and non-technical sessions, an Expo featuring AWS experts and security partners with AWS Security Competencies, and keynote and leadership sessions featuring Security leadership. re:Inforce 2023 features content across the following six areas:
Data protection
Governance, risk, and compliance
Identity and access management
Network and infrastructure security
Threat detection and incident response
Application security
The threat detection and incident response track is designed to showcase how AWS, customers, and partners can intelligently detect potential security risks, centralize and streamline security management at scale, investigate and respond quickly to security incidents across their environment, and unlock security innovation across hybrid cloud environments.
Breakout sessions, chalk talks, and lightning talks
TDR201 | Breakout session | How Citi advanced their containment capabilities through automation Incident response is critical for maintaining the reliability and security of AWS environments. To support the 28 AWS services in their cloud environment, Citi implemented a highly scalable cloud incident response framework specifically designed for their workloads on AWS. Using AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda, Citi’s automated and orchestrated incident response plan follows NIST guidelines and has significantly improved its response time to security events. In this session, learn from real-world scenarios and examples on how to use AWS Step Functions and other core AWS services to effectively build and design scalable incident response solutions.
TDR202 | Breakout session | Wix’s layered security strategy to discover and protect sensitive data Wix is a leading cloud-based development platform that empowers users to get online with a personalized, professional web presence. In this session, learn how the Wix security team layers AWS security services including Amazon Macie, AWS Security Hub, and AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer to maintain continuous visibility into proper handling and usage of sensitive data. Using AWS security services, Wix can discover, classify, and protect sensitive information across terabytes of data stored on AWS and in public clouds as well as SaaS applications, while empowering hundreds of internal developers to drive innovation on the Wix platform.
TDR203 | Breakout session | Vulnerability management at scale drives enterprise transformation Automating vulnerability management at scale can help speed up mean time to remediation and identify potential business-impacting issues sooner. In this session, explore key challenges that organizations face when approaching vulnerability management across large and complex environments, and consider the innovative solutions that AWS provides to help overcome them. Learn how customers use AWS services such as Amazon Inspector to automate vulnerability detection, streamline remediation efforts, and improve compliance posture. Whether you’re just getting started with vulnerability management or looking to optimize your existing approach, gain valuable insights and inspiration to help you drive innovation and enhance your security posture with AWS.
TDR204 | Breakout session | Continuous innovation in AWS detection and response services Join this session to learn about the latest advancements and most recent AWS launches in detection and response. This session focuses on use cases such as automated threat detection, continual vulnerability management, continuous cloud security posture management, and unified security data management. Through these examples, gain a deeper understanding of how you can seamlessly integrate AWS services into your existing security framework to gain greater control and insight, quickly address security risks, and maintain the security of your AWS environment.
TDR205 | Breakout session | Build your security data lake with Amazon Security Lake, featuring Interpublic Group Security teams want greater visibility into security activity across their entire organizations to proactively identify potential threats and vulnerabilities. Amazon Security Lake automatically centralizes security data from cloud, on-premises, and custom sources into a purpose-built data lake stored in your account and allows you to use industry-leading AWS and third-party analytics and ML tools to gain insights from your data and identify security risks that require immediate attention. Discover how Security Lake can help you consolidate and streamline security logging at scale and speed, and hear from an AWS customer, Interpublic Group (IPG), on their experience.
TDR209 | Breakout session | Centralizing security at scale with Security Hub & Intuit’s experience As organizations move their workloads to the cloud, it becomes increasingly important to have a centralized view of security across their cloud resources. AWS Security Hub is a powerful tool that allows organizations to gain visibility into their security posture and compliance status across their AWS accounts and Regions. In this session, learn about Security Hub’s new capabilities that help simplify centralizing and operationalizing security. Then, hear from Intuit, a leading financial software company, as they share their experience and best practices for setting up and using Security Hub to centralize security management.
TDR210 | Breakout session | Streamline security analysis with Amazon Detective Join us to discover how to streamline security investigations and perform root-cause analysis with Amazon Detective. Learn how to leverage the graph analysis techniques in Detective to identify related findings and resources and investigate them together to accelerate incident analysis. Also hear a customer story about their experience using Detective to analyze findings automatically ingested from Amazon GuardDuty, and walk through a sample security investigation.
TDR310 | Breakout session | Developing new findings using machine learning in Amazon GuardDuty Amazon GuardDuty provides threat detection at scale, helping you quickly identify and remediate security issues with actionable insights and context. In this session, learn how GuardDuty continuously enhances its intelligent threat detection capabilities using purpose-built machine learning models. Discover how new findings are developed for new data sources using novel machine learning techniques and how they are rigorously evaluated. Get a behind-the-scenes look at GuardDuty findings from ideation to production, and learn how this service can help you strengthen your security posture.
TDR311 | Breakout session | Securing data and democratizing the alert landscape with an event-driven architecture Security event monitoring is a unique challenge for businesses operating at scale and seeking to integrate detections into their existing security monitoring systems while using multiple detection tools. Learn how organizations can triage and raise relevant cloud security findings across a breadth of detection tools and provide results to downstream security teams in a serverless manner at scale. We discuss how to apply a layered security approach to evaluate the security posture of your data, protect your data from potential threats, and automate response and remediation to help with compliance requirements.
TDR231 | Chalk talk | Operationalizing security findings at scale You enabled AWS Security Hub standards and checks across your AWS organization and in all AWS Regions. What should you do next? Should you expect zero critical and high findings? What is your ideal state? Is achieving zero findings possible? In this chalk talk, learn about a framework you can implement to triage Security Hub findings. Explore how this framework can be applied to several common critical and high findings, and take away mechanisms to prioritize and respond to security findings at scale.
TDR232 | Chalk talk | Act on security findings using Security Hub’s automation capabilities Alert fatigue, a shortage of skilled staff, and keeping up with dynamic cloud resources are all challenges that exist when it comes to customers successfully achieving their security goals in AWS. In order to achieve their goals, customers need to act on security findings associated with cloud-based resources. In this session, learn how to automatically, or semi-automatically, act on security findings aggregated in AWS Security Hub to help you secure your organization’s cloud assets across a diverse set of accounts and Regions.
TDR233 | Chalk talk | How LLA reduces incident response time with AWS Systems Manager Liberty Latin America (LLA) is a leading telecommunications company operating in over 20 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean. LLA offers communications and entertainment services, including video, broadband internet, telephony, and mobile services. In this chalk talk, discover how LLA implemented a security framework to detect security issues and automate incident response in more than 180 AWS accounts accessed by internal stakeholders and third-party partners using AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager, AWS Organizations, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Security Hub.
TDR432 | Chalk talk | Deep dive into exposed credentials and how to investigate them In this chalk talk, sharpen your detection and investigation skills to spot and explore common security events like unauthorized access with exposed credentials. Learn how to recognize the indicators of such events, as well as logs and techniques that unauthorized users use to evade detection. The talk provides knowledge and resources to help you immediately prepare for your own security investigations.
TDR332 | Chalk talk | Speed up zero-day vulnerability response In this chalk talk, learn how to scale vulnerability management for Amazon EC2 across multiple accounts and AWS Regions. Explore how to use Amazon Inspector, AWS Systems Manager, and AWS Security Hub to respond to zero-day vulnerabilities, and leave knowing how to plan, perform, and report on proactive and reactive remediations.
TDR333 | Chalk talk | Gaining insights from Amazon Security Lake You’ve created a security data lake, and you’re ingesting data. Now what? How do you use that data to gain insights into what is happening within your organization or assist with investigations and incident response? Join this chalk talk to learn how analytics services and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions can connect to and use data stored within Amazon Security Lake to investigate security events and identify trends across your organization. Leave with a better understanding of how you can integrate Amazon Security Lake with other business intelligence and analytics tools to gain valuable insights from your security data and respond more effectively to security events.
TDR431 | Chalk talk | The anatomy of a ransomware event Ransomware events can cost governments, nonprofits, and businesses billions of dollars and interrupt operations. Early detection and automated responses are important steps that can limit your organization’s exposure. In this chalk talk, examine the anatomy of a ransomware event that targets data residing in Amazon RDS and get detailed best practices for detection, response, recovery, and protection.
TDR221 | Lightning talk | Streamline security operations and improve threat detection with OCSF Security operations centers (SOCs) face significant challenges in monitoring and analyzing security telemetry data from a diverse set of sources. This can result in a fragmented and siloed approach to security operations that makes it difficult to identify and investigate incidents. In this lightning talk, get an introduction to the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) and its taxonomy constructs, and see a quick demo on how this normalized framework can help SOCs improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their security operations.
TDR222 | Lightning talk | Security monitoring for connected devices across OT, IoT, edge & cloud With the responsibility to stay ahead of cybersecurity threats, CIOs and CISOs are increasingly tasked with managing cybersecurity risks for their connected devices including devices on the operational technology (OT) side of the company. In this lightning talk, learn how AWS makes it simpler to monitor, detect, and respond to threats across the entire threat surface, which includes OT, IoT, edge, and cloud, while protecting your security investments in existing third-party security tools.
TDR223 | Lightning talk | Bolstering incident response with AWS Wickr enterprise integrations Every second counts during a security event. AWS Wickr provides end-to-end encrypted communications to help incident responders collaborate safely during a security event, even on a compromised network. Join this lightning talk to learn how to integrate AWS Wickr with AWS security services such as Amazon GuardDuty and AWS WAF. Learn how you can strengthen your incident response capabilities by creating an integrated workflow that incorporates GuardDuty findings into a secure, out-of-band communication channel for dedicated teams.
TDR224 | Lightning talk | Securing the future of mobility: Automotive threat modeling Many existing automotive industry cybersecurity threat intelligence offerings lack the connected mobility insights required for today’s automotive cybersecurity threat landscape. Join this lightning talk to learn about AWS’s approach to developing an automotive industry in-vehicle, domain-specific threat intelligence solution using AWS AI/ML services that proactively collect, analyze, and deduce threat intelligence insights for use and adoption across automotive value chains.
Hands-on sessions (builders’ sessions and workshops)
TDR251 | Builders’ session | Streamline and centralize security operations with AWS Security Hub AWS Security Hub provides you with a comprehensive view of the security state of your AWS resources by collecting security data from across AWS accounts, Regions, and services. In this builders’ session, explore best practices for using Security Hub to manage security posture, prioritize security alerts, generate insights, automate response, and enrich findings. Come away with a better understanding of how to use Security Hub features and practical tips for getting the most out of this powerful service.
TDR351 | Builders’ session | Broaden your scope: Analyze and investigate potential security issues In this builders’ session, learn how you can more efficiently triage potential security issues with a dynamic visual representation of the relationship between security findings and associated entities such as accounts, IAM principals, IP addresses, Amazon S3 buckets, and Amazon EC2 instances. With Amazon Detective finding groups, you can group related Amazon GuardDuty findings to help reduce time spent in security investigations and in understanding the scope of a potential issue. Leave this hands-on session knowing how to quickly investigate and discover the root cause of an incident.
TDR352 | Builders’ session | How to automate containment and forensics for Amazon EC2 In this builders’ session, learn how to deploy and scale the self-service Automated Forensics Orchestrator for Amazon EC2 solution, which gives you a standardized and automated forensics orchestration workflow capability to help you respond to Amazon EC2 security events. Explore the prerequisites and ways to customize the solution to your environment.
TDR353 | Builders’ session | Detecting suspicious activity in Amazon S3 Have you ever wondered how to uncover evidence of unauthorized activity in your AWS account? In this builders’ session, join the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) for a guided simulation of suspicious activity within an AWS account involving unauthorized data exfiltration and Amazon S3 bucket and object data deletion. Learn how to detect and respond to this malicious activity using AWS services like AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Athena, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon CloudWatch, and nontraditional threat detection services like AWS Billing to uncover evidence of unauthorized use.
TDR354 | Builders’ session | Simulate and detect unwanted IMDS access due to SSRF Using appropriate security controls can greatly reduce the risk of unauthorized use of web applications. In this builders’ session, find out how the server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability works, how unauthorized users may try to use it, and most importantly, how to detect it and prevent it from being used to access the instance metadata service (IMDS). Also, learn some of the detection activities that the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) performs when responding to security events of this nature.
TDR341 | Code talk | Investigating incidents with Amazon Security Lake & Jupyter notebooks In this code talk, watch as experts live code and build an incident response playbook for your AWS environment using Jupyter notebooks, Amazon Security Lake, and Python code. Leave with a better understanding of how to investigate and respond to a security event and how to use these technologies to more effectively and quickly respond to disruptions.
TDR441 | Code talk | How to run security incident response in your Amazon EKS environment Join this Code Talk to get both an adversary’s and a defender’s point of view as AWS experts perform live exploitation of an application running on multiple Amazon EKS clusters, invoking an alert in Amazon GuardDuty. Experts then walk through incident response procedures to detect, contain, and recover from the incident in near real-time. Gain an understanding of how to respond and recover to Amazon EKS-specific incidents as you watch the events unfold.
TDR271-R | Workshop | Chaos Kitty: Gamifying incident response with chaos engineering When was the last time you simulated an incident? In this workshop, learn to build a sandbox environment to gamify incident response with chaos engineering. You can use this sandbox to test out detection capabilities, play with incident response runbooks, and illustrate how to integrate AWS resources with physical devices. Walk away understanding how to get started with incident response and how you can use chaos engineering principles to create mechanisms that can improve your incident response processes.
TDR371-R | Workshop | Threat detection and response on AWS Join AWS experts for a hands-on threat detection and response workshop using Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon Detective. This workshop simulates security events for different types of resources and behaviors and illustrates both manual and automated responses with AWS Lambda. Dive in and learn how to improve your security posture by operationalizing threat detection and response on AWS.
TDR372-R | Workshop | Container threat detection with AWS security services Join AWS experts for a hands-on container security workshop using AWS threat detection and response services. This workshop simulates scenarios and security events while using Amazon EKS and demonstrates how to use different AWS security services to detect and respond to events and improve your security practices. Dive in and learn how to improve your security posture when running workloads on Amazon EKS.
Browse the full re:Inforce catalog to get details on additional sessions and content at the event, including gamified learning, leadership sessions, partner sessions, and labs.
If you want to learn the latest threat detection and incident response best practices and updates, join us in California by registering for re:Inforce 2023. We look forward to seeing you there!
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.
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A full conference pass is $1,099. Register today with the code secure150off to receive a limited time $150 discount, while supplies last.
AWS re:Inforce 2023 is fast approaching, and this post can help you plan your agenda with a look at the sessions in the identity and access management track. AWS re:Inforce is a learning conference where you can learn more about cloud security, compliance, identity, and privacy. You have access to hundreds of technical and non-technical sessions, an AWS Partner expo featuring security partners with AWS Security Competencies, and keynote and leadership sessions featuring AWS Security leadership. AWS re:Inforce 2023 will take place in-person in Anaheim, California, on June 13 and 14. re:Inforce 2023 features content in the following six areas:
The identity and access management track will share recommended practices and learnings for identity management and governance in AWS environments. You will hear from other AWS customers about how they are building customer identity and access management (CIAM) patterns for great customer experiences and new approaches for managing standard, elevated, and privileged workforce access. You will also hear from AWS leaders about accelerating the journey to least privilege with access insights and the role of identity within a Zero Trust architecture.
This post highlights some of the identity and access management sessions that you can sign up for, including breakout sessions, chalk talks, code talks, lightning talks, builders’ sessions, and workshops. For the full catalog, see the AWS re:Inforce catalog preview.
Breakout sessions
Lecture-style presentations that cover topics at all levels and delivered by AWS experts, builders, customers, and partners. Breakout sessions typically include 10–15 minutes of Q&A at the end.
IAM201: A first-principles approach: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Learning how to build effectively and securely on AWS starts with a strong working knowledge of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). In this session aimed at engineers who build on AWS, explore a no-jargon, first-principles approach to IAM. Learn the fundamental concepts of IAM authentication and authorization policies as well as concrete techniques that you can immediately apply to the workloads you run on AWS.
IAM301: Establishing a data perimeter on AWS, featuring USAA In this session, dive deep into the data perimeter controls that help you manage your trusted identities and their access to trusted resources from expected networks. USAA shares how they use automation to embed security and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) baselines to empower a self-service mindset. Learn how they use data perimeters to support decentralization without compromising on security. Also, discover how USAA uses a threat-based approach to prioritize implementation of specific data perimeters.
IAM302: Create enterprise-wide preventive guardrails, featuring Inter & Co. In this session, learn how to establish permissions guardrails within your multi-account environment with AWS Organizations and service control policies (SCPs). Explore how effective use of SCPs can help your builders innovate on AWS while maintaining a high bar on security. Learn about the strategies to incorporate SCPs at different levels within your organization. In addition, Inter & Co. share their strategies for implementing enterprise-wide guardrails at scale within their multi-account environments. Discover how they use code repositories and CI/CD pipelines to manage approvals and deployments of SCPs.
IAM303: Balance least privilege & agile development, feat. Fidelity & Merck Finding a proper balance between securing multiple AWS accounts and enabling agile development to accelerate business innovation has been key to the cloud adoption journey for AWS customers. In this session, learn how Fidelity and Merck empowered their business stakeholders to quickly develop solutions while still conforming to security standards and operating within the guardrails at scale.
IAM304: Migrating to Amazon Cognito, featuring approaches from Fandango Digital transformation of customer-facing applications often involves changes to identity and access management to help improve security and user experience. This process can benefit from fast-growing technologies and open standards and may involve migration to a modern customer identity and access management solution, such as Amazon Cognito, that offers the security and scale your business requires. There are several ways to approach migrating users to Amazon Cognito. In this session, learn about options and best practices, as well as lessons learned from Fandango’s migration to Amazon Cognito.
IAM305: Scaling access with AWS IAM Identity Center, feat. Allegiant Airlines In this session, learn how to scale assignment of permission sets to users and groups by automating federated role-based access to any AWS accounts in your organization. As a highlight of this session, hear Allegiant Airlines’ success story of how this automation has benefited Allegiant by centralizing management of federated access for their organization of more than 5,000 employees. Additionally, explore how to build this automation in your environment using infrastructure as code tools like Terraform and AWS CloudFormation using a CI/CD pipeline.
IAM306: Managing hybrid workloads with IAM Roles Anywhere, featuring Hertz A key element of using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Roles Anywhere is managing how identities are assigned to your workloads. In this session, learn how you can define and manage identities for your workloads, how to use those identities to control access to an AWS resource via attribute-based access control (ABAC), and how to monitor and audit activities performed by those identities. Discover key concepts, best practices, and troubleshooting tips. Hertz describes how they used IAM Roles Anywhere to secure access to AWS services from Salesforce and how it has improved their overall security posture.
IAM307: Steps towards a Zero Trust architecture on AWS Modern workplaces have evolved beyond traditional network boundaries as they have expanded to hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Identity has taken center stage for information security teams. The need for fine-grained, identity-based authorization, flexible identity-aware networks, and the removal of unneeded pathways to data has accelerated the adoption of Zero Trust principles and architecture. In this session, learn about different architecture patterns and security mechanisms available from AWS that you can apply to secure standard, sensitive, and privileged access to your critical data and workloads.
Builders’ sessions
Small-group sessions led by an AWS expert who guides you as you build the service or product on your own laptop. Use your laptop to experiment and build along with the AWS expert.
IAM351: Sharing resources across accounts with least-privilege permissions Are you looking to manage your resource access control permissions? Learn how you can author customer managed permissions to provide least-privilege access to your resources shared using AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM). Explore how to use customer managed permissions with use cases ranging from managing incident response with AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager to enhancing your IP security posture with Amazon VPC IP Address Manager.
IAM352: Cedar policy language in action Cedar is a language for defining permissions as policies that describe who should have access to what. Amazon Verified Permissions and AWS Verified Access use Cedar to define fine-grained permissions for applications and end users. In this builders’ session, come learn by building Cedar policies for access control.
IAM355: Using passwordless authentication with Amazon Cognito and WebAuthn In recent years, passwordless authentication has been on the rise. The FIDO Alliance, a first-mover for enabling passwordless in 2009, is an open industry association whose stated mission is to develop and promote authentication standards that “help reduce the world’s over-reliance on passwords.” This builders’ session allows participants to learn about and follow the steps to implement a passwordless authentication experience on a web or mobile application using Amazon Cognito.
IAM356: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies troubleshooting In this builders’ session, walk through practical examples that can help you build, test, and troubleshoot AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. Utilize a workflow that can help you create fine-grained access policies with the help of the IAM API, the AWS Management Console, and AWS CloudTrail. Also review key concepts of IAM policy evaluation logic.
Chalk talks
Highly interactive sessions with a small audience. Experts lead you through problems and solutions on a digital whiteboard as the discussion unfolds.
IAM231: Lessons learned from AWS IAM Identity Center migrations In this chalk talk, discover best practices and tips to migrate your workforce users’ access from IAM users to AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On). Learn how to create preventive guardrails, gain visibility into the usage of IAM users across an organization, and apply authentication solutions for common use cases.
IAM331: Leaving IAM access keys behind: A modern path forward Static credentials have been used for a long time to secure multiple types of access, including access keys for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, command line tools, secure shell access, application API keys, and pre-shared keys for VPN access. However, best practice recommends replacing static credentials with short-term credentials. In this chalk talk, learn how to identify static access keys in your environment, quantify the risk, and then apply multiple available methods to replace them with short-term credentials. The talk also covers prescriptive guidance and best practice advice for improving your overall management of IAM access keys.
IAM332: Practical identity and access management: The basics of IAM on AWS Learn from prescriptive guidance on how to build an Identity and Access Management strategy on AWS. We provide guidance on human access versus machine access using services like IAM Identity Center. You will also learn about the different IAM policy types, where each policy type is useful, and how you should incorporate each policy type in your AWS environment. This session will walk you through what you need to know to build an effective identity and access management baseline.
IAM431: A tour of the world of IAM policy evaluation This session takes you beyond the basics of IAM policy evaluation and focuses on how policy evaluation works with advanced AWS features. Hear about how policies are evaluated alongside AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key grants, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) access points, Amazon VPC Lattice, and more. You’ll leave this session with prescriptive guidance on what to do and what to avoid when designing authorization schemes.
Code talks
Engaging, code-focused sessions with a small audience. AWS experts lead an interactive discussion featuring live coding and/or code samples as they explain the “why” behind AWS solutions.
IAM341: Cedar: Fast, safe, and fine-grained access for your applications Cedar is a new policy language that helps you write fine-grained permissions in your applications. With Cedar, you can customize authorization and you can define and enforce who can access what. This code talk explains the design of Cedar, how it was built to a high standard of assurance, and its benefits. Learn what makes Cedar ergonomic, fast, and analyzable: simple syntax for expressing common authorization use cases, policy structure that allows for scalable real-time evaluation, and comprehensive auditing based on automated reasoning. Also find out how Cedar’s implementation was made safer through formal verification and differential testing.
IAM441: Enable new Amazon Cognito use cases with OAuth2.0 flows Delegated authorization without user interaction on a consumer device and reinforced passwordless authentication for higher identity assurance are advanced authentication flows achievable with Amazon Cognito. In this code talk, you can discover new OAuth2.0 flow diagrams, code snippets, and long and short demos that offer different approaches to these authentication use cases. Gain confidence using AWS Lambda triggers with Amazon Cognito, native APIs, and OAuth2.0 endpoints to help ensure greater success in customer identity and access management strategy.
Lightning talks
Short and focused theater presentations that are dedicated to either a specific customer story, service demo, or partner offering (sponsored).
IAM221: Accelerate your business with AWS Directory Service In this lightning talk, explore AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory and discover a number of use cases that provide flexibility, empower agile application development, and integrate securely with other identity stores. Join the talk to discover how you can take advantage of this managed service and focus on what really matters to your customers.
IAM321: Move toward least privilege with IAM Access Analyzer AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer provides tools that simplify permissions management by making it easy for organizations to set, verify, and refine permissions. In this lightning talk, dive into how you can detect resources shared with an external entity across one or multiple AWS accounts with IAM Access Analyzer. Find out how you can activate and use this feature and how it integrates with AWS Security Hub.
Workshops
Interactive learning sessions where you work in small teams to solve problems using AWS Cloud security services. Come prepared with your laptop and a willingness to learn!
IAM371: Building a Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) solution How do your customers access your application? Get a head start on customer identity and access management (CIAM) by using Amazon Cognito. Join this workshop to learn how to build CIAM solutions on AWS using Amazon Cognito, Amazon Verified Permissions, and several other AWS services. Start from the basic building blocks of CIAM and build up to advanced user identity and access management use cases in customer-facing applications.
IAM372: Consuming AWS Resources from everywhere with IAM Roles Anywhere If your workload already lives on AWS, then there is a high chance that some temporary AWS credentials have been securely distributed to perform needed tasks. But what happens when your workload is on premises? In this workshop, learn how to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Roles Anywhere. Start from the basics and create the necessary steps to learn how to use your applications outside of AWS in a safe way using IAM Roles Anywhere in practice.
IAM373: Building a data perimeter to allow access to authorized users In this workshop, learn how to create a data perimeter by building controls that allow access to data only from expected network locations and by trusted identities. The workshop consists of five modules, each designed to illustrate a different AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) principle or network control. Learn where and how to implement the appropriate controls based on different risk scenarios.
If these sessions look interesting to you, join us in Anaheim by registering for AWS re:Inforce 2023. We look forward to seeing you there!
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.
Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.
A full conference pass is $1,099. Register today with the code secure150off to receive a limited time $150 discount, while supplies last.
AWS re:Inforce is fast approaching, and this post can help you plan your agenda. AWS re:Inforce is a security learning conference where you can gain skills and confidence in cloud security, compliance, identity, and privacy. As a re:Inforce attendee, you have access to hundreds of technical and non-technical sessions, an Expo featuring AWS experts and security partners with AWS Security Competencies, and keynote and leadership sessions featuring Security leadership. AWS re:Inforce 2023 will take place in-person in Anaheim, CA, on June 13 and 14. re:Inforce 2023 features content in the following six areas:
Data Protection
Governance, Risk, and Compliance
Identity and Access Management
Network and Infrastructure Security
Threat Detection and Incident Response
Application Security
The data protection track will showcase services and tools that you can use to help achieve your data protection goals in an efficient, cost-effective, and repeatable manner. You will hear from AWS customers and partners about how they protect data in transit, at rest, and in use. Learn how experts approach data management, key management, cryptography, data security, data privacy, and encryption. This post will highlight of some of the data protection offerings that you can add to your agenda. To learn about sessions from across the content tracks, see the AWS re:Inforce catalog preview.
“re:Inforce is a great opportunity for us to hear directly from our customers, understand their unique needs, and use customer input to define solutions that protect sensitive data. We also use this opportunity to deliver content focused on the latest security research and trends, and I am looking forward to seeing you all there. Security is everyone’s job, and at AWS, it is job zero.” — Ritesh Desai, General Manager, AWS Secrets Manager
Breakout sessions, chalk talks, and lightning talks
DAP301: Moody’s database secrets management at scale with AWS Secrets Manager Many organizations must rotate database passwords across fleets of on-premises and cloud databases to meet various regulatory standards and enforce security best practices. One-time solutions such as scripts and runbooks for password rotation can be cumbersome. Moody’s sought a custom solution that satisfies the goal of managing database passwords using well-established DevSecOps processes. In this session, Moody’s discusses how they successfully used AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Lambda, along with open-source CI/CD system Jenkins, to implement database password lifecycle management across their fleet of databases spanning nonproduction and production environments.
DAP401: Security design of the AWS Nitro System The AWS Nitro System is the underlying platform for all modern Amazon EC2 instances. In this session, learn about the inner workings of the Nitro System and discover how it is used to help secure your most sensitive workloads. Explore the unique design of the Nitro System’s purpose-built hardware and software components and how they operate together. Dive into specific elements of the Nitro System design, including eliminating the possibility of operator access and providing a hardware root of trust and cryptographic system integrity protections. Learn important aspects of the Amazon EC2 tenant isolation model that provide strong mitigation against potential side-channel issues.
DAP322: Integrating AWS Private CA with SPIRE and Ottr at Coinbase Coinbase is a secure online platform for buying, selling, transferring, and storing cryptocurrency. This lightning talk provides an overview of how Coinbase uses AWS services, including AWS Private CA, AWS Secrets Manager, and Amazon RDS, to build out a Zero Trust architecture with SPIRE for service-to-service authentication. Learn how short-lived certificates are issued safely at scale for X.509 client authentication (i.e., Amazon MSK) with Ottr.
DAP331: AWS Private CA: Building better resilience and revocation techniques In this chalk talk, explore the concept of PKI resiliency and certificate revocation for AWS Private CA, and discover the reasons behind multi-Region resilient private PKI. Dive deep into different revocation methods like certificate revocation list (CRL) and Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) and compare their advantages and limitations. Leave this talk with the ability to better design resiliency and revocations.
DAP231: Securing your application data with AWS storage services Critical applications that enterprises have relied on for years were designed for the database block storage and unstructured file storage prevalent on premises. Now, organizations are growing with cloud services and want to bring their security best practices along. This chalk talk explores the features for securing application data using Amazon FSx, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). Learn about the fundamentals of securing your data, including encryption, access control, monitoring, and backup and recovery. Dive into use cases for different types of workloads, such as databases, analytics, and content management systems.
Hands-on sessions (builders’ sessions and workshops)
DAP353: Privacy-enhancing data collaboration with AWS Clean Rooms Organizations increasingly want to protect sensitive information and reduce or eliminate raw data sharing. To help companies meet these requirements, AWS has built AWS Clean Rooms. This service allows organizations to query their collective data without needing to expose the underlying datasets. In this builders’ session, get hands-on with AWS Clean Rooms preventative and detective privacy-enhancing controls to mitigate the risk of exposing sensitive data.
DAP371: Post-quantum crypto with AWS KMS TLS endpoints, SDKs, and libraries This hands-on workshop demonstrates post-quantum cryptographic algorithms and compares their performance and size to classical ones. Learn how to use AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) with the AWS SDK for Java to establish a quantum-safe tunnel to transfer the most critical digital secrets and protect them from a theoretical computer targeting these communications in the future. Find out how the tunnels use classical and quantum-resistant key exchanges to offer the best of both worlds, and discover the performance implications.
DAP271: Data protection risk assessment for AWS workloads Join this workshop to learn how to simplify the process of selecting the right tools to mitigate your data protection risks while reducing costs. Follow the data protection lifecycle by conducting a risk assessment, selecting the effective controls to mitigate those risks, deploying and configuring AWS services to implement those controls, and performing continuous monitoring for audits. Leave knowing how to apply the right controls to mitigate your business risks using AWS advanced services for encryption, permissions, and multi-party processing.
If these sessions look interesting to you, join us in California by registering for re:Inforce 2023. We look forward to seeing you there!
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A full conference pass is $1,099. Register today with the code secure150off to receive a limited time $150 discount, while supplies last.
AWS re:Inforce is a security learning conference where you can gain skills and confidence in cloud security, compliance, identity, and privacy. As a re:Inforce attendee, you have access to hundreds of technical and non-technical sessions, an Expo featuring AWS experts and security partners with AWS Security Competencies, and keynote and leadership sessions featuring Security leadership. AWS re:Inforce 2023 will take place in-person in Anaheim, CA, on June 13 and 14.
In these sessions, you’ll hear directly from AWS leaders and get hands-on with the tools that help you ship securely. You’ll hear how organization and culture help security accelerate your business, and you’ll dive deep into the technology that helps you more swiftly get features to customers. You might even find some new tools that make it simpler to empower your builders to move quickly and ship securely.
Breakout sessions, chalk talks, and lightning talks
APS221: From code to insight: Amazon Inspector & AWS Lambda in action In this lightning talk, see a demo of Amazon Inspector support for AWS Lambda. Inspect a Java application running on Lambda for security vulnerabilities using Amazon Inspector for an automated and continual vulnerability assessment. In addition, explore how Amazon Inspector can help you identify package and code vulnerabilities in your serverless applications.
APS302: From IDE to code review, increasing quality and security Attend this session to discover how to improve the quality and security of your code early in the development cycle. Explore how you can integrate Amazon Code Whisperer, Amazon CodeGuru reviewer, and Amazon Inspector into your development workflow, which can help you identify potential issues and automate your code review process.
APS201: How AWS and MongoDB raise the security bar with distributed ownership In this session, explore how AWS and MongoDB have approached creating their Security Guardians and Security Champions programs. Learn practical advice on scoping, piloting, measuring, scaling, and managing a program with the goal of accelerating development with a high security bar, and discover tips on how to bridge the gap between your security and development teams. Learn how a guardians or champions program can improve security outside of your dev teams for your company as a whole when applied broadly across your organization.
APS202: AppSec tooling & culture tips from AWS & Toyota Motor North America In this session, AWS and Toyota Motor North America (TMNA) share how they scale AppSec tooling and culture across enterprise organizations. Discover practical advice and lessons learned from the AWS approach to threat modeling across hundreds of service teams. In addition, gain insight on how TMNA has embedded security engineers into business units working on everything from mainframes to serverless. Learn ways to support teams at varying levels of maturity, the importance of differentiating between risks and vulnerabilities, and how to balance the use of cloud-native, third-party, and open-source tools at scale.
APS331: Shift security left with the AWS integrated builder experience As organizations start building their applications on AWS, they use a wide range of highly capable builder services that address specific parts of the development and management of these applications. The AWS integrated builder experience (IBEX) brings those separate pieces together to create innovative solutions for both customers and AWS Partners building on AWS. In this chalk talk, discover how you can use IBEX to shift security left by designing applications with security best practices built in and by unlocking agile software to help prevent security issues and bottlenecks.
Hands-on sessions (builders’ sessions and workshops)
APS271: Threat modeling for builders Attend this facilitated workshop to get hands-on experience creating a threat model for a workload. Learn some of the background and reasoning behind threat modeling, and explore tools and techniques for modeling systems, identifying threats, and selecting mitigations. In addition, explore the process for creating a system model and corresponding threat model for a serverless workload. Learn how AWS performs threat modeling internally, and discover the principles to effectively perform threat modeling on your own workloads.
APS371: Integrating open-source security tools with the AWS code services AWS, open-source, and partner tooling works together to accelerate your software development lifecycle. In this workshop, learn how to use Automated Security Helper (ASH), a source-application security tool, to quickly integrate various security testing tools into your software build and deployment flows. AWS experts guide you through the process of security testing locally on your machines and within the AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline services. In addition, discover how to identify potential security issues in your applications through static analysis, software composition analysis, and infrastructure-as-code testing.
APS352: Practical shift left for builders Providing early feedback in the development lifecycle maximizes developer productivity and enables engineering teams to deliver quality products. In this builders’ session, learn how to use AWS Developer Tools to empower developers to make good security decisions early in the development cycle. Tools such as Amazon CodeGuru, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and Amazon DevOps Guru can provide continuous real-time feedback upon each code commit into a source repository and supplement this with ML capabilities integrated into the code review stage.
APS351: Secure software factory on AWS through the DoD DevSecOps lens Modern information systems within regulated environments are driven by the need to develop software with security at the forefront. Increasingly, organizations are adopting DevSecOps and secure software factory patterns to improve the security of their software delivery lifecycle. In this builder’s session, we will explore the options available on AWS to create a secure software factory aligned with the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps initiative. We will focus on the security of the software supply chain as we deploy code from source to an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) environment.
If these sessions look interesting to you, join us in California by registering for re:Inforce 2023. We look forward to seeing you there!
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.
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I’d like to personally invite you to attend the Amazon Web Services (AWS) security conference, AWS re:Inforce 2023, in Anaheim, CA on June 13–14, 2023. You’ll have access to interactive educational content to address your security, compliance, privacy, and identity management needs. Join security experts, peers, leaders, and partners from around the world who are committed to the highest security standards, and learn how your business can stay ahead in the rapidly evolving security landscape.
As Chief Information Security Officer of AWS, my primary job is to help you navigate your security journey while keeping the AWS environment secure. AWS re:Inforce offers an opportunity for you to dive deep into how to use security to drive adaptability and speed for your business. With headlines currently focused on the macroeconomy and broader technology topics such as the intersection between AI and security, this is your chance to learn the tactical and strategic lessons that will help you develop a security culture that facilitates business innovation.
Here are a few reasons I’m especially looking forward to this year’s program:
Sharing my keynote, including the latest innovations in cloud security and what AWS Security is focused on
AWS re:Inforce 2023 will kick off with my keynote on Tuesday, June 13, 2023 at 9 AM PST. I’ll be joined by Steve Schmidt, Chief Security Officer (CSO) of Amazon, and other industry-leading guest speakers. You’ll hear all about the latest innovations in cloud security from AWS and learn how you can improve the security posture of your business, from the silicon to the top of the stack. Take a look at my most recent re:Invent presentation, What we can learn from customers: Accelerating innovation at AWS Security and the latest re:Inforce keynote for examples of the type of content to expect.
Engaging sessions with real-world examples of how security is embedded into the way businesses operate
AWS re:Inforce offers an opportunity to learn how to prioritize and optimize your security investments, be more efficient, and respond faster to an evolving landscape. Using the Security pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, these sessions will demonstrate how you can build practical and prescriptive measures to protect your data, systems, and assets.
Sessions are offered at all levels and all backgrounds. Depending on your interests and educational needs, AWS re:Inforce is designed to meet you where you are on your cloud security journey. There are learning opportunities in several hundred sessions across six tracks: Data Protection; Governance, Risk & Compliance; Identity & Access Management; Network & Infrastructure Security, Threat Detection & Incident Response; and, this year, Application Security—a brand-new track. In this new track, discover how AWS experts, customers, and partners move fast while maintaining the security of the software they are building. You’ll hear from AWS leaders and get hands-on experience with the tools that can help you ship quickly and securely.
Shifting security into the “department of yes”
Rather than being seen as the proverbial “department of no,” IT teams have the opportunity to make security a business differentiator, especially when they have the confidence and tools to do so. AWS re:Inforce provides unique opportunities to connect with and learn from AWS experts, customers, and partners who share insider insights that can be applied immediately in your everyday work. The conference sessions, led by AWS leaders who share best practices and trends, will include interactive workshops, chalk talks, builders’ sessions, labs, and gamified learning. This means you’ll be able to work with experts and put best practices to use right away.
Our Expo offers opportunities to connect face-to-face with AWS security solution builders who are the tip of the spear for security. You can ask questions and build solutions together. AWS Partners that participate in the Expo have achieved security competencies and are there to help you find ways to innovate and scale your business.
A full conference pass is $1,099. Register today with the code ALUMwrhtqhv to receive a limited time $300 discount, while supplies last.
I’m excited to see everyone at re:Inforce this year. Please join us for this unique event that showcases our commitment to giving you direct access to the latest security research and trends. Our teams at AWS will continue to release additional details about the event on our website, and you can get real-time updates by following @awscloud and @AWSSecurityInfo.
I look forward to seeing you in Anaheim and providing insight into how we prioritize security at AWS to help you navigate your cloud security investments.
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AWS re:Inforce returned to Boston, MA, in July after 2 years, and we were so glad to be back in person with customers. The conference featured over 250 sessions and hands-on labs, 100 AWS partner sponsors, and over 6,000 attendees over 2 days. If you weren’t able to join us in person, or just want to revisit some of the themes, this blog post is for you. It summarizes all the key announcements and points to where you can watch the event keynote, sessions, and partner lightning talks on demand.
Key announcements
Here are some of the announcements that we made at AWS re:Inforce 2022.
Free MFA token ordering portal – We’ve made our free multi-factor authentication (MFA) security key program easier. We now have an ordering portal in the AWS Management Console where eligible customers can order their token. In response to customer demand, we’ve streamlined the ordering process, especially for linked accounts. At this time, only US-based AWS account root users who have spent more than $100 each month over the past 3 months are eligible to place an order.
IAM Roles Anywhere – This new feature extends the capabilities of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles to workloads outside of AWS. You can use IAM Roles Anywhere to provide a secure way for on-premises servers, containers, or applications to obtain temporary AWS credentials and remove the need for creating and managing long-term AWS credentials.
AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights – This new feature helps simplify third-party software risk assessments by compiling security and compliance information in a unified dashboard.
AWS Cloud Audit Academy – PCI DSS on AWS – Cloud Audit Academy (CAA) PCI DSS on AWS is the third course in the AWS security auditing learning path. This path is designed for those who are in auditing, risk, and compliance roles and who are involved in assessing regulated workloads in the cloud.
New workshop – Threat modeling the right way for builders – This workshop introduces you to the background of threat modeling and why to do it, as well as some of the tools and techniques for modeling systems, identifying threats, and selecting mitigations.
Enable secure communication with end-to-end encryption with AWS Wickr, and collaborate on calls with confidence. AWS Wickr encrypts messages, calls, and files with a proprietary, 256-bit end-to-end encryption protocol. No one but intended recipients can decrypt them, reducing the risk of person-in-the-middle attacks.
Watch on demand
You can also watch these talks and learning sessions on demand.
Keynotes and leadership sessions
Watch the AWS re:Inforce 2022 keynote where Amazon Chief Security Officer Stephen Schmidt, AWS Chief Information Security Officer CJ Moses, Vice President of AWS Platform Kurt Kufeld, and MongoDB Chief Information Security Officer Lena Smart share the latest innovations in cloud security from AWS and what you can do to foster a culture of security in your business. Additionally, you can review all the leadership sessions to learn best practices for managing security, compliance, identity, and privacy in the cloud.
Breakout sessions and partner lightning talks
Data Protection and Privacy track – See how AWS, customers, and partners work together to protect data. Learn about trends in data management, cryptography, data security, data privacy, encryption, and key rotation and storage.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance track – Dive into the latest hot topics in governance and compliance for security practitioners, and discover how to automate compliance tools and services for operational use.
Identity and Access Management track – Hear from AWS, customers, and partners on how to use AWS Identity Services to manage identities, resources, and permissions securely and at scale. Learn how to configure fine-grained access controls for your employees, applications, and devices and deploy permission guardrails across your organization.
Network and Infrastructure Security track – Gain practical expertise on the services, tools, and products that AWS, customers, and partners use to protect the usability and integrity of their networks and data.
Threat Detection and Incident Response track – Learn how AWS, customers, and partners get the visibility they need to improve their security posture, reduce the risk profile of their environments, identify issues before they impact business, and implement incident response best practices.
Session presentation downloads are also available on our AWS Event Contents page. Consider joining us for more in-person security learning opportunities by registering for AWS re:Invent 2022, which will be held November 28 through December 2 in Las Vegas. We look forward to seeing you there!
If you’d like to discuss how these new announcements can help your organization improve its security posture, AWS is here to help. Contact your AWS account team today.
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.
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You can set up GuardDuty Malware Protection for your S3 buckets even without GuardDuty enabled for your AWS account. However, if you enable GuardDuty in your account, you can use the full monitoring of 
