Tag Archives: domain controller

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

2018-05-02 Chaim Landau

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

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

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

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

Prerequisites

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

Solution overview

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

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

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

High-level AppStream 2.0 architecture

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

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

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

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

Figure 1: Architecture diagram

Step-by-step instructions

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

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

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

Phase 1: Create the DHCP Options Set

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

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

Figure 3: The “Edit DHCP Options Set” dialog

Phase 2: Create the AppStream 2.0 Stack

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

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

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

Phase 3: Create the AppsStream 2.0 Directory Configuration

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

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

To create a directory configuration, follow these steps:

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

Create Security Groups

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

BastionHostSecurityGroup

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

To create a security group, follow these steps:

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

BastionHostAccessSecurityGroup

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

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

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

Phase 4: Build the AppStream 2.0 Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phase 5: Create the AppStream 2.0 Fleet

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

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

To create a fleet, follow these steps:

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

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

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

Figure 12: Review your settings

Associate the fleet with the stack

Follow these steps:

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

Phase 6: Configure ADFS for AppStream 2.0

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

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

End User Experience

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

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

Process

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

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

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

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

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

Monitoring

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

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

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

Figure 16: An example CloudTrail event

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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[$] Authentication and authorization in Samba 4

2018-02-14 jake

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/747122/rss

Volker Lendecke is one of the first contributors to Samba,
having submitted his first patches in 1994. In addition to developing
other important file-sharing tools, he’s heavily involved in development of
the winbind service, which is implemented in winbindd. Although the core Active Directory (AD) domain controller
(DC) code was written by his colleague Stefan Metzmacher, winbind is a
crucial component of Samba’s AD functionality.
In his information-packed talk at FOSDEM
2018, Lendecke
said he aimed to give a high-level
overview of what AD and Samba authentication is, and in particular the
communication pathways and trust relationships between the parts of
Samba that authenticate a Samba user in an AD environment.

Use Kerberos Authentication to Integrate Amazon EMR with Microsoft Active Directory

2018-01-10 Bruno Faria

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

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

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

Walkthrough overview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Single-step solution deployment

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

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

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

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

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

The following parameters are available in this template.

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

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

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

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

Deploying each component individually

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

Create and configure an Amazon VPC

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

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

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

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

Launching this stack creates the following AWS resources:

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

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

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

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

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

Launch and configure an Active Directory domain controller

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

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

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

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

To launch this stack, choose Launch Stack:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Managing and testing the solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

$ ssh -l <ad_user> <master_node_URL>

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

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

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

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

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

Running jobs on a kerberized Amazon EMR cluster

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

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

$ kinit <username>@<AD_DOMAIN>

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

Auditing jobs

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

$ spark-example SparkPi

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

Common issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cleaning up

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

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

Summary

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

Wanted: Sales Engineer

2018-01-10 Yev

Post Syndicated from Yev original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wanted-sales-engineer/

At inception, Backblaze was a consumer company. Thousands upon thousands of individuals came to our website and gave us $5/mo to keep their data safe. But, we didn’t sell business solutions. It took us years before we had a sales team. In the last couple of years, we’ve released products that businesses of all sizes love: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and Backblaze for Business Computer Backup. Those businesses want to integrate Backblaze deeply into their infrastructure, so it’s time to hire our first Sales Engineer!

Company Description:
Founded in 2007, Backblaze started with a mission to make backup software elegant and provide complete peace of mind. Over the course of almost a decade, we have become a pioneer in robust, scalable low cost cloud backup. Recently, we launched B2 – robust and reliable object storage at just $0.005/gb/mo. Part of our differentiation is being able to offer the lowest price of any of the big players while still being profitable.

We’ve managed to nurture a team oriented culture with amazingly low turnover. We value our people and their families. Don’t forget to check out our “About Us” page to learn more about the people and some of our perks.

We have built a profitable, high growth business. While we love our investors, we have maintained control over the business. That means our corporate goals are simple – grow sustainably and profitably.

Some Backblaze Perks:

Competitive healthcare plans
Competitive compensation and 401k
All employees receive Option grants
Unlimited vacation days
Strong coffee
Fully stocked Micro kitchen
Catered breakfast and lunches
Awesome people who work on awesome projects
Childcare bonus
Normal work hours
Get to bring your pets into the office
San Mateo Office – located near Caltrain and Highways 101 & 280.

Backblaze B2 cloud storage is a building block for almost any computing service that requires storage. Customers need our help integrating B2 into iOS apps to Docker containers. Some customers integrate directly to the API using the programming language of their choice, others want to solve a specific problem using ready made software, already integrated with B2.

At the same time, our computer backup product is deepening it’s integration into enterprise IT systems. We are commonly asked for how to set Windows policies, integrate with Active Directory, and install the client via remote management tools.

We are looking for a sales engineer who can help our customers navigate the integration of Backblaze into their technical environments.

Are you 1/2” deep into many different technologies, and unafraid to dive deeper?

Can you confidently talk with customers about their technology, even if you have to look up all the acronyms right after the call?

Are you excited to setup complicated software in a lab and write knowledge base articles about your work?

Then Backblaze is the place for you!

Enough about Backblaze already, what’s in it for me?
In this role, you will be given the opportunity to learn about the technologies that drive innovation today; diverse technologies that customers are using day in and out. And more importantly, you’ll learn how to learn new technologies.

Just as an example, in the past 12 months, we’ve had the opportunity to learn and become experts in these diverse technologies:

How to setup VM servers for lab environments, both on-prem and using cloud services.
Create an automatically “resetting” demo environment for the sales team.
Setup Microsoft Domain Controllers with Active Directory and AD Federation Services.
Learn the basics of OAUTH and web single sign on (SSO).
Archive video workflows from camera to media asset management systems.
How upload/download files from Javascript by enabling CORS.
How to install and monitor online backup installations using RMM tools, like JAMF.
Tape (LTO) systems. (Yes – people still use tape for storage!)

How can I know if I’ll succeed in this role?

You have:

Confidence. Be able to ask customers questions about their environments and convey to them your technical acumen.
Curiosity. Always want to learn about customers’ situations, how they got there and what problems they are trying to solve.
Organization. You’ll work with customers, integration partners, and Backblaze team members on projects of various lengths. You can context switch and either have a great memory or keep copious notes. Your checklists have their own checklists.

You are versed in:

The fundamentals of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. You shouldn’t be afraid to use a command line.

Building, installing, integrating and configuring applications on any operating system.

Debugging failures – reading logs, monitoring usage, effective google searching to fix problems excites you.

The basics of TCP/IP networking and the HTTP protocol.

Novice development skills in any programming/scripting language. Have basic understanding of data structures and program flow.

Your background contains:

Bachelor’s degree in computer science or the equivalent.

2+ years of experience as a pre or post-sales engineer.

The right extra credit:
There are literally hundreds of previous experiences you can have had that would make you perfect for this job. Some experiences that we know would be helpful for us are below, but make sure you tell us your stories!

Experience using or programming against Amazon S3.

Experience with large on-prem storage – NAS, SAN, Object. And backing up data on such storage with tools like Veeam, Veritas and others.

Experience with photo or video media. Media archiving is a key market for Backblaze B2.

Program arduinos to automatically feed your dog.

Experience programming against web or REST APIs. (Point us towards your projects, if they are open source and available to link to.)

Experience with sales tools like Salesforce.

3D print door stops.

Experience with Windows Servers, Active Directory, Group policies and the like.

What’s it like working with the Sales team?
The Backblaze sales team collaborates. We help each other out by sharing ideas, templates, and our customer’s experiences. When we talk about our accomplishments, there is no “I did this,” only “we”. We are truly a team.

We are honest to each other and our customers and communicate openly. We aim to have fun by embracing crazy ideas and creative solutions. We try to think not outside the box, but with no boxes at all. Customers are the driving force behind the success of the company and we care deeply about their success.

If this all sounds like you:

Send an email to [email protected] with the position in the subject line.
Tell us a bit about your Sales Engineering experience.
Include your resume.

The post Wanted: Sales Engineer appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How to Patch, Inspect, and Protect Microsoft Windows Workloads on AWS—Part 1

2017-11-21 Koen van Blijderveen

Post Syndicated from Koen van Blijderveen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-patch-inspect-and-protect-microsoft-windows-workloads-on-aws-part-1/

Most malware tries to compromise your systems by using a known vulnerability that the maker of the operating system has already patched. To help prevent malware from affecting your systems, two security best practices are to apply all operating system patches to your systems and actively monitor your systems for missing patches. In case you do need to recover from a malware attack, you should make regular backups of your data.

In today’s blog post (Part 1 of a two-part post), I show how to keep your Amazon EC2 instances that run Microsoft Windows up to date with the latest security patches by using Amazon EC2 Systems Manager. Tomorrow in Part 2, I show how to take regular snapshots of your data by using Amazon EBS Snapshot Scheduler and how to use Amazon Inspector to check if your EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows contain any common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).

What you should know first

To follow along with the solution in this post, you need one or more EC2 instances. You may use existing instances or create new instances. For the blog post, I assume this is an EC2 for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 instance installed from the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). If you are not familiar with how to launch an EC2 instance, see Launching an Instance. I also assume you launched or will launch your instance in a private subnet. A private subnet is not directly accessible via the internet, and access to it requires either a VPN connection to your on-premises network or a jump host in a public subnet (a subnet with access to the internet). You must make sure that the EC2 instance can connect to the internet using a network address translation (NAT) instance or NAT gateway to communicate with Systems Manager and Amazon Inspector. The following diagram shows how you should structure your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). You should also be familiar with Restoring an Amazon EBS Volume from a Snapshot and Attaching an Amazon EBS Volume to an Instance.

Later on, you will assign tasks to a maintenance window to patch your instances with Systems Manager. To do this, the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user you are using for this post must have the iam:PassRole permission. This permission allows this IAM user to assign tasks to pass their own IAM permissions to the AWS service. In this example, when you assign a task to a maintenance window, IAM passes your credentials to Systems Manager. This safeguard ensures that the user cannot use the creation of tasks to elevate their IAM privileges because their own IAM privileges limit which tasks they can run against an EC2 instance. You should also authorize your IAM user to use EC2, Amazon Inspector, Amazon CloudWatch, and Systems Manager. You can achieve this by attaching the following AWS managed policies to the IAM user you are using for this example: AmazonInspectorFullAccess, AmazonEC2FullAccess, and AmazonSSMFullAccess.

Architectural overview

The following diagram illustrates the components of this solution’s architecture.

For this blog post, Microsoft Windows EC2 is Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 instances with attached Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, which are running in your VPC. These instances may be standalone Windows instances running your Windows workloads, or you may have joined them to an Active Directory domain controller. For instances joined to a domain, you can be using Active Directory running on an EC2 for Windows instance, or you can use AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory.

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager is a scalable tool for remote management of your EC2 instances. You will use the Systems Manager Run Command to install the Amazon Inspector agent. The agent enables EC2 instances to communicate with the Amazon Inspector service and run assessments, which I explain in detail later in this blog post. You also will create a Systems Manager association to keep your EC2 instances up to date with the latest security patches.

You can use the EBS Snapshot Scheduler to schedule automated snapshots at regular intervals. You will use it to set up regular snapshots of your Amazon EBS volumes. EBS Snapshot Scheduler is a prebuilt solution by AWS that you will deploy in your AWS account. With Amazon EBS snapshots, you pay only for the actual data you store. Snapshots save only the data that has changed since the previous snapshot, which minimizes your cost.

You will use Amazon Inspector to run security assessments on your EC2 for Windows Server instance. In this post, I show how to assess if your EC2 for Windows Server instance is vulnerable to any of the more than 50,000 CVEs registered with Amazon Inspector.

In today’s and tomorrow’s posts, I show you how to:

Launch an EC2 instance with an IAM role, Amazon EBS volume, and tags that Systems Manager and Amazon Inspector will use.
Configure Systems Manager to install the Amazon Inspector agent and patch your EC2 instances.
Take EBS snapshots by using EBS Snapshot Scheduler to automate snapshots based on instance tags.
Use Amazon Inspector to check if your EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows contain any common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).

Step 1: Launch an EC2 instance

In this section, I show you how to launch your EC2 instances so that you can use Systems Manager with the instances and use instance tags with EBS Snapshot Scheduler to automate snapshots. This requires three things:

Create an IAM role for Systems Manager before launching your EC2 instance.
Launch your EC2 instance with Amazon EBS and the IAM role for Systems Manager.
Add tags to instances so that you can automate policies for which instances you take snapshots of and when.

Create an IAM role for Systems Manager

Before launching your EC2 instance, I recommend that you first create an IAM role for Systems Manager, which you will use to update the EC2 instance you will launch. AWS already provides a preconfigured policy that you can use for your new role, and it is called AmazonEC2RoleforSSM.

Sign in to the IAM console and choose Roles in the navigation pane. Choose Create new role.
In the role-creation workflow, choose AWS service > EC2 > EC2 to create a role for an EC2 instance.
Choose the AmazonEC2RoleforSSM policy to attach it to the new role you are creating.
Give the role a meaningful name (I chose EC2SSM) and description, and choose Create role.

Launch your EC2 instance

To follow along, you need an EC2 instance that is running Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and that has an Amazon EBS volume attached. You can use any existing instance you may have or create a new instance.

When launching your new EC2 instance, be sure that:

The operating system is Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2.
You attach at least one Amazon EBS volume to the EC2 instance.
You attach the newly created IAM role (EC2SSM).
The EC2 instance can connect to the internet through a network address translation (NAT) gateway or a NAT instance.
You create the tags shown in the following screenshot (you will use them later).

If you are using an already launched EC2 instance, you can attach the newly created role as described in Easily Replace or Attach an IAM Role to an Existing EC2 Instance by Using the EC2 Console.

Add tags

The final step of configuring your EC2 instances is to add tags. You will use these tags to configure Systems Manager in Step 2 of this blog post and to configure Amazon Inspector in Part 2. For this example, I add a tag key, Patch Group, and set the value to Windows Servers. I could have other groups of EC2 instances that I treat differently by having the same tag key but a different tag value. For example, I might have a collection of other servers with the Patch Group tag key with a value of IAS Servers.

Note: You must wait a few minutes until the EC2 instance becomes available before you can proceed to the next section.

At this point, you now have at least one EC2 instance you can use to configure Systems Manager, use EBS Snapshot Scheduler, and use Amazon Inspector.

Note: If you have a large number of EC2 instances to tag, you may want to use the EC2 CreateTags API rather than manually apply tags to each instance.

Step 2: Configure Systems Manager

In this section, I show you how to use Systems Manager to apply operating system patches to your EC2 instances, and how to manage patch compliance.

To start, I will provide some background information about Systems Manager. Then, I will cover how to:

Create the Systems Manager IAM role so that Systems Manager is able to perform patch operations.
Associate a Systems Manager patch baseline with your instance to define which patches Systems Manager should apply.
Define a maintenance window to make sure Systems Manager patches your instance when you tell it to.
Monitor patch compliance to verify the patch state of your instances.

Systems Manager is a collection of capabilities that helps you automate management tasks for AWS-hosted instances on EC2 and your on-premises servers. In this post, I use Systems Manager for two purposes: to run remote commands and apply operating system patches. To learn about the full capabilities of Systems Manager, see What Is Amazon EC2 Systems Manager?

Patch management is an important measure to prevent malware from infecting your systems. Most malware attacks look for vulnerabilities that are publicly known and in most cases are already patched by the maker of the operating system. These publicly known vulnerabilities are well documented and therefore easier for an attacker to exploit than having to discover a new vulnerability.

Patches for these new vulnerabilities are available through Systems Manager within hours after Microsoft releases them. There are two prerequisites to use Systems Manager to apply operating system patches. First, you must attach the IAM role you created in the previous section, EC2SSM, to your EC2 instance. Second, you must install the Systems Manager agent on your EC2 instance. If you have used a recent Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 AMI published by AWS, Amazon has already installed the Systems Manager agent on your EC2 instance. You can confirm this by logging in to an EC2 instance and looking for Amazon SSM Agent under Programs and Features in Windows. To install the Systems Manager agent on an instance that does not have the agent preinstalled or if you want to use the Systems Manager agent on your on-premises servers, see the documentation about installing the Systems Manager agent. If you forgot to attach the newly created role when launching your EC2 instance or if you want to attach the role to already running EC2 instances, see Attach an AWS IAM Role to an Existing Amazon EC2 Instance by Using the AWS CLI or use the AWS Management Console.

To make sure your EC2 instance receives operating system patches from Systems Manager, you will use the default patch baseline provided and maintained by AWS, and you will define a maintenance window so that you control when your EC2 instances should receive patches. For the maintenance window to be able to run any tasks, you also must create a new role for Systems Manager. This role is a different kind of role than the one you created earlier: Systems Manager will use this role instead of EC2. Earlier we created the EC2SSM role with the AmazonEC2RoleforSSM policy, which allowed the Systems Manager agent on our instance to communicate with the Systems Manager service. Here we need a new role with the policy AmazonSSMMaintenanceWindowRole to make sure the Systems Manager service is able to execute commands on our instance.

Create the Systems Manager IAM role

To create the new IAM role for Systems Manager, follow the same procedure as in the previous section, but in Step 3, choose the AmazonSSMMaintenanceWindowRole policy instead of the previously selected AmazonEC2RoleforSSM policy.

Finish the wizard and give your new role a recognizable name. For example, I named my role MaintenanceWindowRole.

By default, only EC2 instances can assume this new role. You must update the trust policy to enable Systems Manager to assume this role.

To update the trust policy associated with this new role:

Navigate to the IAM console and choose Roles in the navigation pane.
Choose MaintenanceWindowRole and choose the Trust relationships tab. Then choose Edit trust relationship.

Update the policy document by copying the following policy and pasting it in the Policy Document box. As you can see, I have added the ssm.amazonaws.com service to the list of allowed Principals that can assume this role. Choose Update Trust Policy.

{
   "Version":"2012-10-17",
   "Statement":[
      {
         "Sid":"",
         "Effect":"Allow",
         "Principal":{
            "Service":[
               "ec2.amazonaws.com",
               "ssm.amazonaws.com"
           ]
         },
         "Action":"sts:AssumeRole"
      }
   ]
}

Associate a Systems Manager patch baseline with your instance

Next, you are going to associate a Systems Manager patch baseline with your EC2 instance. A patch baseline defines which patches Systems Manager should apply. You will use the default patch baseline that AWS manages and maintains. Before you can associate the patch baseline with your instance, though, you must determine if Systems Manager recognizes your EC2 instance.

Navigate to the EC2 console, scroll down to Systems Manager Shared Resources in the navigation pane, and choose Managed Instances. Your new EC2 instance should be available there. If your instance is missing from the list, verify the following:

Go to the EC2 console and verify your instance is running.
Select your instance and confirm you attached the Systems Manager IAM role, EC2SSM.
Make sure that you deployed a NAT gateway in your public subnet to ensure your VPC reflects the diagram at the start of this post so that the Systems Manager agent can connect to the Systems Manager internet endpoint.
Check the Systems Manager Agent logs for any errors.

Now that you have confirmed that Systems Manager can manage your EC2 instance, it is time to associate the AWS maintained patch baseline with your EC2 instance:

Choose Patch Baselines under Systems Manager Services in the navigation pane of the EC2 console.
Choose the default patch baseline as highlighted in the following screenshot, and choose Modify Patch Groups in the Actions drop-down.
In the Patch group box, enter the same value you entered under the Patch Group tag of your EC2 instance in “Step 1: Configure your EC2 instance.” In this example, the value I enter is Windows Servers. Choose the check mark icon next to the patch group and choose Close.

Define a maintenance window

Now that you have successfully set up a role and have associated a patch baseline with your EC2 instance, you will define a maintenance window so that you can control when your EC2 instances should receive patches. By creating multiple maintenance windows and assigning them to different patch groups, you can make sure your EC2 instances do not all reboot at the same time. The Patch Group resource tag you defined earlier will determine to which patch group an instance belongs.

To define a maintenance window:

Navigate to the EC2 console, scroll down to Systems Manager Shared Resources in the navigation pane, and choose Maintenance Windows. Choose Create a Maintenance Window.
Select the Cron schedule builder to define the schedule for the maintenance window. In the example in the following screenshot, the maintenance window will start every Saturday at 10:00 P.M. UTC.
To specify when your maintenance window will end, specify the duration. In this example, the four-hour maintenance window will end on the following Sunday morning at 2:00 A.M. UTC (in other words, four hours after it started).
Systems manager completes all tasks that are in process, even if the maintenance window ends. In my example, I am choosing to prevent new tasks from starting within one hour of the end of my maintenance window because I estimated my patch operations might take longer than one hour to complete. Confirm the creation of the maintenance window by choosing Create maintenance window.
After creating the maintenance window, you must register the EC2 instance to the maintenance window so that Systems Manager knows which EC2 instance it should patch in this maintenance window. To do so, choose Register new targets on the Targets tab of your newly created maintenance window. You can register your targets by using the same Patch Group tag you used before to associate the EC2 instance with the AWS-provided patch baseline.
Assign a task to the maintenance window that will install the operating system patches on your EC2 instance:
1. Open Maintenance Windows in the EC2 console, select your previously created maintenance window, choose the Tasks tab, and choose Register run command task from the Register new task drop-down.
2. Choose the AWS-RunPatchBaseline document from the list of available documents.
3. For Parameters:
  1. For Role, choose the role you created previously (called MaintenanceWindowRole).
  2. For Execute on, specify how many EC2 instances Systems Manager should patch at the same time. If you have a large number of EC2 instances and want to patch all EC2 instances within the defined time, make sure this number is not too low. For example, if you have 1,000 EC2 instances, a maintenance window of 4 hours, and 2 hours’ time for patching, make this number at least 500.
  3. For Stop after, specify after how many errors Systems Manager should stop.
  4. For Operation, choose Install to make sure to install the patches.

Now, you must wait for the maintenance window to run at least once according to the schedule you defined earlier. Note that if you don’t want to wait, you can adjust the schedule to run sooner by choosing Edit maintenance window on the Maintenance Windows page of Systems Manager. If your maintenance window has expired, you can check the status of any maintenance tasks Systems Manager has performed on the Maintenance Windows page of Systems Manager and select your maintenance window.

Monitor patch compliance

You also can see the overall patch compliance of all EC2 instances that are part of defined patch groups by choosing Patch Compliance under Systems Manager Services in the navigation pane of the EC2 console. You can filter by Patch Group to see how many EC2 instances within the selected patch group are up to date, how many EC2 instances are missing updates, and how many EC2 instances are in an error state.

In this section, you have set everything up for patch management on your instance. Now you know how to patch your EC2 instance in a controlled manner and how to check if your EC2 instance is compliant with the patch baseline you have defined. Of course, I recommend that you apply these steps to all EC2 instances you manage.

Summary

In Part 1 of this blog post, I have shown how to configure EC2 instances for use with Systems Manager, EBS Snapshot Scheduler, and Amazon Inspector. I also have shown how to use Systems Manager to keep your Microsoft Windows–based EC2 instances up to date. In Part 2 of this blog post tomorrow, I will show how to take regular snapshots of your data by using EBS Snapshot Scheduler and how to use Amazon Inspector to check if your EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows contain any CVEs.

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

– Koen

Introducing AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Standard Edition)

2017-10-25 Peter Pereira

Post Syndicated from Peter Pereira original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/introducing-aws-directory-service-for-microsoft-active-directory-standard-edition/

Today, AWS introduced AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Standard Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition), which is managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD) that is performance optimized for small and midsize businesses. AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) offers you a highly available and cost-effective primary directory in the AWS Cloud that you can use to manage users, groups, and computers. It enables you to join Amazon EC2 instances to your domain easily and supports many AWS and third-party applications and services. It also can support most of the common use cases of small and midsize businesses. When you use AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) as your primary directory, you can manage access and provide single sign-on (SSO) to cloud applications such as Microsoft Office 365. If you have an existing Microsoft AD directory, you can also use AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) as a resource forest that contains primarily computers and groups, allowing you to migrate your AD-aware applications to the AWS Cloud while using existing on-premises AD credentials.

In this blog post, I help you get started by answering three main questions about AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition):

What do I get?
How can I use it?
What are the key features?

After answering these questions, I show how you can get started with creating and using your own AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) directory.

1. What do I get?

When you create an AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) directory, AWS deploys two Microsoft AD domain controllers powered by Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). To help deliver high availability, the domain controllers run in different Availability Zones in the AWS Region of your choice.

As a managed service, AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) configures directory replication, automates daily snapshots, and handles all patching and software updates. In addition, AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) monitors and automatically recovers domain controllers in the event of a failure.

AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) has been optimized as a primary directory for small and midsize businesses with the capacity to support approximately 5,000 employees. With 1 GB of directory object storage, AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) has the capacity to store 30,000 or more total directory objects (users, groups, and computers). AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) also gives you the option to add domain controllers to meet the specific performance demands of your applications. You also can use AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) as a resource forest with a trust relationship to your on-premises directory.

2. How can I use it?

With AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition), you can share a single directory for multiple use cases. For example, you can share a directory to authenticate and authorize access for .NET applications, Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Windows Authentication enabled, and Amazon Chime for messaging and video conferencing.

The following diagram shows some of the use cases for your AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) directory, including the ability to grant your users access to external cloud applications and allow your on-premises AD users to manage and have access to resources in the AWS Cloud. Click the diagram to see a larger version.

Use case 1: Sign in to AWS applications and services with AD credentials

You can enable multiple AWS applications and services such as the AWS Management Console, Amazon WorkSpaces, and Amazon RDS for SQL Server to use your AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) directory. When you enable an AWS application or service in your directory, your users can access the application or service with their AD credentials.

For example, you can enable your users to sign in to the AWS Management Console with their AD credentials. To do this, you enable the AWS Management Console as an application in your directory, and then assign your AD users and groups to IAM roles. When your users sign in to the AWS Management Console, they assume an IAM role to manage AWS resources. This makes it easy for you to grant your users access to the AWS Management Console without needing to configure and manage a separate SAML infrastructure.

Use case 2: Manage Amazon EC2 instances

Using familiar AD administration tools, you can apply AD Group Policy objects (GPOs) to centrally manage your Amazon EC2 for Windows or Linux instances by joining your instances to your AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) domain.

In addition, your users can sign in to your instances with their AD credentials. This eliminates the need to use individual instance credentials or distribute private key (PEM) files. This makes it easier for you to instantly grant or revoke access to users by using AD user administration tools you already use.

Use case 3: Provide directory services to your AD-aware workloads

AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) is an actual Microsoft AD that enables you to run traditional AD-aware workloads such as Remote Desktop Licensing Manager, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft SQL Server Always On in the AWS Cloud. AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) also helps you to simplify and improve the security of AD-integrated .NET applications by using group Managed Service Accounts (gMSAs) and Kerberos constrained delegation (KCD).

Use case 4: SSO to Office 365 and other cloud applications

You can use AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) to provide SSO for cloud applications. You can use Azure AD Connect to synchronize your users into Azure AD, and then use Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) so that your users can access Microsoft Office 365 and other SAML 2.0 cloud applications by using their AD credentials.

Use case 5: Extend your on-premises AD to the AWS Cloud

If you already have an AD infrastructure and want to use it when migrating AD-aware workloads to the AWS Cloud, AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) can help. You can use AD trusts to connect AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) to your existing AD. This means your users can access AD-aware and AWS applications with their on-premises AD credentials, without needing you to synchronize users, groups, or passwords.

For example, your users can sign in to the AWS Management Console and Amazon WorkSpaces by using their existing AD user names and passwords. Also, when you use AD-aware applications such as SharePoint with AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition), your logged-in Windows users can access these applications without needing to enter credentials again.

3. What are the key features?

AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) includes the features detailed in this section.

Extend your AD schema

With AWS Microsoft AD, you can run customized AD-integrated applications that require changes to your directory schema, which defines the structures of your directory. The schema is composed of object classes such as user objects, which contain attributes such as user names. AWS Microsoft AD lets you extend the schema by adding new AD attributes or object classes that are not present in the core AD attributes and classes.

For example, if you have a human resources application that uses employee badge color to assign specific benefits, you can extend the schema to include a badge color attribute in the user object class of your directory. To learn more, see How to Move More Custom Applications to the AWS Cloud with AWS Directory Service.

Create user-specific password policies

With user-specific password policies, you can apply specific restrictions and account lockout policies to different types of users in your AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) domain. For example, you can enforce strong passwords and frequent password change policies for administrators, and use less-restrictive policies with moderate account lockout policies for general users.

Add domain controllers

You can increase the performance and redundancy of your directory by adding domain controllers. This can help improve application performance by enabling directory clients to load-balance their requests across a larger number of domain controllers.

Encrypt directory traffic

You can use AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) to encrypt Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) communication between your applications and your directory. By enabling LDAP over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS), also called LDAPS, you encrypt your LDAP communications end to end. This helps you to protect sensitive information you keep in your directory when it is accessed over untrusted networks.

Improve the security of signing in to AWS services by using multi-factor authentication (MFA)

You can improve the security of signing in to AWS services, such as Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon QuickSight, by enabling MFA in your AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) directory. With MFA, your users must enter a one-time passcode (OTP) in addition to their AD user names and passwords to access AWS applications and services you enable in AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition).

Get started

To get started, use the Directory Service console to create your first directory with just a few clicks. If you have not used Directory Service before, you may be eligible for a 30-day limited free trial.

Summary

In this blog post, I explained what AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) is and how you can use it. With a single directory, you can address many use cases for your business, making it easier to migrate and run your AD-aware workloads in the AWS Cloud, provide access to AWS applications and services, and connect to other cloud applications. To learn more about AWS Microsoft AD, see the Directory Service home page.

If you have comments about this post, submit them in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions about this blog post, start a new thread on the Directory Service forum.

– Peter

How to Enable LDAPS for Your AWS Microsoft AD Directory

2017-09-26 Vijay Sharma

Post Syndicated from Vijay Sharma original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-enable-ldaps-for-your-aws-microsoft-ad-directory/

Starting today, you can encrypt the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) communications between your applications and AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Microsoft AD. Many Windows and Linux applications use Active Directory’s (AD) LDAP service to read and write sensitive information about users and devices, including personally identifiable information (PII). Now, you can encrypt your AWS Microsoft AD LDAP communications end to end to protect this information by using LDAP Over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS), also called LDAPS. This helps you protect PII and other sensitive information exchanged with AWS Microsoft AD over untrusted networks.

To enable LDAPS, you need to add a Microsoft enterprise Certificate Authority (CA) server to your AWS Microsoft AD domain and configure certificate templates for your domain controllers. After you have enabled LDAPS, AWS Microsoft AD encrypts communications with LDAPS-enabled Windows applications, Linux computers that use Secure Shell (SSH) authentication, and applications such as Jira and Jenkins.

In this blog post, I show how to enable LDAPS for your AWS Microsoft AD directory in six steps: 1) Delegate permissions to CA administrators, 2) Add a Microsoft enterprise CA to your AWS Microsoft AD directory, 3) Create a certificate template, 4) Configure AWS security group rules, 5) AWS Microsoft AD enables LDAPS, and 6) Test LDAPS access using the LDP tool.

Assumptions

For this post, I assume you are familiar with following:

Creating an Amazon EC2 for Windows Server instance and seamlessly joining it to your AWS Microsoft AD domain.
Logging in to an Amazon EC2 for Windows Server instance using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
Launching and using Microsoft Windows Server Manager.
Launching Windows PowerShell with administrative privileges and running Windows PowerShell scripts.

Solution overview

Before going into specific deployment steps, I will provide a high-level overview of deploying LDAPS. I cover how you enable LDAPS on AWS Microsoft AD. In addition, I provide some general background about CA deployment models and explain how to apply these models when deploying Microsoft CA to enable LDAPS on AWS Microsoft AD.

How you enable LDAPS on AWS Microsoft AD

LDAP-aware applications (LDAP clients) typically access LDAP servers using Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) on port 389. By default, LDAP communications on port 389 are unencrypted. However, many LDAP clients use one of two standards to encrypt LDAP communications: LDAP over SSL on port 636, and LDAP with StartTLS on port 389. If an LDAP client uses port 636, the LDAP server encrypts all traffic unconditionally with SSL. If an LDAP client issues a StartTLS command when setting up the LDAP session on port 389, the LDAP server encrypts all traffic to that client with TLS. AWS Microsoft AD now supports both encryption standards when you enable LDAPS on your AWS Microsoft AD domain controllers.

You enable LDAPS on your AWS Microsoft AD domain controllers by installing a digital certificate that a CA issued. Though Windows servers have different methods for installing certificates, LDAPS with AWS Microsoft AD requires you to add a Microsoft CA to your AWS Microsoft AD domain and deploy the certificate through autoenrollment from the Microsoft CA. The installed certificate enables the LDAP service running on domain controllers to listen for and negotiate LDAP encryption on port 636 (LDAP over SSL) and port 389 (LDAP with StartTLS).

Background of CA deployment models

You can deploy CAs as part of a single-level or multi-level CA hierarchy. In a single-level hierarchy, all certificates come from the root of the hierarchy. In a multi-level hierarchy, you organize a collection of CAs in a hierarchy and the certificates sent to computers and users come from subordinate CAs in the hierarchy (not the root).

Certificates issued by a CA identify the hierarchy to which the CA belongs. When a computer sends its certificate to another computer for verification, the receiving computer must have the public certificate from the CAs in the same hierarchy as the sender. If the CA that issued the certificate is part of a single-level hierarchy, the receiver must obtain the public certificate of the CA that issued the certificate. If the CA that issued the certificate is part of a multi-level hierarchy, the receiver can obtain a public certificate for all the CAs that are in the same hierarchy as the CA that issued the certificate. If the receiver can verify that the certificate came from a CA that is in the hierarchy of the receiver’s “trusted” public CA certificates, the receiver trusts the sender. Otherwise, the receiver rejects the sender.

Deploying Microsoft CA to enable LDAPS on AWS Microsoft AD

Microsoft offers a standalone CA and an enterprise CA. Though you can configure either as single-level or multi-level hierarchies, only the enterprise CA integrates with AD and offers autoenrollment for certificate deployment. Because you cannot sign in to run commands on your AWS Microsoft AD domain controllers, an automatic certificate enrollment model is required. Therefore, AWS Microsoft AD requires the certificate to come from a Microsoft enterprise CA that you configure to work in your AD domain. When you install the Microsoft enterprise CA, you can configure it to be part of a single-level hierarchy or a multi-level hierarchy. As a best practice, AWS recommends a multi-level Microsoft CA trust hierarchy consisting of a root CA and a subordinate CA. I cover only a multi-level hierarchy in this post.

In a multi-level hierarchy, you configure your subordinate CA by importing a certificate from the root CA. You must issue a certificate from the root CA such that the certificate gives your subordinate CA the right to issue certificates on behalf of the root. This makes your subordinate CA part of the root CA hierarchy. You also deploy the root CA’s public certificate on all of your computers, which tells all your computers to trust certificates that your root CA issues and to trust certificates from any authorized subordinate CA.

In such a hierarchy, you typically leave your root CA offline (inaccessible to other computers in the network) to protect the root of your hierarchy. You leave the subordinate CA online so that it can issue certificates on behalf of the root CA. This multi-level hierarchy increases security because if someone compromises your subordinate CA, you can revoke all certificates it issued and set up a new subordinate CA from your offline root CA. To learn more about setting up a secure CA hierarchy, see Securing PKI: Planning a CA Hierarchy.

When a Microsoft CA is part of your AD domain, you can configure certificate templates that you publish. These templates become visible to client computers through AD. If a client’s profile matches a template, the client requests a certificate from the Microsoft CA that matches the template. Microsoft calls this process autoenrollment, and it simplifies certificate deployment. To enable LDAPS on your AWS Microsoft AD domain controllers, you create a certificate template in the Microsoft CA that generates SSL and TLS-compatible certificates. The domain controllers see the template and automatically import a certificate of that type from the Microsoft CA. The imported certificate enables LDAP encryption.

Steps to enable LDAPS for your AWS Microsoft AD directory

The rest of this post is composed of the steps for enabling LDAPS for your AWS Microsoft AD directory. First, though, I explain which components you must have running to deploy this solution successfully. I also explain how this solution works and include an architecture diagram.

Prerequisites

The instructions in this post assume that you already have the following components running:

An active AWS Microsoft AD directory – To create a directory, follow the steps in Create an AWS Microsoft AD directory.
An Amazon EC2 for Windows Server instance for managing users and groups in your directory – This instance needs to be joined to your AWS Microsoft AD domain and have Active Directory Administration Tools installed. Active Directory Administration Tools installs Active Directory Administrative Center and the LDP tool.
An existing root Microsoft CA or a multi-level Microsoft CA hierarchy – You might already have a root CA or a multi-level CA hierarchy in your on-premises network. If you plan to use your on-premises CA hierarchy, you must have administrative permissions to issue certificates to subordinate CAs. If you do not have an existing Microsoft CA hierarchy, you can set up a new standalone Microsoft root CA by creating an Amazon EC2 for Windows Server instance and installing a standalone root certification authority. You also must create a local user account on this instance and add this user to the local administrator group so that the user has permissions to issue a certificate to a subordinate CA.

The solution setup

The following diagram illustrates the setup with the steps you need to follow to enable LDAPS for AWS Microsoft AD. You will learn how to set up a subordinate Microsoft enterprise CA (in this case, SubordinateCA) and join it to your AWS Microsoft AD domain (in this case, corp.example.com). You also will learn how to create a certificate template on SubordinateCA and configure AWS security group rules to enable LDAPS for your directory.

As a prerequisite, I already created a standalone Microsoft root CA (in this case RootCA) for creating SubordinateCA. RootCA also has a local user account called RootAdmin that has administrative permissions to issue certificates to SubordinateCA. Note that you may already have a root CA or a multi-level CA hierarchy in your on-premises network that you can use for creating SubordinateCA instead of creating a new root CA. If you choose to use your existing on-premises CA hierarchy, you must have administrative permissions on your on-premises CA to issue a certificate to SubordinateCA.

Lastly, I also already created an Amazon EC2 instance (in this case, Management) that I use to manage users, configure AWS security groups, and test the LDAPS connection. I join this instance to the AWS Microsoft AD directory domain.

Here is how the process works:

Delegate permissions to CA administrators (in this case, CAAdmin) so that they can join a Microsoft enterprise CA to your AWS Microsoft AD domain and configure it as a subordinate CA.
Add a Microsoft enterprise CA to your AWS Microsoft AD domain (in this case, SubordinateCA) so that it can issue certificates to your directory domain controllers to enable LDAPS. This step includes joining SubordinateCA to your directory domain, installing the Microsoft enterprise CA, and obtaining a certificate from RootCA that grants SubordinateCA permissions to issue certificates.
Create a certificate template (in this case, ServerAuthentication) with server authentication and autoenrollment enabled so that your AWS Microsoft AD directory domain controllers can obtain certificates through autoenrollment to enable LDAPS.
Configure AWS security group rules so that AWS Microsoft AD directory domain controllers can connect to the subordinate CA to request certificates.
AWS Microsoft AD enables LDAPS through the following process:
1. AWS Microsoft AD domain controllers request a certificate from SubordinateCA.
2. SubordinateCA issues a certificate to AWS Microsoft AD domain controllers.
3. AWS Microsoft AD enables LDAPS for the directory by installing certificates on the directory domain controllers.
Test LDAPS access by using the LDP tool.

I now will show you these steps in detail. I use the names of components—such as RootCA, SubordinateCA, and Management—and refer to users—such as Admin, RootAdmin, and CAAdmin—to illustrate who performs these steps. All component names and user names in this post are used for illustrative purposes only.

Deploy the solution

Step 1: Delegate permissions to CA administrators

In this step, you delegate permissions to your users who manage your CAs. Your users then can join a subordinate CA to your AWS Microsoft AD domain and create the certificate template in your CA.

To enable use with a Microsoft enterprise CA, AWS added a new built-in AD security group called AWS Delegated Enterprise Certificate Authority Administrators that has delegated permissions to install and administer a Microsoft enterprise CA. By default, your directory Admin is part of the new group and can add other users or groups in your AWS Microsoft AD directory to this security group. If you have trust with your on-premises AD directory, you can also delegate CA administrative permissions to your on-premises users by adding on-premises AD users or global groups to this new AD security group.

To create a new user (in this case CAAdmin) in your directory and add this user to the AWS Delegated Enterprise Certificate Authority Administrators security group, follow these steps:

Sign in to the Management instance using RDP with the user name admin and the password that you set for the admin user when you created your directory.
Launch the Microsoft Windows Server Manager on the Management instance and navigate to Tools > Active Directory Users and Computers.
Switch to the tree view and navigate to corp.example.com > CORP > Users. Right-click Users and choose New > User.
Add a new user with the First name CA, Last name Admin, and User logon name CAAdmin.
In the Active Directory Users and Computers tool, navigate to corp.example.com > AWS Delegated Groups. In the right pane, right-click AWS Delegated Enterprise Certificate Authority Administrators and choose Properties.
In the AWS Delegated Enterprise Certificate Authority Administrators window, switch to the Members tab and choose Add.
In the Enter the object names to select box, type CAAdmin and choose OK.
In the next window, choose OK to add CAAdmin to the AWS Delegated Enterprise Certificate Authority Administrators security group.
Also add CAAdmin to the AWS Delegated Server Administrators security group so that CAAdmin can RDP in to the Microsoft enterprise CA machine.

You have granted CAAdmin permissions to join a Microsoft enterprise CA to your AWS Microsoft AD directory domain.

Step 2: Add a Microsoft enterprise CA to your AWS Microsoft AD directory

In this step, you set up a subordinate Microsoft enterprise CA and join it to your AWS Microsoft AD directory domain. I will summarize the process first and then walk through the steps.

First, you create an Amazon EC2 for Windows Server instance called SubordinateCA and join it to the domain, corp.example.com. You then publish RootCA’s public certificate and certificate revocation list (CRL) to SubordinateCA’s local trusted store. You also publish RootCA’s public certificate to your directory domain. Doing so enables SubordinateCA and your directory domain controllers to trust RootCA. You then install the Microsoft enterprise CA service on SubordinateCA and request a certificate from RootCA to make SubordinateCA a subordinate Microsoft CA. After RootCA issues the certificate, SubordinateCA is ready to issue certificates to your directory domain controllers.

Note that you can use an Amazon S3 bucket to pass the certificates between RootCA and SubordinateCA.

In detail, here is how the process works, as illustrated in the preceding diagram:

Set up an Amazon EC2 instance joined to your AWS Microsoft AD directory domain – Create an Amazon EC2 for Windows Server instance to use as a subordinate CA, and join it to your AWS Microsoft AD directory domain. For this example, the machine name is SubordinateCA and the domain is corp.example.com.
Share RootCA’s public certificate with SubordinateCA – Log in to RootCA as RootAdmin and start Windows PowerShell with administrative privileges. Run the following commands to copy RootCA’s public certificate and CRL to the folder c:\rootcerts on RootCA.
```
New-Item c:\rootcerts -type directory
copy C:\Windows\system32\certsrv\certenroll\*.cr* c:\rootcerts
```
Upload RootCA’s public certificate and CRL from c:\rootcerts to an S3 bucket by following the steps in How Do I Upload Files and Folders to an S3 Bucket.

The following screenshot shows RootCA’s public certificate and CRL uploaded to an S3 bucket.

Publish RootCA’s public certificate to your directory domain – Log in to SubordinateCA as the CAAdmin. Download RootCA’s public certificate and CRL from the S3 bucket by following the instructions in How Do I Download an Object from an S3 Bucket? Save the certificate and CRL to the C:\rootcerts folder on SubordinateCA. Add RootCA’s public certificate and the CRL to the local store of SubordinateCA and publish RootCA’s public certificate to your directory domain by running the following commands using Windows PowerShell with administrative privileges.
```
certutil –addstore –f root <path to the RootCA public certificate file>
certutil –addstore –f root <path to the RootCA CRL file>
certutil –dspublish –f <path to the RootCA public certificate file> RootCA
```
Install the subordinate Microsoft enterprise CA – Install the subordinate Microsoft enterprise CA on SubordinateCA by following the instructions in Install a Subordinate Certification Authority. Ensure that you choose Enterprise CA for Setup Type to install an enterprise CA.

For the CA Type, choose Subordinate CA.

Request a certificate from RootCA – Next, copy the certificate request on SubordinateCA to a folder called c:\CARequest by running the following commands using Windows PowerShell with administrative privileges.
```
New-Item c:\CARequest -type directory
Copy c:\*.req C:\CARequest
```
Upload the certificate request to the S3 bucket.

Approve SubordinateCA’s certificate request – Log in to RootCA as RootAdmin and download the certificate request from the S3 bucket to a folder called CARequest. Submit the request by running the following command using Windows PowerShell with administrative privileges.
```
certreq -submit <path to certificate request file>
```
In the Certification Authority List window, choose OK.

Navigate to Server Manager > Tools > Certification Authority on RootCA.

In the Certification Authority window, expand the ROOTCA tree in the left pane and choose Pending Requests. In the right pane, note the value in the Request ID column. Right-click the request and choose All Tasks > Issue.

Retrieve the SubordinateCA certificate – Retrieve the SubordinateCA certificate by running following command using Windows PowerShell with administrative privileges. The command includes the <RequestId> that you noted in the previous step.
```
certreq –retrieve <RequestId> <drive>:\subordinateCA.crt
```
Upload SubordinateCA.crt to the S3 bucket.

Install the SubordinateCA certificate – Log in to SubordinateCA as the CAAdmin and download SubordinateCA.crt from the S3 bucket. Install the certificate by running following commands using Windows PowerShell with administrative privileges.
```
certutil –installcert c:\subordinateCA.crt
start-service certsvc
```
Delete the content that you uploaded to S3 – As a security best practice, delete all the certificates and CRLs that you uploaded to the S3 bucket in the previous steps because you already have installed them on SubordinateCA.

You have finished setting up the subordinate Microsoft enterprise CA that is joined to your AWS Microsoft AD directory domain. Now you can use your subordinate Microsoft enterprise CA to create a certificate template so that your directory domain controllers can request a certificate to enable LDAPS for your directory.

Step 3: Create a certificate template

In this step, you create a certificate template with server authentication and autoenrollment enabled on SubordinateCA. You create this new template (in this case, ServerAuthentication) by duplicating an existing certificate template (in this case, Domain Controller template) and adding server authentication and autoenrollment to the template.

Follow these steps to create a certificate template:

Log in to SubordinateCA as CAAdmin.
Launch Microsoft Windows Server Manager. Select Tools > Certification Authority.
In the Certificate Authority window, expand the SubordinateCA tree in the left pane. Right-click Certificate Templates, and choose Manage.
In the Certificate Templates Console window, right-click Domain Controller and choose Duplicate Template.
In the Properties of New Template window, switch to the General tab and change the Template display name to ServerAuthentication.
Switch to the Security tab, and choose Domain Controllers in the Group or user names section. Select the Allow check box for Autoenroll in the Permissions for Domain Controllers section.
Switch to the Extensions tab, choose Application Policies in the Extensions included in this template section, and choose Edit
In the Edit Application Policies Extension window, choose Client Authentication and choose Remove. Choose OK to create the ServerAuthentication certificate template. Close the Certificate Templates Console window.
In the Certificate Authority window, right-click Certificate Templates, and choose New > Certificate Template to Issue.
In the Enable Certificate Templates window, choose ServerAuthentication and choose OK.

You have finished creating a certificate template with server authentication and autoenrollment enabled on SubordinateCA. Your AWS Microsoft AD directory domain controllers can now obtain a certificate through autoenrollment to enable LDAPS.

Step 4: Configure AWS security group rules

In this step, you configure AWS security group rules so that your directory domain controllers can connect to the subordinate CA to request a certificate. To do this, you must add outbound rules to your directory’s AWS security group (in this case, sg-4ba7682d) to allow all outbound traffic to SubordinateCA’s AWS security group (in this case, sg-6fbe7109) so that your directory domain controllers can connect to SubordinateCA for requesting a certificate. You also must add inbound rules to SubordinateCA’s AWS security group to allow all incoming traffic from your directory’s AWS security group so that the subordinate CA can accept incoming traffic from your directory domain controllers.

Follow these steps to configure AWS security group rules:

Log in to the Management instance as Admin.
Navigate to the EC2 console.
In the left pane, choose Network & Security > Security Groups.
In the right pane, choose the AWS security group (in this case, sg-6fbe7109) of SubordinateCA.
Switch to the Inbound tab and choose Edit.
Choose Add Rule. Choose All traffic for Type and Custom for Source. Enter your directory’s AWS security group (in this case, sg-4ba7682d) in the Source box. Choose Save.
Now choose the AWS security group (in this case, sg-4ba7682d) of your AWS Microsoft AD directory, switch to the Outbound tab, and choose Edit.
Choose Add Rule. Choose All traffic for Type and Custom for Destination. Enter your directory’s AWS security group (in this case, sg-6fbe7109) in the Destination box. Choose Save.

You have completed the configuration of AWS security group rules to allow traffic between your directory domain controllers and SubordinateCA.

Step 5: AWS Microsoft AD enables LDAPS

The AWS Microsoft AD domain controllers perform this step automatically by recognizing the published template and requesting a certificate from the subordinate Microsoft enterprise CA. The subordinate CA can take up to 180 minutes to issue certificates to the directory domain controllers. The directory imports these certificates into the directory domain controllers and enables LDAPS for your directory automatically. This completes the setup of LDAPS for the AWS Microsoft AD directory. The LDAP service on the directory is now ready to accept LDAPS connections!

Step 6: Test LDAPS access by using the LDP tool

In this step, you test the LDAPS connection to the AWS Microsoft AD directory by using the LDP tool. The LDP tool is available on the Management machine where you installed Active Directory Administration Tools. Before you test the LDAPS connection, you must wait up to 180 minutes for the subordinate CA to issue a certificate to your directory domain controllers.

To test LDAPS, you connect to one of the domain controllers using port 636. Here are the steps to test the LDAPS connection:

Log in to Management as Admin.
Launch the Microsoft Windows Server Manager on Management and navigate to Tools > Active Directory Users and Computers.
Switch to the tree view and navigate to corp.example.com > CORP > Domain Controllers. In the right pane, right-click on one of the domain controllers and choose Properties. Copy the DNS name of the domain controller.
Launch the LDP.exe tool by launching Windows PowerShell and running the LDP.exe command.
In the LDP tool, choose Connection > Connect.
In the Server box, paste the DNS name you copied in the previous step. Type 636 in the Port box. Choose OK to test the LDAPS connection to port 636 of your directory.
You should see the following message to confirm that your LDAPS connection is now open.

You have completed the setup of LDAPS for your AWS Microsoft AD directory! You can now encrypt LDAP communications between your Windows and Linux applications and your AWS Microsoft AD directory using LDAPS.

Summary

In this blog post, I walked through the process of enabling LDAPS for your AWS Microsoft AD directory. Enabling LDAPS helps you protect PII and other sensitive information exchanged over untrusted networks between your Windows and Linux applications and your AWS Microsoft AD. To learn more about how to use AWS Microsoft AD, see the Directory Service documentation. For general information and pricing, see the Directory Service home page.

If you have comments about this blog post, submit a comment in the “Comments” section below. If you have implementation or troubleshooting questions, start a new thread on the Directory Service forum.

– Vijay

Samba 4.7.0 released

2017-09-23 corbet

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/734639/rss

The Samba 4.7.0 release is out. New features include whole DB read locks
(a reliability improvement), active directory with Kerberos support,
detailed audit trails for authentication and authorization activities, a
multi-process LDAP server, better read-only domain controller support, and
more. See the release
notes for details.

How to Enable Your Users to Access Office 365 with AWS Microsoft Active Directory Credentials

2017-09-14 Darryn Hendricks

Post Syndicated from Darryn Hendricks original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-enable-your-users-to-access-office-365-with-aws-microsoft-active-directory-credentials/

You can now enable your users to access Microsoft Office 365 with credentials that you manage in AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Microsoft AD. You can accomplish this by deploying Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) Connect and Active Directory Federation Services for Windows Server 2016 (AD FS 2016) with AWS Microsoft AD. AWS Microsoft AD makes it possible and easy for you to build a Windows environment in the AWS Cloud, synchronize your AWS Microsoft AD users into Microsoft Azure AD, and use Office 365, all without needing to create and manage AD domain controllers. Now you can also benefit from the broad set of AWS Cloud services for compute, storage, database, and Internet of Things (IoT) while continuing to use Office 365 business productivity apps—all with a single AD domain.

Office 365 provides different options to support user authentication with identities that come from AD. One common way to do this is to use Azure AD Connect and AD FS together with your AD directory. In this model, you use Azure AD Connect to synchronize user names from AD into Azure AD so that Office 365 can use those identities. To complete this solution, you use AD FS to enable Office 365 to authenticate the identities against your AD directory. Good news: AWS Microsoft AD now supports this model!

In this blog post, we show how to use Azure AD Connect and AD FS with AWS Microsoft AD so that your employees can access Office 365 by using their AD credentials.

Prerequisites

The instructions in this post assume that you understand how to create Amazon EC2 for Windows Server instances, know how to use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to log in to the instances, and already have completed the following tasks:

Create an AWS Microsoft AD directory.
Join an Amazon EC2 for Windows Server instance to your AWS Microsoft AD domain to use as a management instance (Management).
Install Active Directory Administration Tools on your Management instance.
Join an Amazon EC2 for Windows Server 2016 instance to the AWS Microsoft AD domain to use as your ADFS server. We show you how to install AD FS later.
Join an Amazon EC2 for Windows Server instance to the AWS Microsoft AD domain you use as your ADSync server. We will show you how to install Azure AD Connect on this instance later.
Using Active Directory Users and Computers on your Management instance, create a standard user named ADFSSVC in your AWS Microsoft AD directory. AD FS uses this user account later.
Create an active Office 365 subscription.
Add and verify your domain in Office 365

Note: You must use RDP and sign in with the AWS Microsoft AD admin account using the password you specified when you created your AWS Microsoft AD directory when performing Steps 3 and 6 in this “Prerequisites” section.

The following diagram illustrates the environment you must have in place to implement the solution in this blog post (the numbers in the diagram correspond to Steps 1–8 earlier in this section). We build on this configuration to install and configure Azure AD Connect and AD FS with Azure AD and Office 365.

Note: In this blog post, we use separate Microsoft Windows Server instances on which to run AD FS and Azure AD Connect. You can choose to combine these on a single server, as long as you use Windows Server 2016. Though it is technically possible to use an on-premises server as the AD FS and Azure AD host, such a configuration is counter to the idea of a Windows environment completely in the cloud. Also, this requires configuration of firewall ports and AWS security groups, which is beyond the scope of this blog.

Configuration background

When you create an AWS Microsoft AD directory, AWS exclusively retains the enterprise administrator account of the forest and domain administrator account for the root domain to deliver the directory as a managed service. When you set up your directory, AWS creates an organizational unit (OU) in the directory and delegates administrative privileges for the OU to your admin account. Within this OU, you administer users, groups, computers, Group Policy objects, other devices, and additional OUs as needed. You perform these actions using standard AD administration tools from a computer that is joined to an AWS Microsoft AD domain. Typically, the administration computer is an EC2 instance that you access using RDP, by logging in with your admin account credentials. From your admin account, you can also delegate permissions to other users or groups you create within your OU.

To use Office 365 with AD identities, you use Azure AD Connect to synchronize the AD identities into Azure AD. There are two commonly supported ways to use Azure AD Connect to support Office 365 use. In one model, you synchronize user names only, and you use AD FS to federate authentication from Office 365 to your AD. In the second model, you synchronize user names and passwords from your AD directory to Azure AD, and you do not have to use AD FS. The model supported by AWS Microsoft AD is the first model: synchronize user names only and use AD FS to authenticate from Office 365 to your AWS Microsoft AD. The AD FS model also enables authentication with SaaS applications that support federated authentication (this topic is beyond the scope of this blog post).

Note: Azure AD Connect now has a pass-through model of authentication. Because this was in a preview status at the time of writing this blog post, this authentication model is beyond the scope of this blog post.

In a default AD FS installation, AD FS uses two containers that require special AD permissions that your AWS Microsoft AD administrative account does not have. To address this, you will create two nested containers in your OU for AD FS to use. When you install AD FS, you tell AD FS where to find the containers through a Windows PowerShell parameter.

As described previously, we will now show you how to use Azure AD Connect and AD FS with AWS Microsoft AD with Azure AD and Office 365 in five steps, as illustrated in the following diagram.

Add two containers to AWS Microsoft AD for use by AD FS.
Install AD FS.
Integrate AD FS with Azure AD.
Synchronize users from AWS Microsoft AD to Azure AD with Azure AD Connect.
Sign in to Office 365 by using your Microsoft AD identities.

Step 1: Add two containers to AWS Microsoft AD for use by AD FS

The following steps show how to create the AD containers required by AD FS in your AWS Microsoft AD directory.

From the Management instance:

Generate a random global unique identifier (GUID) using the following Windows PowerShell command.
```
(New-Guid).Guid
```

Make a note of the GUID output because it will be required later on. In this case, the GUID is 67734c62-0805-4274-b72b-f7171110cd56.

Create a container named ADFS in your OU. The OU is located in the domain root and it has the same name as the NetBIOS name you specified when you created your AWS Microsoft AD directory. In this example, our OU name is AWS, and our domain is DC=awsexample,DC=com. You create the container by running the following Windows PowerShell command. You must replace the names that are in bold text with the names from your AWS Microsoft AD directory.
```
New-ADObject -Name "ADFS" -Type Container -Path “OU=YourNetBIOSName,DC=YourDomainSuffix,DC=YourDomainRoot”
```
Create another AD container in your new ADFS container, and use the previously generated GUID as the name. Do this by running the following Windows PowerShell command. Be sure to replace the names in bold text with the names from your AWS Microsoft AD directory and your GUID. In this example, we replace GUID with 67734c62-0805-4274-b72b-f7171110cd56. The other bold items shown match the names in our example AWS Microsoft AD directory.
```
New-ADObject -Name "GUID" -Type Container -Path “CN=ADFS,OU=YourNetBIOSName,DC=YourDomainSuffix,DC=YourDomainRoot”
```

To verify that you successfully created the ADFS and GUID containers, open Active Directory Users and Computers and navigate to the containers you created. Your root domain, OU name, and GUID name should match your AWS Microsoft AD configuration.

Note: If you do not see the ADFS and GUID containers, turn on Advanced Features by choosing View in the Active Directory Users and Computers tool, and then choosing Advanced Features.

Step 2: Install AD FS

In this section, we show how to install AD FS by using Windows PowerShell commands. First, though, select a federation service name for your AD FS server. You can create your federation service name by adding a short name (for example, sts) followed by your domain name (for example, awsexample.com). In this example, we use sts.awsexample.com as the federation service name.

Using your AWS Microsoft AD admin account, open an RDP session to your ADFS instance, run Windows PowerShell as a local administrator, and complete the following steps:

Install the Windows feature, AD FS, by running the following Windows PowerShell command. This command only adds the components needed to install your ADFS server later.
```
Install-WindowsFeature ADFS-Federation
```
Now that you have installed AD FS, you must obtain a certificate for use when you configure your ADFS server. The AD FS certificate plays an important role to secure communication between the ADFS server and clients, and to ensure tokens issued by the ADFS server are secured. AWS recommends that you use a certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority (CA).

In our example, we use the SSL certificate, sts.awsexample.com. It is important to note that the common name and subject alternative name (SAN) must include the federation service name we plan to use for the AD FS server. In our example, the name is sts.awsexample.com.

Install the certificate on the AD FS server using the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in for certificates by following these steps:

Open a command prompt window.
Type mmc and press Enter.
Choose File, choose Add/Remove snap-in, and choose Add.
For Add Standalone Snap-in, choose Certificates and then choose Add.
For the Certificates snap-in, choose Computer account and then choose Next.
Choose Finish, and then choose OK to load the Certificates snap In.
Expand Certificates (Local Computer).
Right-click Personal, choose All Tasks, and then choose Import.
On the Certificate Import Wizard, choose Next.
Choose Browse to locate and select your certificate that has been given by your CA. Choose Next.
Ensure Certificate store is set to Personal, and choose Next.
Choose Finish and OK to complete the installation of the certificate on the AD FS server.

Next you need to retrieve the Thumbprint value of the newly installed certificate and save it for use when you configure your ADFS server. Follow the remaining steps:

In the Certificates console window, expand Personal, and choose Certificates.
Right-click the certificate, and then choose Open.
Choose the Details tab to locate the Thumbprint

Note: In this case, we will copy our certificate Thumbprint, d096652327cfa18487723ff61040c85c7f57f701, and save it in Windows Notepad.

Open an RDP session to your ADFS server by using the admin account for your AWS Microsoft AD directory. Install AD FS by running the following Windows PowerShell command. You must replace the bold strings in the command with the GUID you created in Step 1 and the names from your AWS Microsoft AD directory.
```
$adminConfig = @{"DKMContainerDn"="CN=GUID,CN=ADFS,OU=YourNetBIOSName,DC=YourDomainSuffix,DC=YourDomainRoot"}
```

Enter the AD FS standard user account credentials for the ADFSSVC user and save it in the script variable, $svcCred, by running the following Windows PowerShell command.
```
$svcCred = (get-credential)
```

Type the Microsoft AD administrator credentials of the Admin user and save it in the script variable, $localAdminCred, by running the following Windows PowerShell command.
```
$localAdminCred = (get-credential)
```

Install the AD FS server by running the following Windows PowerShell command. You must replace the bold items with the Thumbprint ID from your certificate, and replace the federation service name with the federation service name you chose earlier. For our example, the federation service name is awsexample.com and we copy our certificate Thumbprint, d096652327cfa18487723ff61040c85c7f57f701, from where we saved it in Windows Notepad.

Note: Be sure to remove any empty spaces in the certificate Thumbprint value.

Install-ADFSFarm -CertificateThumbprint <Thumbprint ID> -FederationServiceName "YourFederationServiceName" -ServiceAccountCredential $svcCred -Credential $localAdminCred -OverwriteConfiguration -AdminConfiguration $adminConfig -SigningCertificateThumbprint <Thumbprint ID> -DecryptionCertificateThumbprint <Thumbprint ID>

Create a DNS A record for use with AD FS. This record resolves the federation service name to the public IP address you assign to your ADFS instance. You must create the DNS A record at the DNS hosting provider that hosts your domain. In the following example, sts.awsexample.com is the federation service name and 54.x.x.x is the public IP address of our AD FS instance.
- Hostname: awsexample.com
- Record Type: A
- IP Address: x.x.x

Enable the AD FS sign-in page by running the following Windows PowerShell command.
```
Set-ADFSProperties -EnableIdpInitiatedSignonPage $true
```

To verify that the AD FS sign-in page works, open a browser on the AD FS instance, and sign in on the AD FS sign-in page (https://<my federation service name>/AD FS/ls/IdpInitiatedSignOn.aspx) by using your AWS Microsoft AD admin account. In our example, the federation service name (<my federation service name> in the sign-in page URL) is sts.awsexample.com.

Step 3: Integrate AD FS with Azure AD

The following steps show you how to connect AD FS with Office 365 by connecting to Azure AD with Windows PowerShell and federating the custom domain.From the ADFS instance, make sure you run Windows PowerShell as a local administrator and complete the following steps:

Connect to Azure AD using Windows PowerShell.
Federate the custom domain you added and verified in Azure AD by running the following two Windows PowerShell commands. You must update the items in bold text with the names from your AWS Microsoft AD directory. For our example, our AD FS instance’s Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) is adfsserver.awsexample.com, and our domain name is awsexample.com.
```
Set-MsolADFSContext –computer <ADFS instance FQDN>

Convert-MsolDomainToFederated –domain <Domain name>
```

Step 4: Synchronize users from AWS Microsoft AD to Azure AD with Azure AD Connect

The following steps show you how to install and customize Azure AD Connect to synchronize your AWS Microsoft AD identities to Azure AD for use with Office 365.Open an RDP session to your ADSync instance by using your AWS Microsoft AD admin user account:

Download Azure AD Connect.
On the Welcome page of the Azure AD Connect Wizard, accept the license terms and privacy notice, and then choose Continue.
On the Express Settings page, choose Customize.
On the Install required components page, choose Install.
On the User sign-in page, choose Do not configure and then choose Next.
On the Connect to Azure AD page, enter your Office 365 global administrator account credentials and then choose Next.
On the Connect your directories page, choose Active Directory as the Directory Type, and then choose your Microsoft AD Forest as your Forest. Choose Add Directory.
At the prompt, enter your AWS Microsoft AD admin account credentials, and then choose OK.
Now that you have added the AWS Microsoft AD directory, choose Next.
On the Azure AD sign-in configuration page, choose Next.

Note: AWS recommends the userPrincipalName (UPN) attribute for use by AWS Microsoft AD users when they sign in to Azure AD and Office 365. The UPN attribute format combines the user’s login name and the UPN-suffix of an AWS Microsoft AD user. The UPN suffix is the domain name of your AWS Microsoft AD domain and the same domain name you added and verified with Azure AD.

In the following example from the Active Directory Users and Computers tool, the user’s UPN is [email protected], which is a combination of the user’s login name, awsuser, with the UPN-suffix, @awsexample.com.

On the Domain and OU filtering page, choose Sync selected domains and OUs, choose the Users OU under your NetBIOS OU, and then choose Next.
On the Uniquely identifying your users page, choose Next.
On the Filter users and devices page, choose Next.
On the Optional features page, choose Next.
On the Ready to configure page, choose Start the synchronization process when configuration completes, and then choose Install.
The Azure AD Connect installation has now completed. Choose Exit.

Note: By default, the Azure AD Connect sync scheduler runs every 30 minutes to synchronize your AWS Microsoft AD identities to Azure AD. You can tune the scheduler by opening a Windows PowerShell session as an administrator and running the appropriate Windows PowerShell commands. For more information, go to Azure AD Connect Sync Scheduler.

Tip: Do you need to synchronize a change immediately? You can manually start a sync cycle outside the scheduled sync cycle from the Azure AD Connect sync instance. Open a Windows PowerShell session as an administrator and run the following Windows PowerShell commands.

Import-Module ADSync
Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Delta

Step 5: Sign in to Office 365 by using your AWS Microsoft AD identities

The following steps show you how to sign in to Office 365 using AD FS as the authentication method with your AWS Microsoft AD user account. In this example, we assign a license to the AWS Microsoft AD user account, [email protected], in the Office 365 admin center. We then sign in to Office 365 by using the AWS Microsoft AD user account UPN, [email protected].

Using a computer on the internet, open a browser and complete the following steps:

Access the Office 365 admin center using your global administrator account, and assign a license to a user you created in your AWS Microsoft AD directory.
Sign in with the AWS Microsoft AD user account at https://portal.office.com.

When entering the UPN of the AWS Microsoft AD user account, you will be redirected to your ADFS server sign-in page to complete user authentication.
On the AD FS sign-in page, enter your UPN and the password of the AWS Microsoft AD user account.
You have successfully signed in to Office 365 using your AWS Microsoft AD user account!

Summary

In this blog post, we showed how to use Azure AD Connect and AD FS with AWS Microsoft AD so that your employees can access Office 365 using their AD credentials. Now that you have Azure AD Connect and AD FS in place, you also might want to explore how to build upon this infrastructure to add sign-in for other Software as a Service (SaaS) applications that are compatible with AD FS. For example, this blog post explains how you can provide your users single sign-on access to Amazon AppStream by using AD FS.

If you have comments or questions, post them on the Directory Service forum or contact AWS Support.

– Darryn and Ron

How to Increase the Redundancy and Performance of Your AWS Directory Service for Microsoft AD Directory by Adding Domain Controllers

2017-07-07 Peter Pereira

Post Syndicated from Peter Pereira original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-increase-the-redundancy-and-performance-of-your-aws-directory-service-for-microsoft-ad-directory-by-adding-domain-controllers/

You can now increase the redundancy and performance of your AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD, directory by deploying additional domain controllers. Adding domain controllers increases redundancy, resulting in even greater resilience and higher availability. This new capability enables you to have at least two domain controllers operating, even if an Availability Zone were to be temporarily unavailable. The additional domain controllers also improve the performance of your applications by enabling directory clients to load-balance their requests across a larger number of domain controllers. For example, AWS Microsoft AD enables you to use larger fleets of Amazon EC2 instances to run .NET applications that perform frequent user attribute lookups.

AWS Microsoft AD is a highly available, managed Active Directory built on actual Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 in the AWS Cloud. When you create your AWS Microsoft AD directory, AWS deploys two domain controllers that are exclusively yours in separate Availability Zones for high availability. Now, you can deploy additional domain controllers easily via the Directory Service console or API, by specifying the total number of domain controllers that you want.

AWS Microsoft AD distributes the additional domain controllers across the Availability Zones and subnets within the Amazon VPC where your directory is running. AWS deploys the domain controllers, configures them to replicate directory changes, monitors for and repairs any issues, performs daily snapshots, and updates the domain controllers with patches. This reduces the effort and complexity of creating and managing your own domain controllers in the AWS Cloud.

In this blog post, I create an AWS Microsoft AD directory with two domain controllers in each Availability Zone. This ensures that I always have at least two domain controllers operating, even if an entire Availability Zone were to be temporarily unavailable. To accomplish this, first I create an AWS Microsoft AD directory with one domain controller per Availability Zone, and then I deploy one additional domain controller per Availability Zone.

Solution architecture

The following diagram shows how AWS Microsoft AD deploys all the domain controllers in this solution after you complete Steps 1 and 2. In Step 1, AWS Microsoft AD deploys the two required domain controllers across multiple Availability Zones and subnets in an Amazon VPC. In Step 2, AWS Microsoft AD deploys one additional domain controller per Availability Zone and subnet.

Solution diagram

Step 1: Create an AWS Microsoft AD directory

First, I create an AWS Microsoft AD directory in an Amazon VPC. I can add domain controllers only after AWS Microsoft AD configures my first two required domain controllers. In my example, my domain name is example.com.

When I create my directory, I must choose the VPC in which to deploy my directory (as shown in the following screenshot). Optionally, I can choose the subnets in which to deploy my domain controllers, and AWS Microsoft AD ensures I select subnets from different Availability Zones. In this case, I have no subnet preference, so I choose No Preference from the Subnets drop-down list. In this configuration, AWS Microsoft AD selects subnets from two different Availability Zones to deploy the directory.

Screenshot of choosing the VPC in which to create the directory

I then choose Next Step to review my configuration, and then choose Create Microsoft AD. It takes approximately 40 minutes for my domain controllers to be created. I can check the status from the AWS Directory Service console, and when the status is Active, I can add my two additional domain controllers to the directory.

Step 2: Deploy two more domain controllers in the directory

Now that I have created an AWS Microsoft AD directory and it is active, I can deploy two additional domain controllers in the directory. AWS Microsoft AD enables me to add domain controllers through the Directory Service console or API. In this post, I use the console.

To deploy two more domain controllers in the directory:

I open the AWS Management Console, choose Directory Service, and then choose the Microsoft AD Directory ID. In my example, my recently created directory is example.com, as shown in the following screenshot.
I choose the Domain controllers tab next. Here I can see the two domain controllers that AWS Microsoft AD created for me in Step 1. It also shows the Availability Zones and subnets in which AWS Microsoft AD deployed the domain controllers.
I then choose Modify on the Domain controllers tab. I specify the total number of domain controllers I want by choosing the subtract and add buttons. In my example, I want four domain controllers in total for my directory.
I choose Apply. AWS Microsoft AD deploys the two additional domain controllers and distributes them evenly across the Availability Zones and subnets in my Amazon VPC. Within a few seconds, I can see the Availability Zones and subnets in which AWS Microsoft AD deployed my two additional domain controllers with a status of Creating (see the following screenshot). While AWS Microsoft AD deploys the additional domain controllers, my directory continues to operate by using the active domain controllers—with no disruption of service.
When AWS Microsoft AD completes the deployment steps, all domain controllers are in Active status and available for use by my applications. As a result, I have improved the redundancy and performance of my directory.

Note: After deploying additional domain controllers, I can reduce the number of domain controllers by repeating the modification steps with a lower number of total domain controllers. Unless a directory is deleted, AWS Microsoft AD does not allow fewer than two domain controllers per directory in order to deliver fault tolerance and high availability.

Summary

In this blog post, I demonstrated how to deploy additional domain controllers in your AWS Microsoft AD directory. By adding domain controllers, you increase the redundancy and performance of your directory, which makes it easier for you to migrate and run mission-critical Active Directory–integrated workloads in the AWS Cloud without having to deploy and maintain your own AD infrastructure.

To learn more about AWS Directory Service, see the AWS Directory Service home page. If you have questions, post them on the Directory Service forum.

– Peter

Noise

Tag Archives: domain controller

How to Enable LDAPS for Your AWS Microsoft AD Directory

Assumptions

Solution overview

How you enable LDAPS on AWS Microsoft AD

Background of CA deployment models

Deploying Microsoft CA to enable LDAPS on AWS Microsoft AD

Steps to enable LDAPS for your AWS Microsoft AD directory

Prerequisites

The solution setup

Deploy the solution

Step 1: Delegate permissions to CA administrators

Step 2: Add a Microsoft enterprise CA to your AWS Microsoft AD directory

Step 3: Create a certificate template

Step 4: Configure AWS security group rules

Step 5: AWS Microsoft AD enables LDAPS

Step 6: Test LDAPS access by using the LDP tool

Summary

Samba 4.7.0 released

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