Tag Archives: DoD

AWS FedRAMP Revision 5 baselines transition update

Post Syndicated from Kevin Donohue original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-fedramp-revision-5-transition-update/

On May 20, 2023, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) released the FedRAMP Rev.5 baselines. The FedRAMP baselines were updated to correspond with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-53 Rev. 5 Catalog of Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations and SP 800-53B Control Baselines for Information Systems and Organizations. AWS is transitioning to the updated security requirements and assisting customers by making new resources available (additional information on these resources below). AWS security and compliance teams are analyzing both the FedRAMP baselines and templates, along with the NIST 800-53 Rev. 5 requirements, to help ensure a seamless transition. This post details the high-level milestones for the transition of AWS GovCloud (US) and AWS US East/West FedRAMP-authorized Regions and lists new resources available to customers.

Background

The NIST 800-53 framework is an information security standard that sets forth minimum requirements for federal information systems. In 2020, NIST released Rev. 5 of the framework with new control requirements related to privacy and supply chain risk management, among other enhancements, to improve security standards for industry partners and government agencies. The Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) of 2014 is a law requiring the implementation of information security policies for federal Executive Branch civilian agencies and contractors. FedRAMP is a government-wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud service offerings across the federal government by providing a standardized approach to security and risk assessment for cloud technologies and federal agencies. Both FISMA and FedRAMP adhere to the NIST SP 800-53 framework to define security control baselines that are applicable to AWS and its agency customers.

Key milestones and deliverables

The timeline for AWS to transition to FedRAMP Rev. 5 baselines will be predicated on transition guidance and requirements issued by the FedRAMP Program Management Office (PMO), our third-party assessment (3PAO) schedule, and the FedRAMP Provisional Authorization to Operate (P-ATO) authorization date. Below you will find a list of key documents to help customers get started with Rev. 5 on AWS, as well as timelines for the AWS preliminary authorization schedule.

Key Rev. 5 AWS documents for customers:

  • AWS FedRAMP Rev5 Customer Responsibility Matrix (CRM) – Made available on AWS Artifact September 1, 2023 (attachment within the AWS FedRAMP Customer Package).
  • AWS Customer Compliance Guides (CCG) V2 AWS Customer Compliance Guides are now available on AWS Artifact. CCGs are mapped to NIST 800-53 Rev. 5 and nine additional compliance frameworks.

AWS GovCloud (US) authorization timeline:

  • 3PAO Rev. 5 annual assessment: January 2024–April 2024
  • Estimated 2024 Rev. 5 P-ATO letter delivery: Q4 2024

AWS US East/West commercial authorization timeline:

  • 3PAO Rev 5. annual assessment: March 2024–June 2024
  • Estimated 2024 Rev. 5 P-ATO letter delivery: Q4 2024

The AWS transition to FedRAMP Rev. 5 baselines will be completed in accordance with regulatory requirements as defined in our existing FedRAMP P-ATO letter, according to the FedRAMP Transition Guidance. Note that FedRAMP P-ATO letters and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Provisional Authorization (PA) letters for AWS are considered active through the transition to NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5. This includes through the 2024 annual assessments of AWS GovCloud (US) and AWS US East/West Regions. The P-ATO letters for each Region are expected to be delivered between Q3 and Q4 of 2024. Supporting documentation required for FedRAMP authorization will be made available to U.S. Government agencies and stakeholders in 2024 on a rolling basis and based on the timeline and conclusion of 3PAO assessments.

How to contact us

For questions about the AWS transition to the FedRAMP Rev. 5 baselines, AWS and its services, or for compliance questions, contact [email protected].

To learn more about AWS compliance programs, see the AWS Compliance Programs page. For more information about the FedRAMP project, see the FedRAMP website.

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Kevin Donohue

Kevin Donohue

Kevin is a Senior Security Partner Strategist on the AWS Global Security and Compliance Acceleration team, specializing in shared responsibility and regulatory compliance support for AWS customers and partners. Kevin began his tenure with AWS in 2019 with the AWS FedRAMP program, where he created Customer Compliance Guides to assist U.S. government customers with their assessment and authorization responsibilities.

Customer Compliance Guides now available on AWS Artifact

Post Syndicated from Kevin Donohue original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/customer-compliance-guides-now-available-on-aws-artifact/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released Customer Compliance Guides (CCGs) to support customers, partners, and auditors in their understanding of how compliance requirements from leading frameworks map to AWS service security recommendations. CCGs cover 100+ services and features offering security guidance mapped to 10 different compliance frameworks. Customers can select any of the available frameworks and services to see a consolidated summary of recommendations that are mapped to security control requirements. 

CCGs summarize key details from public AWS user guides and map them to related security topics and control requirements. CCGs don’t cover compliance topics such as physical and maintenance controls, or organization-specific requirements such as policies and human resources controls. This makes the guides lightweight and focused only on the unique security considerations for AWS services.

Customer Compliance Guides work backwards from security configuration recommendations for each service and map the guidance and compliance considerations to the following frameworks:

  • National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-53
  • NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF)
  • NIST 800-171
  • System and Organization Controls (SOC) II
  • Center for Internet Security (CIS) Critical Controls v8.0
  • ISO 27001
  • NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP)
  • Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) v4.0
  • Department of Defense Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC)
  • HIPAA

Customer Compliance Guides help customers address three primary challenges:

  1. Explaining how configuration responsibility might vary depending on the service and summarizing security best practice guidance through the lens of compliance
  2. Assisting customers in determining the scope of their security or compliance assessments based on the services they use to run their workloads
  3. Providing customers with guidance to craft security compliance documentation that might be required to meet various compliance frameworks

CCGs are available for download in AWS Artifact. Artifact is your go-to, central resource for AWS compliance-related information. It provides on-demand access to security and compliance reports from AWS and independent software vendors (ISVs) who sell their products on AWS Marketplace. To access the new CCG resources, navigate to AWS Artifact from the console and search for Customer Compliance Guides. To learn more about the background of Customer Compliance Guides, see the YouTube video Simplify the Shared Responsibility Model.

 
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Kevin Donohue

Kevin Donohue

Kevin is a Senior Manager in AWS Security Assurance, specializing in shared responsibility compliance and regulatory operations across various industries. Kevin began his tenure with AWS in 2019 in support of U.S. Government customers in the AWS FedRAMP program.

Travis Goldbach

Travis Goldbach

Travis has over 12 years’ experience as a cybersecurity and compliance professional with demonstrated ability to map key business drivers to ensure client success. He started at AWS in 2021 as a Sr. Business Development Manager to help AWS customers accelerate their DFARS, NIST, and CMMC compliance requirements while reducing their level of effort and risk.

AWS announces migration plans for NIST 800-53 Revision 5

Post Syndicated from James Mueller original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-announces-migration-plans-for-nist-800-53-revision-5/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is excited to begin migration plans for National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-53 Revision 5.

The NIST 800-53 framework is a regulatory standard that defines the minimum baseline of security controls for U.S. federal information systems. In 2020, NIST released Revision 5 of the framework to improve security standards for industry partners and government agencies. The set of NIST 800-53 controls provides a foundation for additional laws and regulations within the U.S. government.

The Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) of 2014 is a law that requires federal agencies and contractors to meet information security standards. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a federal government program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring of cloud services. Both FISMA and FedRAMP rely on the NIST 800-53 framework.

NIST 800-53 Revision 5

AWS meets the NIST 800-53 Revision 4 regulatory standards mandated by government authorities. NIST added numerous security enhancements, such as privacy and supply chain management, to Revision 5 to keep abreast of emerging threats to federal information systems.

In preparation for federal regulators to accept NIST 800-53 Revision 5 as the new requirement standard, AWS has begun efforts to adapt to the new security controls, processes, and procedures. AWS security compliance teams have analyzed the new requirements and launched a project to implement the updates. Although AWS is not required to migrate to the new Revision 5 standard until NIST announces the official regulatory compliance deadline, we are already taking steps to meet the deadline.

To learn more about AWS compliance programs, see the AWS Compliance Programs page.

 
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James Mueller

James Mueller

James is a Security Assurance Manager for AWS. For over 20 years, he has served customers in the private, public, and non-profit sectors delivering innovative information technology solutions. He currently leads security compliance efforts to drive adoption of AWS services.

AWS achieves the first OSCAL format system security plan submission to FedRAMP

Post Syndicated from Matthew Donkin original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-the-first-oscal-format-system-security-plan-submission-to-fedramp/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the first cloud service provider to produce an Open Security Control Assessment Language (OSCAL)–formatted system security plan (SSP) for the FedRAMP Project Management Office (PMO). OSCAL is the first step in the AWS effort to automate security documentation to simplify our customers’ journey through cloud adoption and accelerate the authorization to operate (ATO) process.

AWS continues its commitment to innovation and customer obsession. Our incorporation of the OSCAL format will improve the customer experience of reviewing and assessing security documentation. It can take an estimated 4,200 workforce hours for companies to receive an ATO, with much of the effort due to manual review and transcription of documentation. Automating this process through a machine-translatable language gives our customers the ability to ingest security documentation into a governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) tool to automate much of this time-consuming task. AWS worked with an AWS Partner, to ingest the AWS SSP through their tool, Xacta.

This is a first step in several initiatives AWS has planned to automate the security assurance process across multiple compliance frameworks. We continue to look for ways to earn trust with our customers, and over the next year we will continue to release new solutions that customers can use to rapidly deploy secure and innovative services.

“Providing the SSP packages in OSCAL is a great milestone in security automation marking the beginning of a new era in cybersecurity. We appreciate the leadership in this area and look forward to working with all cyber professionals, in particular with the visionary cloud service providers, to help deliver secure innovation faster to the people they serve.”

– Dr. Michaela Iorga, OSCAL Strategic Outreach Director, NIST

To learn more about OSCAL, visit the NIST OSCAL website. To learn more about FedRAMP’s plans for OSCAL, visit the FedRAMP Blog.

To learn what other public sector customers are doing on AWS, see our Government, Education, and Nonprofits case studies and customer success stories. Stay tuned for future updates on our Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. Let us know how this post will help your mission by reaching out to your AWS account team. Lastly, if you have feedback about this blog post, let us know in the Comments section.

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Matthew Donkin

Matthew Donkin

Matthew Donkin, AWS Security Compliance Lead, provides direction and guidance for security documentation automation, physical security compliance, and assists customers in navigating compliance in the cloud. He is leading the development of the industries’ first open security controls assessment language (OSCAL) artifacts for adoption of a faster and more reliable way to process resource intensive documentation within the authorization process.

10 additional AWS services authorized at DoD Impact Level 6 for the AWS Secret Region

Post Syndicated from Tyler Harding original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/10-additional-aws-services-authorized-dod-impact-level-6-for-aws-secret-region/

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has authorized 10 additional AWS services in the AWS Secret Region for production workloads at the Department of Defense (DoD) Impact Level (IL) 6 under the DoD’s Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (DoD CC SRG). With this authorization at DoD IL 6, DoD Mission Owners can process classified and mission critical workloads for National Security Systems in the AWS Secret Region. The AWS Secret Region is available to the Department of Defense on the AWS’s GSA IT Multiple Award Schedule.

AWS successfully completed an independent evaluation by members of the Intelligence Community (IC) that confirmed AWS effectively implemented 859 security controls using applicable criteria from NIST SP 800-53 Rev 4, the DoD CC SRG, and the Committee on National Security Systems Instruction No. 1253 at the Moderate Confidentiality, Moderate Integrity, and Moderate Availability impact levels.

The 10 AWS services newly authorized by DISA at IL 6 provide additional choices for DoD Mission Owners to use the capabilities of the AWS Cloud in service areas such as compute and storage, management and developer tools, analytics, and networking. With the addition of these 10 newly authorized AWS services (listed with links below), AWS expands the capabilities for DoD Mission Owners to use a total of 36 services and features.

Compute and Storage:

Management and Developer Tools:

  • AWS Personal Health Dashboard: Monitor, manage, and optimize your AWS environment with a personalized view into the performance and availability of the AWS services underlying your AWS resources.
  • AWS Systems Manager: Automatically collect software inventory, apply OS patches, create system images, configure Windows and Linux operating systems, and seamlessly bridge your existing infrastructure with AWS.
  • AWS CodeDeploy: A fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of compute services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and on-premises servers.

Analytics:

  • AWS Data Pipeline: Reliably process and move data between different AWS compute and storage services, as well as on-premises data sources, at specified intervals.

Networking:

  • AWS PrivateLink: Use secure private connectivity between Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS services, and on-premises applications on the AWS network, and eliminate the exposure of data to the public internet.
  • AWS Transit Gateway: Easily connect Amazon VPC, AWS accounts, and on-premises networks to a single gateway.
Figure 1: 10 additional AWS services authorized at DoD Impact Level 6

Figure 1: 10 additional AWS services authorized at DoD Impact Level 6

Newly authorized AWS services and features at DoD Impact Level 6

  1. Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
  2. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
  3. AWS CodeDeploy
  4. AWS Data Pipeline
  5. AWS Lambda
  6. AWS Personal Health Dashboard
  7. AWS PrivateLink
  8. AWS Snowball Edge
  9. AWS Systems Manager
  10. AWS Transit Gateway

Existing authorized AWS services and features at DoD Impact Level 6

  1. Amazon CloudWatch
  2. Amazon DynamoDB (DDB)
  3. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
  4. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  5. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – Auto Scaling
  6. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) (Classic and Application Load Balancer)
  7. Amazon ElastiCache
  8. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
  9. Amazon Redshift
  10. Amazon S3 Glacier
  11. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
  12. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
  13. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
  14. Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF)
  15. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  16. AWS CloudFormation
  17. AWS CloudTrail
  18. AWS Config
  19. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
  20. AWS Direct Connect (Dx)
  21. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  22. AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
  23. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) (including MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and SQL Server)
  24. AWS Snowball
  25. AWS Step Functions
  26. AWS Trusted Advisor

To learn more about AWS solutions for DoD, please see our AWS solution offerings. Follow the AWS Security Blog for future updates on our Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. If you have feedback about this post, let us know in the Comments section below.

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Author

Tyler Harding

Tyler is the DoD Compliance Program Manager within AWS Security Assurance. He has over 20 years of experience providing information security solutions to federal civilian, DoD, and intelligence agencies.