Tag Archives: AWS Shield Advanced

AWS Shield Advanced is embracing the AWS WAF Anti-DDoS managed rule group: What changes and how to prepare

2026-07-27 Eitav Arditti

Post Syndicated from Eitav Arditti original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-shield-advanced-is-embracing-the-aws-waf-anti-ddos-managed-rule-group-what-changes-and-how-to-prepare/

Application-layer distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are difficult to detect because they closely resemble legitimate traffic. HTTP request floods are now among the most common vectors targeting web applications, using valid-looking requests that blend in with normal user activity.

In June 2025, AWS launched the AWS WAF Anti-DDoS managed rule group, built specifically for application-layer (L7) DDoS protection. AWS Shield Advanced is adopting it as the default application-layer protection, and in time as the only one. On July 27, AWS Shield Advanced begins adding the Anti-DDoS managed rule group to eligible web access control lists (ACLs) in Count mode. It will not cause any interruption to your traffic alongside your existing L7 automatic mitigation and WAF rules. In this blog post, we provide details regarding the Anti-DDoS managed rule group and when the change is expected to reach your web ACLs. You will understand the phases and steps that you need to take before the finish date, including how the monitoring and metrics will change.

Anti-DDoS managed rule group features

The Anti-DDoS managed rule group builds on what Shield Advanced automatic mitigation already provides. It profiles your traffic, learns what normal traffic looks like for your application, and establishes a baseline in minutes rather than hours. When an attack starts, it reacts within seconds and there are no health checks to configure. The rule group adds a Challenge action to the Block and Count actions you already use. Challenge decisions are driven by the AMR labels that mark the suspicion level of each inspected request. One option is a silent browser challenge, which has a background verification that runs in the visitor’s browser with no interstitial page, so legitimate users are never interrupted while automated traffic is filtered out. You can also exclude workload paths that don’t support Challenge, which fall back to Block mitigations instead. Sensitivity is configurable to Low, Medium, or High, and you set it separately for Block and Challenge. Block and Challenge are tuned independently; meaning you can run Challenge at high sensitivity to catch more suspicious traffic while keeping Block low to avoid dropping legitimate requests or reverse it for a stricter posture.

The rest is about cost and visibility:

It uses less capacity than before. The rule group needs 50 web ACL capacity units (WCUs), down from the 150 the previous protection required, providing you with capacity for the rest of your rules.
The dashboard ships in the AWS Management Console for AWS WAF. It’s there now, showing live DDoS events, match metrics, and the top URIs, geographies, and IP addresses driving traffic.
It labels everything it inspects. Requests get labels for event-detected, graduated suspicion levels, and specific rules. Match on those labels in your own AWS WAF rules when you need logic the rule group doesn’t cover.
You don’t pay for the attack traffic. During active mitigation, blocked DDoS requests drop out of your monthly count. That exclusion covers AWS WAF request fees, Anti-DDoS managed rule group request fees, and Shield Advanced request charges.

AWS Shield Advanced isn’t required to use any of these features. Shield Advanced subscribers get the rule group included with AWS WAF and any customer can turn it on independently. See AWS WAF pricing for more information on costs.

Implementation details

Shield Advanced upgrades application-layer DDoS protection in five phases. The following dates are when AWS will act automatically, not the earliest date when you can act. After the rule group is deployed in Count mode on July 27, 2026, you can begin migrating right away rather than waiting for the October auto-upgrade. There’s no window where protection lapses. Your current automatic mitigation stays active through every phase until the Anti-DDoS managed rule group takes over. That handoff happens in a single operation, with no cutover window and no gap for your traffic flows.

Phase 1: Anti-DDoS managed rule group deployed in Count mode (rolling out July 27–August 7, 2026)

AWS adds the Anti-DDoS managed rule group in Count mode to every web ACL eligible for this rollout. Eligible means any Shield Advanced web ACL with at least one resource using application-layer automatic mitigation that isn’t already running the Anti-DDoS rule group. This is a broader set than the web ACLs eligible for the October auto-upgrade (Phase 3), which applies a stricter test. The deployment rolls out gradually, starting July 27 and expected to finish by August 7, 2026, so different web ACLs might be updated on different days. There’s no impact to your traffic because the rule group watches and labels requests without acting on them while your existing automatic mitigation keeps running. Throughout the evaluation period, you receive DDoS events, metrics, and AWS WAF labels at no additional charge.

Phase 2: Free evaluation period (July 27–September 30, 2026)

The existing automatic mitigation and the Anti-DDoS managed rule group run side by side each detecting independently. Automatic mitigation continues to protect your resources while the rule group operates in Count mode. To compare their detection results, use the DDoSAttackRequests metric, AWS WAF labels, and the Anti-DDoS dashboard. All Anti-DDoS managed rule group charges are waived during this period, including the subscription fee, per-request fees, and WCU consumption costs for the eligible web ACLs from phase 1.

Phase 3: Auto-upgrade begins (October 1, 2026)

For eligible web ACLs, the auto-upgrade mirrors your existing automatic mitigation configuration. The rule group inherits your current setting, so a Block configuration comes up in Block mode and a Count configuration comes up in Count mode in a single, atomic operation. The rule group takes over in the same step that disables automatic mitigation, so protection never drops for an instant. This is a handoff rather than a cutover with no window where your resources are unprotected. If you’d rather not upgrade you can opt out by contacting AWS Support before the auto-upgrade date.

Phase 4: Guided migration (available July 27–December 31, 2026)

You don’t have to wait for the October auto-upgrade to migrate. As soon as the rule group is deployed in Count mode between July 27 and August 7, 2026, you can move to it on your own schedule. This is the path to use for web ACLs that aren’t eligible for the Phase 3 auto-upgrade, meaning mixed-mode web ACLs or ones with resources that don’t have automatic mitigation enabled. Work with your AWS account team and AWS Support at any point in this window to plan and complete the migration. Eligible web ACLs are also upgraded automatically starting October 1 (Phase 3), so guided migration is mainly for the web ACLs the auto-upgrade can’t cover.

Phase 5: Shield Advanced application-layer automatic mitigation sunset (January 1, 2027)

As of January 1, 2027, the Shield Advanced application-layer automatic mitigation feature will no longer be available. Resources that haven’t migrated to the Anti-DDoS managed rule group will lose automatic application-layer DDoS mitigation.

Capability	Shield Advanced application layer automatic mitigation	Anti-DDoS managed rule group (AWSManagedRulesAntiDDoSRuleSet)
Feature type	Shield Advanced automatic mitigation	AWS WAF managed rule group
Detection and mitigation speed	Requires a baseline period; mitigation varies per event	Enhanced detection and faster mitigation
Configuration scope	Per resource (Shield API)	Per web ACL (AWS WAF API)
Mitigation actions	Count, Block	Count, Block, and Challenge
Sensitivity controls	None	Low, Medium, and High for both Block and Challenge
Non-HTML path handling	N/A	URI regex exemptions for Challenge
WCU consumption	150 WCUs	50 WCUs
Health checks	Required (Amazon Route 53 health-based detection)	Not required, provides automatic traffic profiling
Availability	Shield Advanced only	AWS WAF and Shield Advanced (see pricing)

Observability

The existing automatic mitigation and the Anti-DDoS managed rule group use separate Amazon CloudWatch namespaces and metric structures. The rule group gives you three tiers of observability: tier 1 tells you an attack is happening, tier 2 shows which requests it flagged and why, and tier 3 shows what it did about them. You don’t need all three on day 1 because most customer teams start at tier 1 to confirm detection is working, then add the others as they tune.

Tier 1: Event detection alarms

You can detect DDoS events using two CloudWatch metrics, each with its own namespace.

	DDoSDetected (Shield)	DDoSAttackRequests (Anti-DDoS managed rule group)
Namespace	AWS/DDoSProtection	AWS/WAFV2
Requires Shield Advanced	Yes	No
Scope	L3, L4, and L7 events	L7 events only
Value during event	Binary (0 or 1)	Count of requests observed
Value outside event	Reported once daily (keeps metric alive)	Absent (no data points)
Dimensions	ResourceArn	Resource, ResourceType

What this means for your existing alarms:

After the application-layer automatic mitigation feature is sunset, DDoSDetected still fires for infrastructure layer 3 and layer 4 events, so your existing network layer and transport layer alarms remain valid. For the full list, see AWS Shield Advanced metrics.
DDoSAttackRequests is the Anti-DDoS managed rule group equivalent for application-layer event detection. Alarm on Sum >= 1 to detect any event, or set a volume threshold (for example, more than 10,000 requests per minute) for severity-based alerting.
During the evaluation period, both metrics fire independently and you can validate detection parity before migrating your application-layer alarms.
Because DDoSAttackRequests is absent when there are no active DDoS events, set treat-missing-data to missing or notBreaching for alarms on this metric.

Tier 2: Detection labels for custom monitoring

Every request the Anti-DDoS managed rule group evaluates gets a label. Where tier 1 tells you an attack started, tier 2 shows which requests looked suspicious and how confident the rule group was. The labels surface as AWS WAF metrics in the AWS/WAFV2 namespace: AllowedRequests, BlockedRequests, and CountRuleMatch. Each carries the LabelName and LabelNamespace dimensions under the awswaf:managed:aws:anti-ddos: namespace.

event-detected – Requests observed during a detected DDoS event
ddos-request – Requests identified as part of the attack
low-suspicion-ddos-request, medium-suspicion-ddos-request, high-suspicion-ddos-request – Graduated suspicion levels
challengeable-request – Requests eligible for browser challenge

Chart suspicion-level trends on a CloudWatch dashboard to see how an attack builds. Match on the labels in your own AWS WAF rules or dig into them in your AWS WAF logs with CloudWatch Logs Insights or Amazon Athena when you need to understand a specific event after the fact.

Tier 3: Mitigation action metrics

Where tier 2 shows what the rule group flagged, tier 3 shows what it did about those requests during an event. You’ll find these metrics as ChallengeRequests, BlockedRequests, and CountRuleMatch, each scoped by the rule label that produced it.

ChallengeAllDuringEvent – Requests challenged during an active event
ChallengeDDoSRequests – Suspected DDoS requests challenged based on suspicion level
DDoSRequests – Requests blocked (or counted in Count mode)

Watch these during a live event to see whether mitigation is keeping up. If you’re challenging far more requests than you’re blocking, your configuration might be too cautious, and you can raise the sensitivity level after you trust the numbers.

Observability summary

Tier	Automatic mitigation	Anti-DDoS managed rule group
Event alarm	DDoSDetected in AWS/DDoSProtection (binary, L3/L4/L7)	DDoSAttackRequests in AWS/WAFV2 (request count, L7)
Detection labels	None	event-detected, ddos-request, suspicion levels, challengeable-request
Mitigation actions	Not visible (Shield-managed rule group metrics not exposed)	ChallengeAllDuringEvent, ChallengeDDoSRequests, DDoSRequests
Dashboard	Shield console event history	Shield console and Anti-DDoS dashboard in the AWS WAF console
Historical analysis	Shield event history only	AWS WAF logs (CloudWatch Logs, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Data Firehose)

Billing

Your Shield Advanced subscription includes the Anti-DDoS managed rule group for up to 50 billion requests per month, counted across your whole organization at the payer account level. For most customers that ceiling is well above normal traffic, so you won’t see a line item here unless you’re operating at very high volume. For the exact rates, see AWS WAF pricing and Shield Advanced pricing.

You aren’t charged for DDoS traffic while the Anti-DDoS managed rule group is actively mitigating, which means Block or Challenge mode rather than Count. This applies to AWS WAF request fees, Anti-DDoS managed rule group request fees, and Shield Advanced request charges. Leaving the rule group in Count mode past the evaluation period costs you the protection without the billing relief, so avoid staying in Count mode longer than you need to validate.

During the evaluation period (July 27 to September 30, 2026), the eligible web ACLs AWS auto-enrolled don’t incur per-request fees or WCU consumption, even when configured in Count mode.

The Anti-DDoS managed rule group works at the web ACL level, so every resource you associate with a web ACL shares that coverage. Before assuming a single resource accounts for the whole cost, look at how many resources sit behind each web ACL. A web ACL fronting 20 resources bills differently from one fronting 2, so check that count first and familiarize yourself with the workload protected by each web ACL.

Adding the Anti-DDoS managed rule group to a web ACL yourself isn’t part of the upgrade path, so standard pricing applies from the moment you enable it. The same is true for any resource that was already running the rule group before the rollout. To get the free evaluation, let the automatic rollout reach your web ACLs rather than adding the rule group ahead of it. There’s no penalty for adding it yourself; you just don’t receive the waiver on that web ACL.

Update your infrastructure as code

If you manage web ACLs with AWS CloudFormation, AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), Terraform, or other infrastructure as code (IaC), the auto-upgrade changes your infrastructure configuration outside your templates. Your code is still the source of truth, so you need to do two things. First, change where the protection is declared. Today you enable application-layer automatic mitigation through the Shield API (EnableApplicationLayerAutomaticResponse), configured per protected resource. The Anti-DDoS managed rule group is configured through the AWS WAF API instead (CreateWebACL and UpdateWebACL), as a managed rule group statement inside the web ACL, scoped per web ACL rather than per resource. In IaC terms, you remove the Shield automatic-response block (for example, Terraform’s aws_shield_application_layer_automatic_response) and add the WAF managed rule group statement shown in the following section. Second, pull the upgraded web ACL back into your tooling before your next deploy, or your pipeline will try to revert the change.

For the full statement in Terraform, CloudFormation, and the AWS CDK, plus how to sync state after the auto-upgrade (terraform plan, CloudFormation drift detection, cdk diff), see the iac-webacl-examples helper.

Update your AWS Firewall Manager policy

If you run a Shield Advanced policy in AWS Firewall Manager today, that policy is what enabled application-layer automatic mitigation across your accounts. To keep that protection, add the Anti-DDoS managed rule group to an AWS WAF Firewall Manager policy. Your Shield Advanced policy still handles L3 and L4, while the application-layer piece moves to the AWS WAF policy. The migration is straightforward: add or reuse an AWS WAF Firewall Manager policy, put the Anti-DDoS managed rule group in it, and scope it to the same accounts and resources your Shield Advanced policy covers.

You can’t add the rule group from the Shield console or by editing an account-level web ACL directly, because Firewall Manager owns the web ACLs it creates and overwrites local edits. Instead, add the rule group to the AWS WAF policy and Firewall Manager pushes it to every in-scope account.

You can make this change in the console or as code. If you manage your Firewall Manager policies as code, don’t edit them in the console: add a new AWS WAF policy or update an existing one in your templates with the Anti-DDoS managed rule group included, and deploy it using the following Firewall Manager policies using IaC steps. Otherwise, use the console.

In the console, follow Creating an AWS Firewall Manager policy for AWS WAF to create the policy and reach the Edit policy rules page. Add the Anti-DDoS rule group, listed there as AWS AntiDDoS Protection for Layer 7 attacks (AWSManagedRulesAntiDDoSRuleSet), as a new rule group under First rule groups so it evaluates before your other managed groups, but below any Allow custom rules you use to fast-path known-good traffic.

If you protect CloudFront distributions, make this change in your Global policy, and repeat it in each AWS Regional policy for regional resources. Save the policy, and Firewall Manager rolls the change out to in-scope accounts, which can take a few minutes.

After being added, the rule group appears as the first rule group in the policy, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 1: AntiDDoS enabled

Firewall Manager policies using IaC

If you manage Firewall Manager policies as code, make the change in your template instead of the console. The Anti-DDoS managed rule group goes into the AWS WAF policy’s ManagedServiceData, a WAFV2 policy definition carried as a JSON string, added to the first rule groups so it evaluates early. For the ManagedServiceData JSON with CloudFormation, Terraform, and AWS CDK examples, see the firewall-manager-examples helper.

Whichever path you take, scope the policy to the same accounts and resources your Shield Advanced policy already covers, so no resource loses application-layer protection during the move.

Getting started

Between July 27 and August 7, 2026, AWS will add the Anti-DDoS managed rule group in Count mode to Shield Advanced web ACLs that have resources using application layer automatic mitigation but not yet the Anti-DDoS rule group. After it reaches your web ACL, you can evaluate it, and migrate whenever you’re ready, without waiting for the October auto-upgrade.

Review the Anti-DDoS dashboard in the AWS WAF console. The dashboard shows real-time DDoS events, match metrics, and top traffic sources.
Compare event detection side by side. During Count mode, both systems detect independently. Check the DDoSDetected metric in AWS/DDoSProtection alongside DDoSAttackRequests in AWS/WAFV2 to validate detection parity for your resources. You can deploy the CloudWatch comparison dashboard from the AWS Samples repository to view both systems on a single dashboard.
Explore AWS WAF labels. Enable AWS WAF logging and query for labels in the awswaf:managed:aws:anti-ddos: namespace. Look at suspicion levels (low-suspicion-ddos-request, medium-suspicion-ddos-request, high-suspicion-ddos-request), event-detected, and challengeable-request to see per-request visibility into detected events.
Start with Low sensitivity for Block actions during evaluation to minimize false positive risk. Tune up as you gain confidence from the Anti-DDoS dashboard and AWS WAF label data.
Plan your configuration. Review sensitivity levels, URI exemptions for non-HTML paths, and web ACL priority placement. The Anti-DDoS managed rule group should run at the highest priority in your web ACL, or right below any custom rules with the Allow action.
Sync your IaC templates. After the auto-upgrade adds the Anti-DDoS managed rule group to your web ACL, fetch the current state into your IaC tooling (Terraform refresh, CloudFormation drift detection, AWS CDK import) before your next deployment.

Conclusion

The Anti-DDoS managed rule group profiles your traffic within minutes and mitigates within seconds, where the automatic mitigation it builds on established its baseline over hours, and it gives you granular visibility into what it’s doing. The evaluation period exists so you can watch both systems run on your own traffic before anything changes. Spend the first few weeks in Count mode confirming the new detection matches what you see today, then move your alarms over and pick a sensitivity level you’re comfortable with. If you run a web ACL across several resources, or you manage rules through AWS Firewall Manager, contact AWS Support before you start so you don’t have to unwind anything later. The Shield Advanced application-layer automatic mitigation feature retires on January 1, 2027, and anything still relying on it needs to be migrated by then.

Resources

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Gain visibility into DDoS attacks with flow logs in AWS Shield Advanced

2026-06-04 Ken Kitts

Post Syndicated from Ken Kitts original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/gain-visibility-into-ddos-attacks-with-flow-logs-in-aws-shield-advanced/

Reconstructing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack traffic used to mean combining data from multiple sources after the fact. AWS Shield Advanced attack flow logs change that—they capture traffic metadata during attacks so you can pinpoint sources, verify mitigations, and feed your existing analysis pipelines.

Shield publishes logs to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudWatch Logs, or Amazon Data Firehose using the same CloudWatch Logs delivery infrastructure as other AWS flow logs, so they fit directly into the monitoring and analysis tools you already use.

In this post, you will learn how Shield Advanced attack flow logs capture metadata during DDoS events, what each field in a flow log entry means, and how to enable and configure flow logging for your protected resources.

How DDoS attacks affect your applications

A DDoS attack floods an application with traffic, making it unavailable to users. Infrastructure-layer attacks saturate bandwidth and exhaust connection tables—you see packet loss and timeouts.

Shield Advanced is a managed DDoS protection service that detects and mitigates attacks for Amazon CloudFront distributions, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, Amazon Route 53 hosted zones, AWS Global Accelerator standard accelerators, and Elastic IP (EIP) addresses. See the AWS Shield Advanced documentation for full coverage details. Initially, Shield Advanced will provide infrastructure-layer attack flow logs for EIP protections, with support for additional resource types to follow.

Key benefits

Flow logs help you understand attacks in several ways:

Reconstruct traffic patterns – Query logs after an attack to analyze volume, source distribution, and protocol mix without relying only on aggregate CloudWatch metrics.
Identify attack origins – The srccountry and location fields show where traffic originated and which AWS edge location it entered.
Verify mitigation behavior – The action field records what Shield did with each flow.

Logs go to Amazon S3, CloudWatch Logs, or Data Firehose. You can then query them with Amazon Athena (a serverless query service for analyzing data in Amazon S3), route them to third-party Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms or build CloudWatch Logs Insights queries (an interactive log analysis feature) without deploying new infrastructure.

What attack flow logs capture

Log records capture source and destination IP addresses and ports, protocol, packet and byte counts, the action Shield Advanced took, and TCP flags. They also include the AWS ingress location where traffic entered and a two-letter country code for the traffic source when available. Logs are written at 5-minute intervals and are available during an active attack and after it concludes.

The maximum file size is 75 MB. If a file reaches that limit within the 5-minute window, the file will be closed, published, and a new file will start. Flow logs support JSON, plain text, W3C, and Parquet output formats and contain the following fields:

Field	Description
protection_arn	Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the Shield protection
event_timestamp	Timestamp of log generation
version	Flow log version number
srcaddr	Source IP address
dstaddr	Destination IP address
srcport	Source port
dstport	Destination port
protocol	IP protocol number
packets	Packet count within the aggregation window
bytes	Byte count within the aggregation window
starttime	Aggregation window start time
endtime	Aggregation window end time
action	Action taken by Shield
location	AWS ingress location
sampling_rate	Sampling rate used during packet processing
tcp_flags	TCP flags from the packet
srccountry	Two-letter country code for the traffic source

How to configure flow logs for Shield Advanced protected resources

The following steps walk you through creating the CloudWatch Logs delivery resources that connect a Shield Advanced protection to your preferred log destination.

Prerequisites

Before configuring flow logs, make sure you have:

An active Shield Advanced subscription
At least one existing Shield Advanced protection
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions to create CloudWatch Logs delivery resources (logs:PutDeliverySource, logs:PutDeliveryDestination, logs:CreateDelivery)

Flow logs incur standard CloudWatch Logs vended log charges, and the destination resources (S3 bucket storage, CloudWatch Logs log group storage, or Firehose data processing) incur separate charges. Review the Vended Logs entry on the CloudWatch pricing page and the pricing for your chosen destination service before enabling flow logs on high-traffic resources.

How it works

Log delivery requires three objects:

DeliverySource – Represents the Shield Advanced protection that produces the logs
DeliveryDestination – Represents where logs should be sent (Amazon S3, CloudWatch Logs, or Amazon Data Firehose)
Delivery – Connects the source to the destination

This three-object model lets you reuse destinations across multiple sources and manage delivery pipelines independently. For example, you can send logs from multiple Shield protections to the same S3 bucket by creating multiple DeliverySource objects that reference the same DeliveryDestination.

Because Shield Advanced attack flow logs use the CloudWatch Logs delivery infrastructure, you can aggregate them across accounts and Regions just like other vended logs. Deliver directly to a centralized S3 bucket with a cross-account policy, replicate CloudWatch Logs log groups using cross-account cross-Region centralization rules, or stream to a shared Firehose stream using cross-account subscriptions. Explore these options to build a unified view of DDoS attack traffic across your multi-account, multi-Region footprint.

Step 1: Create your destination resource

Choose a destination:

Option A – S3 bucket: Best for long-term storage and Athena queries. See Creating an S3 bucket.
Option B – CloudWatch Logs log group: Best for real-time monitoring and CloudWatch Logs Insights. See Create a log group in CloudWatch Logs.
Option C – Data Firehose delivery stream: Best for streaming to third-party tools and SIEMs. See Create a Firehose stream.

Step 2: Configure the destination resource policy (if needed)

The destination resource needs a policy that grants the CloudWatch Logs delivery service write permissions. The policy varies by destination type. For more information, see Logs sent to Amazon S3, Logs sent to CloudWatch Logs, or Logs sent to Firehose.

For Amazon S3 destinations, you have two options:

Automatic policy creation: If your bucket has no existing resource policy and you have the s3:GetBucketPolicy and s3:PutBucketPolicy permissions, AWS automatically creates the required policy when you create the delivery in step 6. You can skip to step 3.
Manual policy update: If you need to customize the policy or your organization requires pre-approved policies, create the policy manually by following the instructions for Logs sent to Amazon S3.

Step 3: Get your protection ARN

Shield Advanced is a global service and uses the us-east-1 AWS Region for management. Run the following command to list your Shield Advanced protections.

aws shield list-protections \
  --region us-east-1

In the output, copy the ProtectionArn value for the protection you want to log.

Step 4: Create a delivery source

Run the following command to create the delivery source, replace <protection-arn> with the ProtectionArn value from step 3.

aws logs put-delivery-source \
  --name my-shield-delivery-source \
  --resource-arn <protection-arn> \
  --log-type FLOW_LOGS \
  --region us-east-1

The --resource-arn is the ARN of your Shield Advanced protection—not the protected resource itself. Shield Advanced creates a separate protection object that wraps your resource, and flow logs are generated by that protection layer rather than the underlying resource.

Step 5: Create a delivery destination

Run the following command to create the delivery destination, replace <resource-arn> with the ARN of the destination resource you created in step 1.

aws logs put-delivery-destination \
  --name my-shield-delivery-destination \
  --output-format plain \
  --delivery-destination-configuration '{"destinationResourceArn":"<resource-arn>"}' \
  --region us-east-1

The --delivery-destination-configuration parameter takes a JSON object with a destinationResourceArn key whose value is the ARN of your S3 bucket, log group, or Firehose stream.

In the output, copy the value of the top-level ARN field—this is the delivery destination ARN (different from the bucket ARN). You will use this in step 6.

Step 6: Create the delivery

Run the following command to connect the delivery source to the delivery destination, replace <delivery-destination-arn> with the delivery destination ARN from step 5.

aws logs create-delivery \
  --delivery-source-name my-shield-delivery-source \
  --delivery-destination-arn <delivery-destination-arn> \
  --region us-east-1

Step 7: Verify the delivery

Run the following command to confirm the delivery is active.

aws logs describe-deliveries \
  --region us-east-1

After delivery is active, Shield Advanced publishes flow log records to your destination during DDoS events.

Clean up

To avoid ongoing charges, delete the resources you created.

Delete the delivery:

aws logs delete-delivery \
  --id <delivery-id> \
  --region us-east-1

Delete the delivery source:

aws logs delete-delivery-source \
  --name my-shield-delivery-source \
  --region us-east-1

Delete the delivery destination:

aws logs delete-delivery-destination \
  --name my-shield-delivery-destination \
  --region us-east-1

(Optional) Back up flow log data if you need to retain logs for compliance or analysis.

Delete the destination resource. Warning: Deleting the destination resource will permanently delete all flow log data.

For an S3 bucket:

aws s3 rb s3://<bucket-name> \
  --force \
  --region <region>

For a CloudWatch Logs log group:

aws logs delete-log-group \
  --log-group-name <log-group-name> \
  --region <region>

For a Firehose stream:

aws firehose delete-delivery-stream \
  --delivery-stream-name <stream-name> \
  --region <region>

Conclusion

Shield Advanced attack flow logs provide the visibility you need to understand and respond to DDoS attacks effectively. By integrating with your existing observability infrastructure, they deliver actionable insights without requiring new tooling or complex setup. Enable flow logs on your Shield Advanced protections today to gain immediate visibility into attack patterns and strengthen your DDoS defense posture.

Next steps:

For the full reference about flow log configuration, see the AWS Shield Advanced documentation.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.

Understanding DDoS Simulation Testing in AWS

2023-09-12 Harith Gaddamanugu

Post Syndicated from Harith Gaddamanugu original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/understanding-ddos-simulation-testing-at-aws/

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) events occur when a threat actor sends traffic floods from multiple sources to disrupt the availability of a targeted application. DDoS simulation testing uses a controlled DDoS event to allow the owner of an application to assess the application’s resilience and practice event response. DDoS simulation testing is permitted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), subject to Testing policy terms and conditions. In this blog post, we help you understand when it’s appropriate to perform a DDoS simulation test on an application running on AWS, and what options you have for running the test.

DDoS protection at AWS

Security is the top priority at AWS. AWS services include basic DDoS protection as a standard feature to help protect customers from the most common and frequently occurring infrastructure (layer 3 and 4) DDoS events, such as SYN/UDP floods, reflection attacks, and others. While this protection is designed to protect the availability of AWS infrastructure, your application might require more nuanced protections that consider your traffic patterns and integrate with your internal reporting and incident response processes. If you need more nuanced protection, then you should consider subscribing to AWS Shield Advanced in addition to the native resiliency offered by the AWS services you use.

AWS Shield Advanced is a managed service that helps you protect your application against external threats, like DDoS events, volumetric bots, and vulnerability exploitation attempts. When you subscribe to Shield Advanced and add protection to your resources, Shield Advanced provides expanded DDoS event protection for those resources. With advanced protections enabled on your resources, you get tailored detection based on the traffic patterns of your application, assistance with protecting against Layer 7 DDoS events, access to 24×7 specialized support from the Shield Response Team (SRT), access to centralized management of security policies through AWS Firewall Manager, and cost protections to help safeguard against scaling charges resulting from DDoS-related usage spikes. You can also configure AWS WAF (a web application firewall) to integrate with Shield Advanced to create custom layer 7 firewall rules and enable automatic application layer DDoS mitigation.

Acceptable DDoS simulation use cases on AWS

AWS is constantly learning and innovating by delivering new DDoS protection capabilities, which are explained in the DDoS Best Practices whitepaper. This whitepaper provides an overview of DDoS events and the choices that you can make when building on AWS to help you architect your application to absorb or mitigate volumetric events. If your application is architected according to our best practices, then a DDoS simulation test might not be necessary, because these architectures have been through rigorous internal AWS testing and verified as best practices for customers to use.

Using DDoS simulations to explore the limits of AWS infrastructure isn’t a good use case for these tests. Similarly, validating if AWS is effectively protecting its side of the shared responsibility model isn’t a good test motive. Further, using AWS resources as a source to simulate a DDoS attack on other AWS resources isn’t encouraged. Load tests are performed to gain reliable information on application performance under stress and these are different from DDoS tests. For more information, see the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) testing policy and penetration testing. Application owners, who have a security compliance requirement from a regulator or who want to test the effectiveness of their DDoS mitigation strategies, typically run DDoS simulation tests.

DDoS simulation tests at AWS

AWS offers two options for running DDoS simulation tests. They are:

A simulated DDoS attack in production traffic with an authorized pre-approved AWS Partner.
A synthetic simulated DDoS attack with the SRT, also referred to as a firedrill.

The motivation for DDoS testing varies from application to application and these engagements don’t offer the same value to all customers. Establishing clear motives for the test can help you choose the right option. If you want to test your incident response strategy, we recommend scheduling a firedrill with our SRT. If you want to test the Shield Advanced features or test application resiliency, we recommend that you work with an AWS approved partner.

DDoS simulation testing with an AWS Partner

AWS DDoS test partners are authorized to conduct DDoS simulation tests on customers’ behalf without prior approval from AWS. Customers can currently contact the following partners to set up these paid engagements:

Before contacting the partners, customers must agree to the terms and conditions for DDoS simulation tests. The application must be well-architected prior to DDoS simulation testing as described in AWS DDoS Best Practices whitepaper. AWS DDoS test partners that want to perform DDoS simulation tests that don’t comply with the technical restrictions set forth in our public DDoS testing policy, or other DDoS test vendors that aren’t approved, can request approval to perform DDoS simulation tests by submitting the DDoS Simulation Testing form at least 14 days before the proposed test date. For questions, please send an email to [email protected].

After choosing a test partner, customers go through various phases of testing. Typically, the first phase involves a discovery discussion, where the customer defines clear goals, assembles technical details, and defines the test schedule with the partner. In the next phase, partners run multiple simulations based on agreed attack vectors, duration, diversity of the attack vectors, and other factors. These tests are usually carried out by slowly ramping up traffic levels from low levels to desired high levels with an ability for an emergency stop. The final stage involves reporting, discussing observed gaps, identifying actionable tasks, and driving those tasks to completion.

These engagements are typically long-term, paid contracts that are planned over months and carried out over weeks, with results analyzed over time. These tests and reports are beneficial to customers who need to evaluate detection and mitigation capabilities on a large scale. If you’re an application owner and want to evaluate the DDoS resiliency of your application, practice event response with real traffic, or have a DDoS compliance or regulation requirement, we recommend this type of engagement. These tests aren’t recommended if you want to learn the volumetric breaking points of the AWS network or understand when AWS starts to throttle requests. AWS services are designed to scale, and when certain dynamic volume thresholds are exceeded, AWS detection systems will be invoked to block traffic. Lastly, it’s critical to distinguish between these tests and stress tests, in which meaningful packets are sent to the application to assess its behavior.

DDoS firedrill testing with the Shield Response Team

Shield Advanced service offers additional assistance through the SRT, this team can also help with testing incident response workflows. Customers can contact the SRT and request firedrill testing. Firedrill testing is a type of synthetic test that doesn’t generate real volumetric traffic but does post a shield event to the requesting customer’s account.

These tests are available for customers who are already on-boarded to Shield Advanced and want to test their Amazon CloudWatch alarms by invoking a DDoSDetected metric, or test their proactive engagement setup or their custom incident response strategy. Because this event isn’t based on real traffic, the customer won’t see traffic generated on their account or see logs that drive helpful reports.

These tests are intended to generate associated Shield Advanced metrics and post a DDoS event for a customer resource. For example, SRT can post a 14 Gbps UDP mock attack on a protected resource for about 15 minutes and customers can test their response capability during such an event.

Note: Not all attack vectors and AWS resource types are supported for a firedrill. Shield Advanced onboarded customers can contact AWS Support teams to request assistance with running a firedrill or understand more about them.

Conclusion

DDoS simulations and incident response testing on AWS through the SRT or an AWS Partner are useful in improving application security controls, identifying Shield Advanced misconfigurations, optimizing existing detection systems, and improving incident readiness. The goal of these engagements is to help you build a DDoS resilient architecture to protect your application’s availability. However, these engagements don’t offer the same value to all customers. Most customers can obtain similar benefits by following AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency. AWS recommends architecting your application according to DDoS best practices and fine tuning AWS Shield Advanced out-of-the-box offerings to your application needs to improve security posture.

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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Top 2021 AWS service launches security professionals should review – Part 2

2022-07-06 Marta Taggart

Post Syndicated from Marta Taggart original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/top-2021-aws-service-launches-security-professionals-should-review-part-2/

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we shared an overview of some of the most important 2021 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security service and feature launches. In this follow-up, we’ll dive deep into additional launches that are important for security professionals to be aware of and understand across all AWS services. There have already been plenty in the first half of 2022, so we’ll highlight those soon, as well.

AWS Identity

You can use AWS Identity Services to build Zero Trust architectures, help secure your environments with a robust data perimeter, and work toward the security best practice of granting least privilege. In 2021, AWS expanded the identity source options, AWS Region availability, and support for AWS services. There is also added visibility and power in the permission management system. New features offer new integrations, additional policy checks, and secure resource sharing across AWS accounts.

AWS Single Sign-On

For identity management, AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) is where you create, or connect, your workforce identities in AWS once and manage access centrally across your AWS accounts in AWS Organizations. In 2021, AWS SSO announced new integrations for JumpCloud and CyberArk users. This adds to the list of providers that you can use to connect your users and groups, which also includes Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services, Okta Universal Directory, Azure AD, OneLogin, and Ping Identity.

AWS SSO expanded its availability to new Regions: AWS GovCloud (US), Europe (Paris), and South America (São Paulo) Regions. Another very cool AWS SSO development is its integration with AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager. This integration enables you to log in interactively to your Windows servers running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) while using your existing corporate identities—try it, it’s fantastic!

AWS Identity and Access Management

For access management, there have been a range of feature launches with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) that have added up to more power and visibility in the permissions management system. Here are some key examples.

IAM made it simpler to relate a user’s IAM role activity to their corporate identity. By setting the new source identity attribute, which persists through role assumption chains and gets logged in AWS CloudTrail, you can find out who is responsible for actions that IAM roles performed.

IAM added support for policy conditions, to help manage permissions for AWS services that access your resources. This important feature launch of service principal conditions helps you to distinguish between API calls being made on your behalf by a service principal, and those being made by a principal inside your account. You can choose to allow or deny the calls depending on your needs. As a security professional, you might find this especially useful in conjunction with the aws:CalledVia condition key, which allows you to scope permissions down to specify that this account principal can only call this API if they are calling it using a particular AWS service that’s acting on their behalf. For example, your account principal can’t generally access a particular Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, but if they are accessing it by using Amazon Athena, they can do so. These conditions can also be used in service control policies (SCPs) to give account principals broader scope across an account, organizational unit, or organization; they need not be added to individual principal policies or resource policies.

Another very handy new IAM feature launch is additional information about the reason for an access denied error message. With this additional information, you can now see which of the relevant access control policies (for example, IAM, resource, SCP, or VPC endpoint) was the cause of the denial. As of now, this new IAM feature is supported by more than 50% of all AWS services in the AWS SDK and AWS Command Line Interface, and a fast-growing number in the AWS Management Console. We will continue to add support for this capability across services, as well as add more features that are designed to make the journey to least privilege simpler.

IAM Access Analyzer

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer provides actionable recommendations to set secure and functional permissions. Access Analyzer introduced the ability to preview the impact of policy changes before deployment and added over 100 policy checks for correctness. Both of these enhancements are integrated into the console and are also available through APIs. Access Analyzer also provides findings for external access allowed by resource policies for many services, including a previous launch in which IAM Access Analyzer was directly integrated into the Amazon S3 management console.

IAM Access Analyzer also launched the ability to generate fine-grained policies based on analyzing past AWS CloudTrail activity. This feature provides a great new capability for DevOps teams or central security teams to scope down policies to just the permissions needed, making it simpler to implement least privilege permissions. IAM Access Analyzer launched further enhancements to expand policy checks, and the ability to generate a sample least-privilege policy from past activity was expanded beyond the account level to include an analysis of principal behavior within the entire organization by analyzing log activity stored in AWS CloudTrail.

AWS Resource Access Manager

AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) helps you securely share your resources across unrelated AWS accounts within your organization or organizational units (OUs) in AWS Organizations. Now you can also share your resources with IAM roles and IAM users for supported resource types. This update enables more granular access using managed permissions that you can use to define access to shared resources. In addition to the default managed permission defined for each shareable resource type, you now have more flexibility to choose which permissions to grant to whom for resource types that support additional managed permissions. Additionally, AWS RAM added support for global resource types, enabling you to provision a global resource once, and share that resource across your accounts. A global resource is one that can be used in multiple AWS Regions; the first example of a global resource is found in AWS Cloud WAN, currently in preview as of this publication. AWS RAM helps you more securely share an AWS Cloud WAN core network, which is a managed network containing AWS and on-premises networks. With AWS RAM global resource sharing, you can use the Cloud WAN core network to centrally operate a unified global network across Regions and accounts.

AWS Directory Service

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD), was updated to automatically provide domain controller and directory utilization metrics in Amazon CloudWatch for new and existing directories. Analyzing these utilization metrics helps you quantify your average and peak load times to identify the need for additional domain controllers. With this, you can define the number of domain controllers to meet your performance, resilience, and cost requirements.

Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito identity pools (federated identities) was updated to enable you to use attributes from social and corporate identity providers to make access control decisions and simplify permissions management in AWS resources. In Amazon Cognito, you can choose predefined attribute-tag mappings, or you can create custom mappings using the attributes from social and corporate providers’ access and ID tokens, or SAML assertions. You can then reference the tags in an IAM permissions policy to implement attribute-based access control (ABAC) and manage access to your AWS resources. Amazon Cognito also launched a new console experience for user pools and now supports targeted sign out through refresh token revocation.

Governance, control, and logging services

There were a number of important releases in 2021 in the areas of governance, control, and logging services.

AWS Organizations

AWS Organizations added a number of important import features and integrations during 2021. Security-relevant services like Amazon Detective, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) IP Address Manager (IPAM), as well as others like Amazon DevOps Guru, launched integrations with Organizations. Others like AWS SSO and AWS License Manager upgraded their Organizations support by adding support for a Delegated Administrator account, reducing the need to use the management account for operational tasks. Amazon EC2 and EC2 Image Builder took advantage of the account grouping capabilities provided by Organizations to allow cross-account sharing of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) (for more details, see the Amazon EC2 section later in this post). Organizations also got an updated console, increased quotas for tag policies, and provided support for the launch of an API that allows for programmatic creation and maintenance of AWS account alternate contacts, including the very important security contact (although that feature doesn’t require Organizations). For more information on the value of using the security contact for your accounts, see the blog post Update the alternate security contact across your AWS accounts for timely security notifications.

AWS Control Tower

2021 was also a good year for AWS Control Tower, beginning with an important launch of the ability to take over governance of existing OUs and accounts, as well as bulk update of new settings and guardrails with a single button click or API call. Toward the end of 2021, AWS Control Tower added another valuable enhancement that allows it to work with a broader set of customers and use cases, namely support for nested OUs within an organization.

AWS CloudFormation Guard 2.0

Another important milestone in 2021 for creating and maintaining a well-governed cloud environment was the re-launch of CloudFormation Guard as Cfn-Guard 2.0. This launch was a major overhaul of the Cfn-Guard domain-specific language (DSL), a DSL designed to provide the ability to test infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates such as CloudFormation and Terraform to make sure that they conform with a set of constraints written in the DSL by a central team, such as a security organization or network management team.

This approach provides a powerful new middle ground between the older security models of prevention (which provide developers only an access denied message, and often can’t distinguish between an acceptable and an unacceptable use of the same API) and a detect and react model (when undesired states have already gone live). The Cfn-Guard 2.0 model gives builders the freedom to build with IaC, while allowing central teams to have the ability to reject infrastructure configurations or changes that don’t conform to central policies—and to do so with completely custom error messages that invite dialog between the builder team and the central team, in case the rule is unnuanced and needs to be refined, or if a specific exception needs to be created.

For example, a builder team might be allowed to provision and attach an internet gateway to a VPC, but the team can do this only if the routes to the internet gateway are limited to a certain pre-defined set of CIDR ranges, such as the public addresses of the organization’s branch offices. It’s not possible to write an IAM policy that takes into account the CIDR values of a VPC route table update, but you can write a Cfn-Guard 2.0 rule that allows the creation and use of an internet gateway, but only with a defined and limited set of IP addresses.

AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager

An important launch that security professionals should know about is AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager. Incident Manager provides a number of powerful capabilities for managing incidents of any kind, including operational and availability issues but also security issues. With Incident Manager, you can automatically take action when a critical issue is detected by an Amazon CloudWatch alarm or Amazon EventBridge event. Incident Manager runs pre-configured response plans to engage responders by using SMS and phone calls, can enable chat commands and notifications using AWS Chatbot, and runs automation workflows with AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks. The Incident Manager console integrates with AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter to help you track incidents and post-incident action items from a central place that also synchronizes with third-party management tools such as Jira Service Desk and ServiceNow. Incident Manager enables cross-account sharing of incidents using AWS RAM, and provides cross-Region replication of incidents to achieve higher availability.

AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail added some great new logging capabilities in 2021, including logging data-plane events for Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) direct APIs (direct APIs allow access to EBS snapshot content through a REST API). CloudTrail also got further enhancements to its machine-learning based CloudTrail Insights feature, including a new one called ErrorRate Insights.

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is one of the most important services at AWS, and its steady addition of security-related enhancements is always big news. Here are the 2021 highlights.

Access Points aliases

Amazon S3 introduced a new feature, Amazon S3 Access Points aliases. With Amazon S3 Access Points aliases, you can make the access points backwards-compatible with a large amount of existing code that is programmed to interact with S3 buckets rather than access points.

To understand the importance of this launch, we have to go back to 2019 to the launch of Amazon S3 Access Points. Access points are a powerful mechanism for managing S3 bucket access. They provide a great simplification for managing and controlling access to shared datasets in S3 buckets. You can create up to 1,000 access points per Region within each of your AWS accounts. Although bucket access policies remain fully enforced, you can delegate access control from the bucket to its access points, allowing for distributed and granular control. Each access point enforces a customizable policy that can be managed by a particular workgroup, while also avoiding the problem of bucket policies needing to grow beyond their maximum size. Finally, you can also bind an access point to a particular VPC for its lifetime, to prevent access directly from the internet.

With the 2021 launch of Access Points aliases, Amazon S3 now generates a unique DNS name, or alias, for each access point. The Access Points aliases look and acts just like an S3 bucket to existing code. This means that you don’t need to make changes to older code to use Amazon S3 Access Points; just substitute an Access Points aliases wherever you previously used a bucket name. As a security team, it’s important to know that this flexible and powerful administrative feature is backwards-compatible and can be treated as a drop-in replacement in your various code bases that use Amazon S3 but haven’t been updated to use access point APIs. In addition, using Access Points aliases adds a number of powerful security-related controls, such as permanent binding of S3 access to a particular VPC.

Bucket Keys

Amazon S3 launched support for S3 Inventory and S3 Batch Operations to identify and copy objects to use S3 Bucket Keys, which can help reduce the costs of server-side encryption (SSE) with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).

S3 Bucket Keys were launched at the end of 2020, another great launch that security professionals should know about, so here is an overview in case you missed it. S3 Bucket Keys are data keys generated by AWS KMS to provide another layer of envelope encryption in which the outer layer (the S3 Bucket Key) is cached by S3 for a short period of time. This extra key layer increases performance and reduces the cost of requests to AWS KMS. It achieves this by decreasing the request traffic from Amazon S3 to AWS KMS from a one-to-one model—one request to AWS KMS for each object written to or read from Amazon S3—to a one-to-many model using the cached S3 Bucket Key. The S3 Bucket Key is never stored persistently in an unencrypted state outside AWS KMS, and so Amazon S3 ultimately must always return to AWS KMS to encrypt and decrypt the S3 Bucket Key, and thus, the data. As a result, you still retain control of the key hierarchy and resulting encrypted data through AWS KMS, and are still able to audit Amazon S3 returning periodically to AWS KMS to refresh the S3 Bucket Keys, as logged in CloudTrail.

Returning to our review of 2021, S3 Bucket Keys gained the ability to use Amazon S3 Inventory and Amazon S3 Batch Operations automatically to migrate objects from the higher cost, slightly lower-performance SSE-KMS model to the lower-cost, higher-performance S3 Bucket Keys model.

Simplified ownership and access management

The final item from 2021 for Amazon S3 is probably the most important of all. Last year was the year that Amazon S3 achieved fully modernized object ownership and access management capabilities. You can now disable access control lists to simplify ownership and access management for data in Amazon S3.

To understand this launch, we need to go in time to the origins of Amazon S3, which is one of the oldest services in AWS, created even before IAM was launched in 2011. In those pre-IAM days, a storage system like Amazon S3 needed to have some kind of access control model, so Amazon S3 invented its own: Amazon S3 access control lists (ACLs). Using ACLs, you could add access permissions down to the object level, but only with regard to access by other AWS account principals (the only kind of identity that was available at the time), or public access (read-only or read-write) to an object. And in this model, objects were always owned by the creator of the object, not the bucket owner.

After IAM was introduced, Amazon S3 added the bucket policy feature, a type of resource policy that provides the rich features of IAM, including full support for all IAM principals (users and roles), time-of-day conditions, source IP conditions, ability to require encryption, and more. For many years, Amazon S3 access decisions have been made by combining IAM policy permissions and ACL permissions, which has served customers well. But the object-writer-is-owner issue has often caused friction. The good news for security professionals has been that a deny by either type of access control type overrides an allow by the other, so there were no security issues with this bi-modal approach. The challenge was that it could be administratively difficult to manage both resource policies—which exist at the bucket and access point level—and ownership and ACLs—which exist at the object level. Ownership and ACLs might potentially impact the behavior of only a handful of objects, in a bucket full of millions or billions of objects.

With the features released in 2021, Amazon S3 has removed these points of friction, and now provides the features needed to reduce ownership issues and to make IAM-based policies the only access control system for a specified bucket. The first step came in 2020 with the ability to make object ownership track bucket ownership, regardless of writer. But that feature applied only to newly-written objects. The final step is the 2021 launch we’re highlighting here: the ability to disable at the bucket level the evaluation of all existing ACLs—including ownership and permissions—effectively nullifying all object ACLs. From this point forward, you have the mechanisms you need to govern Amazon S3 access with a combination of S3 bucket policies, S3 access point policies, and (within the same account) IAM principal policies, without worrying about legacy models of ACLs and per-object ownership.

Additional database and storage service features

AWS Backup Vault Lock

AWS Backup added an important new additional layer for backup protection with the availability of AWS Backup Vault Lock. A vault lock feature in AWS is the ability to configure a storage policy such that even the most powerful AWS principals (such as an account or Org root principal) can only delete data if the deletion conforms to the preset data retention policy. Even if the credentials of a powerful administrator are compromised, the data stored in the vault remains safe. Vault lock features are extremely valuable in guarding against a wide range of security and resiliency risks (including accidental deletion), notably in an era when ransomware represents a rising threat to data.

Prior to AWS Backup Vault Lock, AWS provided the extremely useful Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier vault locking features, but these previous vaulting features applied only to the two Amazon S3 storage classes. AWS Backup, on the other hand, supports a wide range of storage types and databases across the AWS portfolio, including Amazon EBS, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) including Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Neptune, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon FSx for Lustre, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon EC2, and AWS Storage Gateway. While built on top of Amazon S3, AWS Backup even supports backup of data stored in Amazon S3. Thus, this new AWS Backup Vault Lock feature effectively serves as a vault lock for all the data from most of the critical storage and database technologies made available by AWS.

Finally, as a bonus, AWS Backup added two more features in 2021 that should delight security and compliance professionals: AWS Backup Audit Manager and compliance reporting.

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB added a long-awaited feature: data-plane operations integration with AWS CloudTrail. DynamoDB has long supported the recording of management operations in CloudTrail—including a long list of operations like CreateTable, UpdateTable, DeleteTable, ListTables, CreateBackup, and many others. What has been added now is the ability to log the potentially far higher volume of data operations such as PutItem, BatchWriteItem, GetItem, BatchGetItem, and DeleteItem. With this launch, full database auditing became possible. In addition, DynamoDB added more granular control of logging through DynamoDB Streams filters. This feature allows users to vary the recording in CloudTrail of both control plane and data plane operations, at the table or stream level.

Amazon EBS snapshots

Let’s turn now to a simple but extremely useful feature launch affecting Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots. In the past, it was possible to accidently delete an EBS snapshot, which is a problem for security professionals because data availability is a part of the core security triad of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Now you can manage that risk and recover from accidental deletions of your snapshots by using Recycle Bin. You simply define a retention policy that applies to all deleted snapshots, and then you can define other more granular policies, for example using longer retention periods based on snapshot tag values, such as stage=prod. Along with this launch, the Amazon EBS team announced EBS Snapshots Archive, a major price reduction for long-term storage of snapshots.

AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority

2021 was a big year for AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) with the following updates and new features:

ACM Private CA achieved FedRAMP authorization for six additional AWS Regions in the US.
Additional certificate customization now allows administrators to tailor the contents of certificates for new use cases, such as identity and smart card certificates; or to securely add information to certificates instead of relying only on the information present in the certificate request.
New support for storing certificate revocation lists (CRLs) in private S3 buckets helps you achieve AWS-recommended best practices for limiting access to your buckets, while still making CRLs available to SSL and TLS clients.
Additional capabilities were added for sharing CAs across accounts by using AWS RAM to help administrators issue fully-customized certificates, or revoke them, from a shared CA.
Integration with Kubernetes provides a more secure certificate authority solution for Kubernetes containers.
Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) provides a fully-managed solution for notifying endpoints that certificates have been revoked, without the need for you to manage or operate infrastructure yourself.

Network and application protection

We saw a lot of enhancements in network and application protection in 2021 that will help you to enforce fine-grained security policies at important network control points across your organization. The services and new capabilities offer flexible solutions for inspecting and filtering traffic to help prevent unauthorized resource access.

AWS WAF

AWS WAF launched AWS WAF Bot Control, which gives you visibility and control over common and pervasive bots that consume excess resources, skew metrics, cause downtime, or perform other undesired activities. The Bot Control managed rule group helps you monitor, block, or rate-limit pervasive bots, such as scrapers, scanners, and crawlers. You can also allow common bots that you consider acceptable, such as status monitors and search engines. AWS WAF also added support for custom responses, managed rule group versioning, in-line regular expressions, and Captcha. The Captcha feature has been popular with customers, removing another small example of “undifferentiated work” for customers.

AWS Shield Advanced

AWS Shield Advanced now automatically protects web applications by blocking application layer (L7) DDoS events with no manual intervention needed by you or the AWS Shield Response Team (SRT). When you protect your resources with AWS Shield Advanced and enable automatic application layer DDoS mitigation, Shield Advanced identifies patterns associated with L7 DDoS events and isolates this anomalous traffic by automatically creating AWS WAF rules in your web access control lists (ACLs).

Amazon CloudFront

In other edge networking news, Amazon CloudFront added support for response headers policies. This means that you can now add cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), security, and custom headers to HTTP responses returned by your CloudFront distributions. You no longer need to configure your origins or use custom Lambda@Edge or CloudFront Functions to insert these headers.

CloudFront Functions were another great 2021 addition to edge computing, providing a simple, inexpensive, and yet highly secure method for running customer-defined code as part of any CloudFront-managed web request. CloudFront functions allow for the creation of very efficient, fine-grained network access filters, such the ability to block or allow web requests at a region or city level.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and Route 53

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) added more-specific routing (routing subnet-to-subnet traffic through a virtual networking device) that allows for packet interception and inspection between subnets in a VPC. This is particularly useful for highly-available, highly-scalable network virtual function services based on Gateway Load Balancer, including both AWS services like AWS Network Firewall, as well as third-party networking services such as the recently announced integration between AWS Firewall Manager and Palo Alto Networks Cloud Next Generation Firewall, powered by Gateway Load Balancer.

Another important set of enhancements to the core VPC experience came in the area of VPC Flow Logs. Amazon VPC launched out-of-the-box integration with Amazon Athena. This means with a few clicks, you can now use Athena to query your VPC flow logs delivered to Amazon S3. Additionally, Amazon VPC launched three associated new log features that make querying more efficient by supporting Apache Parquet, Hive-compatible prefixes, and hourly partitioned files.

Following Route 53 Resolver’s much-anticipated launch of DNS logging in 2020, the big news for 2021 was the launch of its DNS Firewall capability. Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall lets you create “blocklists” for domains you don’t want your VPC resources to communicate with, or you can take a stricter, “walled-garden” approach by creating “allowlists” that permit outbound DNS queries only to domains that you specify. You can also create alerts for when outbound DNS queries match certain firewall rules, allowing you to test your rules before deploying for production traffic. Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall launched with two managed domain lists—malware domains and botnet command and control domains—enabling you to get started quickly with managed protections against common threats. It also integrated with Firewall Manager (see the following section) for easier centralized administration.

AWS Network Firewall and Firewall Manager

Speaking of AWS Network Firewall and Firewall Manager, 2021 was a big year for both. Network Firewall added support for AWS Managed Rules, which are groups of rules based on threat intelligence data, to enable you to stay up to date on the latest security threats without writing and maintaining your own rules. AWS Network Firewall features a flexible rules engine enabling you to define firewall rules that give you fine-grained control over network traffic. As of the launch in late 2021, you can enable managed domain list rules to block HTTP and HTTPS traffic to domains identified as low-reputation, or that are known or suspected to be associated with malware or botnets. Prior to that, another important launch was new configuration options for rule ordering and default drop, making it simpler to write and process rules to monitor your VPC traffic. Also in 2021, Network Firewall announced a major regional expansion following its initial launch in 2020, and a range of compliance achievements and eligibility including HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC, and ISO.

Firewall Manager also had a strong 2021, adding a number of additional features beyond its initial core area of managing network firewalls and VPC security groups that provide centralized, policy-based control over many other important network security capabilities: Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall configurations, deployment of the new AWS WAF Bot Control, monitoring of VPC routes for AWS Network Firewall, AWS WAF log filtering, AWS WAF rate-based rules, and centralized logging of AWS Network Firewall logs.

Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing now supports forwarding traffic directly from Network Load Balancer (NLB) to Application Load Balancer (ALB). With this important new integration, you can take advantage of many critical NLB features such as support for AWS PrivateLink and exposing static IP addresses for applications that still require ALB.

In addition, Network Load Balancer now supports version 1.3 of the TLS protocol. This adds to the existing TLS 1.3 support in Amazon CloudFront, launched in 2020. AWS plans to add TLS 1.3 support for additional services.

The AWS Networking team also made Amazon VPC private NAT gateways available in both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The expansion into the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions enables US government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by helping them to address certain regulatory and compliance requirements.

Compute

Security professionals should also be aware of some interesting enhancements in AWS compute services that can help improve their organization’s experience in building and operating a secure environment.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) launched the Global View on the console to provide visibility to all your resources across Regions. Global View helps you monitor resource counts, notice abnormalities sooner, and find stray resources. A few days into 2022, another simple but extremely useful EC2 launch was the new ability to obtain instance tags from the Instance Metadata Service (IMDS). Many customers run code on Amazon EC2 that needs to introspect about the EC2 tags associated with the instance and then change its behavior depending on the content of the tags. Prior to this launch, you had to associate an EC2 role and call the EC2 API to get this information. That required access to API endpoints, either through a NAT gateway or a VPC endpoint for Amazon EC2. Now, that information can be obtained directly from the IMDS, greatly simplifying a common use case.

Amazon EC2 launched sharing of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with AWS Organizations and Organizational Units (OUs). Previously, you could share AMIs only with specific AWS account IDs. To share AMIs within AWS Organizations, you had to explicitly manage sharing of AMIs on an account-by-account basis, as they were added to or removed from AWS Organizations. With this new feature, you no longer have to update your AMI permissions because of organizational changes. AMI sharing is automatically synchronized when organizational changes occur. This feature greatly helps both security professionals and governance teams to centrally manage and govern AMIs as you grow and scale your AWS accounts. As previously noted, this feature was also added to EC2 Image Builder. Finally, Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager, the tool that manages all your EBS volumes and AMIs in a policy-driven way, now supports automatic deprecation of AMIs. As a security professional, you will find this helpful as you can set a timeline on your AMIs so that, if the AMIs haven’t been updated for a specified period of time, they will no longer be considered valid or usable by development teams.

Looking ahead

In 2022, AWS continues to deliver experiences that meet administrators where they govern, developers where they code, and applications where they run. We will continue to summarize important launches in future blog posts. If you’re interested in learning more about AWS services, join us for AWS re:Inforce, the AWS conference focused on cloud security, identity, privacy, and compliance. AWS re:Inforce 2022 will take place July 26–27 in Boston, MA. Registration is now open. Register now with discount code SALxUsxEFCw to get $150 off your full conference pass to AWS re:Inforce. For a limited time only and while supplies last. We look forward to seeing you there!

To stay up to date on the latest product and feature launches and security use cases, be sure to read the What’s New with AWS announcements (or subscribe to the RSS feed) and the AWS Security Blog.

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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Use AWS Firewall Manager to deploy protection at scale in AWS Organizations

2020-10-15 Chamandeep Singh

Post Syndicated from Chamandeep Singh original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/use-aws-firewall-manager-to-deploy-protection-at-scale-in-aws-organizations/

Security teams that are responsible for securing workloads in hundreds of Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts in different organizational units aim for a consistent approach across AWS Organizations. Key goals include enforcing preventative measures to mitigate known security issues, having a central approach for notifying the SecOps team about potential distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and continuing to maintain compliance obligations. AWS Firewall Manager works at the organizational level to help you achieve your intended security posture while it provides reporting for non-compliant resources in all your AWS accounts. This post provides step-by-step instructions to deploy and manage security policies across your AWS Organizations implementation by using Firewall Manager.

You can use Firewall Manager to centrally manage AWS WAF, AWS Shield Advanced, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) security groups across all your AWS accounts. Firewall Manager helps to protect resources across different accounts, and it can protect resources with specific tags or resources in a group of AWS accounts that are in specific organizational units (OUs). With AWS Organizations, you can centrally manage policies across multiple AWS accounts without having to use custom scripts and manual processes.

Architecture diagram

Figure 1 shows an example organizational structure in AWS Organizations, with several OUs that we’ll use in the example policy sets in this blog post.

Figure 1: AWS Organizations and OU structure

Firewall Manager can be associated to either the AWS master payer account or one of the member AWS accounts that has appropriate permissions as a delegated administrator. Following the best practices for organizational units, in this post we use a dedicated Security Tooling AWS account (named Security in the diagram) to operate the Firewall Manager administrator deployment under the Security OU. The Security OU is used for hosting security-related access and services. The Security OU, its child OUs, and the associated AWS accounts should be owned and managed by your security organization.

Firewall Manager prerequisites

Firewall Manager has the following prerequisites that you must complete before you create and apply a Firewall Manager policy:

AWS Organizations: Your organization must be using AWS Organizations to manage your accounts, and All Features must be enabled. For more information, see Creating an organization and Enabling all features in your organization.
A Firewall Manager administrator account: You must designate one of the AWS accounts in your organization as the Firewall Manager administrator for Firewall Manager. This gives the account permission to deploy security policies across the organization.
AWS Config: You must enable AWS Config for all of the accounts in your organization so that Firewall Manager can detect newly created resources. To enable AWS Config for all of the accounts in your organization, use the Enable AWS Config template from the StackSets sample templates.

Deployment of security policies

In the following sections, we explain how to create AWS WAF rules, Shield Advanced protections, and Amazon VPC security groups by using Firewall Manager. We further explain how you can deploy these different policy types to protect resources across your accounts in AWS Organizations. Each Firewall Manager policy is specific to an individual resource type. If you want to enforce multiple policy types across accounts, you should create multiple policies. You can create more than one policy for each type. If you add a new account to an organization that you created with AWS Organizations, Firewall Manager automatically applies the policy to the resources in that account that are within scope of the policy. This is a scalable approach to assist you in deploying the necessary configuration when developers create resources. For instance, you can create an AWS WAF policy that will result in a known set of AWS WAF rules being deployed whenever someone creates an Amazon CloudFront distribution.

Policy 1: Create and manage security groups

You can use Firewall Manager to centrally configure and manage Amazon VPC security groups across all your AWS accounts in AWS Organizations. A previous AWS Security blog post walks you through how to apply common security group rules, audit your security groups, and detect unused and redundant rules in your security groups across your AWS environment.

Firewall Manager automatically audits new resources and rules as customers add resources or security group rules to their accounts. You can audit overly permissive security group rules, such as rules with a wide range of ports or Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) ranges, or rules that have enabled all protocols to access resources. To audit security group policies, you can use application and protocol lists to specify what’s allowed and what’s denied by the policy.

In this blog post, we use a security policy to audit the security groups for overly permissive rules and high-risk applications that are allowed to open to local CIDR ranges (for example, 10.0.0.0/8, 192.168.0.0/16, 172.16.0.0/12). We created a custom application list named Bastion Host for port 22 and a custom protocol list named Allowed Protocol that allows the child account to create rules only on TCP protocols. Refer link for how to create a custom managed application and protocol list.

To create audit security group policies

Sign in to the Firewall Manager delegated administrator account. Navigate to the Firewall Manager console. In the left navigation pane, under AWS Firewall Manager, select Security policies.
For Region, select the AWS Region where you would like to protect the resources. FMS region selection is on the service page drop down tab. In this example, we selected the Sydney (ap-southeast-2) Region because we have all of our resources in the Sydney Region.
Create the policy, and in Policy details, choose Security group. For Region, select a Region (we selected Sydney (ap-southeast-2)), and then choose Next.
For Security group policy type, choose Auditing and enforcement of security group rules, and then choose Next.
Enter a policy name. We named our policy AWS_FMS_Audit_SecurityGroup.
For Policy rule options, for this example, we chose Configure managed audit policy rules.
Under Policy rules, choose the following:
1. For Security group rules to audit, choose Inbound Rules.
2. For Rules, select the following:
  1. Select Audit over permissive security group rules.
    - For Allowed security group rules, choose Add Protocol list and select the custom protocol list Allowed Protocols that we created earlier.
    - For Denied security group rules, select Deny rules with the allow ‘ALL’ protocol.
  2. Select Audit high risk applications.
    - Choose Applications that can only access local CIDR ranges. Then choose Add application list and select the custom application list Bastion host that we created earlier.
For Policy action, for the example in this post, we chose Auto remediate any noncompliant resources. Choose Next.

Figure 2: Policy rules for the security group audit policy
For Policy scope, choose the following options for this example:
1. For AWS accounts this policy applies to, choose Include only the specified accounts and organizational unit. For Included Organizational units, select OU (example – Non-Prod Accounts).
2. For Resource type, select EC2 Instance, Security Group, and Elastic Network Interface.
3. For Resources, choose Include all resources that match the selected resource type.
You can create tags for the security policy. In the example in this post, Tag Key is set to Firewall_Manager and Tag Value is set to Audit_Security_group.

Important: Migrating AWS accounts from one organizational unit to another won’t remove or detach the existing security group policy applied by Firewall Manager. For example, in the reference architecture in Figure 1 we have the AWS account Tenant-5 under the Staging OU. We’ve created a different Firewall Manager security group policy for the Pre-Prod OU and Prod OU. If you move the Tenant-5 account to Prod OU from Staging OU, the resources associated with Tenant-5 will continue to have the security group policies that are defined for both Prod and Staging OU unless you select otherwise before relocating the AWS account. Firewall Manager supports the detach option in case of policy deletion, because moving accounts across the OU may have unintended impacts such as loss of connectivity or protection, and therefore Firewall Manager won’t remove the security group.

Policy 2: Managing AWS WAF v2 policy

A Firewall Manager AWS WAF policy contains the rule groups that you want to apply to your resources. When you apply the policy, Firewall Manager creates a Firewall Manager web access control list (web ACL) in each account that’s within the policy scope.

Note: Creating Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream is a prerequisite to manage the WAF ACL logging at Step 8 in us-east-1. (example – aws-waf-logs-lab-waf-logs)

To create a Firewall Manager – AWS WAF v2 policy

Sign in to the Firewall Manager delegated administrator account. Navigate to the Firewall Manager console. In the left navigation pane, under AWS Firewall Manager, choose Security policies.
For Region, select a Region. FMS region selection is on the service page drop down tab. For this example, we selected the Region as Global, since the policy is to protect CloudFront resources.
Create the policy. Under Policy details, choose AWS WAF and for Region, choose Global. Then choose Next.
Enter a policy name. We named our policy AWS_FMS_WAF_Rule.
On the Policy rule page, under Web ACL configuration, add rule groups. AWS WAF supports custom rule groups (the customer creates the rules), AWS Managed Rules rule groups (AWS manages the rules), and AWS Marketplace managed rule groups. For this example, we chose AWS Managed Rules rule groups.
For this example, for First rule groups, we chose the AWS Managed Rules rule group, AWS Core rule set. For Last rule groups, we chose the AWS Managed Rules rule group, Amazon IP reputation list.
For Default web ACL action for requests that don’t match any rules in the web ACL, choose a default action. We chose Allow.
Firewall Manager enables logging for a specific web ACL. This logging is applied to all the in-scope accounts and delivers the logs to a centralized single account. To enable centralized logging of AWS WAF logs:
1. For Logging configuration status, choose Enabled.
2. For IAM role, Firewall Manager creates an AWS WAF service-role for logging. Your security account should have the necessary IAM permissions. Learn more about access requirements for logging.
3. Select Kinesis stream created earlier called aws-waf-logs-lab-waf-logs in us-east-1 as we’re using Cloudfront as a resource in the policy.
4. For Redacted fields, for this example select HTTP method, Query String, URI, and Header. You can also add a new header. For more information, see Configure logging for an AWS Firewall Manager AWS WAF policy.
For Policy action, for this example, we chose Auto remediate any noncompliant resources. To replace the existing web ACL that is currently associated with the resource, select Replace web ACLs that are currently associated with in-scope resources with the web ACLs created by this policy. Choose Next.

Note: If a resource has an association with another web ACL that is managed by a different active Firewall Manager, it doesn’t affect that resource.

Figure 3: Policy rules for the AWS WAF security policy
For Policy scope, choose the following options for this example:
1. For AWS accounts this policy applies to, choose Include only the specified accounts and organizational unit. For Included organizational units, select OU (example – Pre-Prod Accounts).
2. For Resource type, choose CloudFront distribution.
3. For Resources, choose Include all resources that match the selected resource type.
You can create tags for the security policy. For the example in this post, Tag Key is set to Firewall_Manager and Tag Value is set to WAF_Policy.
Review the security policy, and then choose Create Policy.

Note: For the AWS WAF v2 policy, the web ACL pushed by the Firewall Manager can’t be modified on the individual account. The account owner can only add a new rule group.
In the policy’s first and last rule groups sets, you can add additional rule groups at the linked AWS account level to provide additional security based on application requirements. You can use managed rule groups, which AWS Managed Rules and AWS Marketplace sellers create and maintain for you. For example, you can use the WordPress application rule group, which contains rules that block request patterns associated with the exploitation of vulnerabilities specific to a WordPress site. You can also manage and use your own rule groups.For more information about all of these options, see Rule groups. Another example could be using a rate-based rule that tracks the rate of requests for each originating IP address, and triggers the rule action on IPs with rates that go over a limit. Learn more about rate-based rules.

Policy 3: Managing AWS Shield Advanced policy

AWS Shield Advanced is a paid service that provides additional protections for internet facing applications. If you have Business or Enterprise support, you can engage the 24X7 AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT), who can write rules on your behalf to mitigate Layer 7 DDoS attacks. Please refer Shield Advanced pricing for more info before proceeding with Shield FMS Policy.

After you complete the prerequisites that were outlined in the prerequisites section, we’ll create Shield Advanced policy which contains the accounts and resources that you want to protect with Shield Advanced. Purpose of this policy is to activate the AWS Shield Advanced in the Accounts in OU’s scope and add the selected resources under Shield Advanced protection list.

To create a Firewall Manager – Shield Advanced policy

Sign in to the Firewall Manager delegated administrator account. Navigate to the Firewall Manager console. In the left navigation pane, under AWS Firewall Manager, choose Security policies.
For Region, select the AWS Region where you would like to protect the resources. FMS region selection is on the service page drop down tab. In this post, we’ve selected the Sydney (ap-southeast-2) Region because all of our resources are in the Sydney Region.

Note: To protect CloudFront resources, select the Global option.
Create the policy, and in Policy details, choose AWS Shield Advanced. For Region, select a Region (example – ap-southeast-2), and then choose Next.
Enter a policy name. We named our policy AWS_FMS_ShieldAdvanced Rule.
For Policy action, for the example in this post, we chose Auto remediate any non-compliant resources. Alternatively, if you choose Create but do not apply this policy to existing or new resources, Firewall Manager doesn’t apply Shield Advanced protection to any resources. You must apply the policy to resources later. Choose Next.
For Policy scope, this example uses the OU structure as the container of multiple accounts with similar requirements:
1. For AWS accounts this policy applies to, choose Include only the specified accounts and organizational units. For Included organizational units, select OU (example – Staging Accounts OU).
2. For Resource type, select Application Load Balancer and Elastic IP.
3. For Resources, choose Include all resources that match the selected resource type.
  
  Figure 4: Policy scope page for creating the Shield Advanced security policy
  
  Note: If you want to protect only the resources with specific tags, or alternatively exclude resources with specific tags, choose Use tags to include/exclude resources, enter the tags, and then choose either Include or Exclude. Tags enable you to categorize AWS resources in different ways, for example by indicating an environment, owner, or team to include or exclude in Firewall Manager policy. Firewall Manager combines the tags with “AND” so that, if you add more than one tag to a policy scope, a resource must have all the specified tags to be included or excluded.
  
  Important: Shield Advanced supports protection for Amazon Route 53 and AWS Global Accelerator. However, protection for these resources cannot be deployed with the help of Firewall Manager security policy at this time. If you need to protect these resources with Shield Advanced, you should use individual AWS account access through the API or console to activate Shield Advanced protection for the intended resources.
You can create tags for the security policy. In the example in this post, Tag Key is set to Firewall_Manager and Tag Value is set to Shield_Advanced_Policy. You can use the tags in the Resource element of IAM permission policy statements to either allow or deny users to make changes to security policy.
Review the security policy, and then choose Create Policy.

Now you’ve successfully created a Firewall Manager security policy. Using the organizational units in AWS Organizations as a method to deploy the Firewall Manager security policy, when you add an account to the OU or to any of its child OUs, Firewall Manager automatically applies the policy to the new account.

Important: You don’t need to manually subscribe Shield Advanced on the member accounts. Firewall Manager subscribes Shield Advanced on the member accounts as part of creating the policy.

Operational visibility and compliance report

Firewall Manager offers a centralized incident notification for DDoS incidents that are reported by Shield Advanced. You can create an Amazon SNS topic to monitor the protected resources for potential DDoS activities and send notifications accordingly. Learn how to create an SNS topic. If you have resources in different Regions, the SNS topic needs to be created in the intended Region. You must perform this step from the Firewall Manager delegated AWS account (for example, Security Tooling) to receive alerts across your AWS accounts in that organization.

As a best practice, you should set up notifications for all the Regions where you have a production workload under Shield Advanced protection.

To create an SNS topic in the Firewall Manager administrative console

In the AWS Management Console, sign in to the Security Tooling account or the AWS Firewall Manager delegated administrator account. In the left navigation pane, under AWS Firewall Manager, choose Settings.
Select the SNS topic that you created earlier to be used for the Firewall Manager central notification mechanism. For this example, we created a new SNS topic in the Sydney Region (ap-southeast-2) named SNS_Topic_Syd.
For Recipient email address, enter the email address that the SNS topic will be sent to. Choose Configure SNS configuration.

After you create the SNS configuration, you can see the SNS topic in the appropriate Region, as in the following example.

Figure 5: An SNS topic for centralized incident notification

AWS Shield Advanced records metrics in Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the protected resources and can also create Amazon CloudWatch alarms. For the simplicity purpose we took the email notification route for this example. In security operations environment, you should integrate the SNS notification to your existing ticketing system or pager duty for Realtime response.

Important: You can also use the CloudWatch dashboard to monitor potential DDoS activity. It collects and processes raw data from Shield Advanced into readable, near real-time metrics.

You can automatically enforce policies on AWS resources that currently exist or are created in the future, in order to promote compliance with firewall rules across the organization. For all policies, you can view the compliance status for in-scope accounts and resources by using the API or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) method. For content audit security group policies, you can also view detailed violation information for in-scope resources. This information can help you to better understand and manage your security risk.

View all the policies in the Firewall Manager administrative account

For our example, we created three security policies in the Firewall Manager delegated administrator account. We can check policy compliance status for all three policies by using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or API methods. The AWS CLI example that follows can be further extended to build an automation for notifying the non-compliant resource owners.

To list all the policies in FMS

 aws fms list-policies --region ap-southeast-2
{
    "PolicyList": [
        {
            "PolicyName": "WAFV2-Test2", 
            "RemediationEnabled": false, 
            "ResourceType": "AWS::ElasticLoadBalancingV2::LoadBalancer", 
            "PolicyArn": "arn:aws:fms:ap-southeast-2:222222222222:policy/78edcc79-c0b1-46ed-b7b9-d166b9fd3b58", 
            "SecurityServiceType": "WAFV2", 
            "PolicyId": "78edcc79-c0b1-46ed-b7b9-d166b9fd3b58"
        },
        {
            "PolicyName": "AWS_FMS_Audit_SecurityGroup", 
            "RemediationEnabled": true, 
            "ResourceType": "ResourceTypeList", 
            "PolicyArn": "arn:aws:fms:ap-southeast-2:<Account-Id>:policy/d44f3f38-ed6f-4af3-b5b3-78e9583051cf", 
            "SecurityServiceType": "SECURITY_GROUPS_CONTENT_AUDIT", 
            "PolicyId": "d44f3f38-ed6f-4af3-b5b3-78e9583051cf"
        }
    ]
}

Now, we got the policy id to check the compliance status

aws fms list-compliance-status --policy-id 78edcc79-c0b1-46ed-b7b9-d166b9fd3b58
{
    "PolicyComplianceStatusList": [
        {
            "PolicyName": "WAFV2-Test2", 
            "PolicyOwner": "222222222222", 
            "LastUpdated": 1601360994.0, 
            "MemberAccount": "444444444444", 
            "PolicyId": "78edcc79-c0b1-46ed-b7b9-d166b9fd3b58", 
            "IssueInfoMap": {}, 
            "EvaluationResults": [
                {
                    "ViolatorCount": 0, 
                    "EvaluationLimitExceeded": false, 
                    "ComplianceStatus": "COMPLIANT"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

For the preceding policy, member account 444444444444 associated to the policy is compliant. The following example shows the status for the second policy.

aws fms list-compliance-status --policy-id 44c0b677-e7d4-4d8a-801f-60be2630a48d
{
    "PolicyComplianceStatusList": [
        {
            "PolicyName": "AWS_FMS_WAF_Rule", 
            "PolicyOwner": "222222222222", 
            "LastUpdated": 1601361231.0, 
            "MemberAccount": "555555555555", 
            "PolicyId": "44c0b677-e7d4-4d8a-801f-60be2630a48d", 
            "IssueInfoMap": {}, 
            "EvaluationResults": [
                {
                    "ViolatorCount": 3, 
                    "EvaluationLimitExceeded": false, 
                    "ComplianceStatus": "NON_COMPLIANT"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

For the preceding policy, member account 555555555555 associated to the policy is non-compliant.

To provide detailed compliance information about the specified member account, the output includes resources that are in and out of compliance with the specified policy, as shown in the following example.

aws fms get-compliance-detail --policy-id 44c0b677-e7d4-4d8a-801f-60be2630a48d --member-account 555555555555
{
    "PolicyComplianceDetail": {
        "Violators": [
            {
                "ResourceType": "AWS::ElasticLoadBalancingV2::LoadBalancer", 
                "ResourceId": "arn:aws:elasticloadbalancing:ap-southeast-2: 555555555555:loadbalancer/app/FMSTest2/c2da4e99d4d13cf4", 
                "ViolationReason": "RESOURCE_MISSING_WEB_ACL"
            }, 
            {
                "ResourceType": "AWS::ElasticLoadBalancingV2::LoadBalancer", 
                "ResourceId": "arn:aws:elasticloadbalancing:ap-southeast-2:555555555555:loadbalancer/app/fmstest/1e70668ce77eb61b", 
                "ViolationReason": "RESOURCE_MISSING_WEB_ACL"
            }
        ], 
        "EvaluationLimitExceeded": false, 
        "PolicyOwner": "222222222222", 
        "ExpiredAt": 1601362402.0, 
        "MemberAccount": "555555555555", 
        "PolicyId": "44c0b677-e7d4-4d8a-801f-60be2630a48d", 
        "IssueInfoMap": {}
    }
}

In the preceding example, two Application Load Balancers (ALBs) are not associated with a web ACL. You can further introduce automation by using AWS Lambda functions to isolate the non-compliant resources or trigger an alert for the account owner to launch manual remediation.

Resource Clean up

You can delete a Firewall Manager policy by performing the following steps.

To delete a policy (console)

In the navigation pane, choose Security policies.
Choose the option next to the policy that you want to delete. We created 3 policies which needs to be removed one by one.
Choose Delete.

Important: When you delete a Firewall Manager Shield Advanced policy, the policy is deleted, but your accounts remain subscribed to Shield Advanced.

Conclusion

In this post, you learned how you can use Firewall Manager to enforce required preventative policies from a central delegated AWS account managed by your security team. You can extend this strategy to all AWS OUs to meet your future needs as new AWS accounts or resources get added to AWS Organizations. A central notification delivery to your Security Operations team is crucial from a visibility perspective, and with the help of Firewall Manager you can build a scalable approach to stay protected, informed, and compliant. Firewall Manager simplifies your AWS WAF, AWS Shield Advanced, and Amazon VPC security group administration and maintenance tasks across multiple accounts and resources.

For further reading and updates, see the Firewall Manager Developer Guide.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, start a new thread on the AWS Firewall Manager forum or contact AWS Support.

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