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Implementing a compliance and reporting strategy for NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5

Post Syndicated from Josh Moss original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/implementing-a-compliance-and-reporting-strategy-for-nist-sp-800-53-rev-5/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides tools that simplify automation and monitoring for compliance with security standards, such as the NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 Operational Best Practices. Organizations can set preventative and proactive controls to help ensure that noncompliant resources aren’t deployed. Detective and responsive controls notify stakeholders of misconfigurations immediately and automate fixes, thus minimizing the time to resolution (TTR).

By layering the solutions outlined in this blog post, you can increase the probability that your deployments stay continuously compliant with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) SP 800-53 security standard, and you can simplify reporting on that compliance. In this post, we walk you through the following tools to get started on your continuous compliance journey:

Detective

Preventative

Proactive

Responsive

Reporting

Note on implementation

This post covers quite a few solutions, and these solutions operate in different parts of the security pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It might take some iterations to get your desired results, but we encourage you to start small, find your focus areas, and implement layered iterative changes to address them.

For example, if your organization has experienced events involving public Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets that can lead to data exposure, focus your efforts across the different control types to address that issue first. Then move on to other areas. Those steps might look similar to the following:

  1. Use Security Hub and Prowler to find your public buckets and monitor patterns over a predetermined time period to discover trends and perhaps an organizational root cause.
  2. Apply IAM policies and SCPs to specific organizational units (OUs) and principals to help prevent the creation of public buckets and the changing of AWS account-level controls.
  3. Set up Automated Security Response (ASR) on AWS and then test and implement the automatic remediation feature for only S3 findings.
  4. Remove direct human access to production accounts and OUs. Require infrastructure as code (IaC) to pass through a pipeline where CloudFormation Guard scans IaC for misconfigurations before deployment into production environments.

Detective controls

Implement your detective controls first. Use them to identify misconfigurations and your priority areas to address. Detective controls are security controls that are designed to detect, log, and alert after an event has occurred. Detective controls are a foundational part of governance frameworks. These guardrails are a second line of defense, notifying you of security issues that bypassed the preventative controls.

Security Hub NIST SP 800-53 security standard

Security Hub consumes, aggregates, and analyzes security findings from various supported AWS and third-party products. It functions as a dashboard for security and compliance in your AWS environment. Security Hub also generates its own findings by running automated and continuous security checks against rules. The rules are represented by security controls. The controls might, in turn, be enabled in one or more security standards. The controls help you determine whether the requirements in a standard are being met. Security Hub provides controls that support specific NIST SP 800-53 requirements. Unlike other frameworks, NIST SP 800-53 isn’t prescriptive about how its requirements should be evaluated. Instead, the framework provides guidelines, and the Security Hub NIST SP 800-53 controls represent the service’s understanding of them.

Using this step-by-step guide, enable Security Hub for your organization in AWS Organizations. Configure the NIST SP 800-53 security standard for all accounts, in all AWS Regions that are required to be monitored for compliance, in your organization by using the new centralized configuration feature; or if your organization uses AWS GovCloud (US), by using this multi-account script. Use the findings from the NIST SP 800-53 security standard in your delegated administrator account to monitor NIST SP 800-53 compliance across your entire organization, or a list of specific accounts.

Figure 1 shows the Security Standard console page, where users of the Security Hub Security Standard feature can see an overview of their security score against a selected security standard.

Figure 1: Security Hub security standard console

Figure 1: Security Hub security standard console

On this console page, you can select each control that is checked by a Security Hub Security Standard, such as the NIST 800-53 Rev. 5 standard, to find detailed information about the check and which NIST controls it maps to, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Security standard check detail

Figure 2: Security standard check detail

After you enable Security Hub with the NIST SP 800-53 security standard, you can link responsive controls such as the Automated Security Response (ASR), which is covered later in this blog post, to Amazon EventBridge rules to listen for Security Hub findings as they come in.

Prowler

Prowler is an open source security tool that you can use to perform assessments against AWS Cloud security recommendations, along with audits, incident response, continuous monitoring, hardening, and forensics readiness. The tool is a Python script that you can run anywhere that an up-to-date Python installation is located—this could be a workstation, an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, AWS Fargate or another container, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CloudShell, AWS Cloud9, or another compute option.

Figure 3 shows Prowler being used to perform a scan.

Figure 3: Prowler CLI in action

Figure 3: Prowler CLI in action

Prowler works well as a complement to the Security Hub NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 security standard. The tool has a native Security Hub integration and can send its findings to your Security Hub findings dashboard. You can also use Prowler as a standalone compliance scanning tool in partitions where Security Hub or the security standards aren’t yet available.

At the time of writing, Prowler has over 300 checks across 64 AWS services.

In addition to integrations with Security Hub and computer-based outputs, Prowler can produce fully interactive HTML reports that you can use to sort, filter, and dive deeper into findings. You can then share these compliance status reports with compliance personnel. Some organizations run automatically recurring Prowler reports and use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to email the results directly to their compliance personnel.

Get started with Prowler by reviewing the Prowler Open Source documentation that contains tutorials for specific providers and commands that you can copy and paste.

Preventative controls

Preventative controls are security controls that are designed to prevent an event from occurring in the first place. These guardrails are a first line of defense to help prevent unauthorized access or unwanted changes to your network. Service control policies (SCPs) and IAM controls are the best way to help prevent principals in your AWS environment (whether they are human or nonhuman) from creating noncompliant or misconfigured resources.

IAM

In the ideal environment, principals (both human and nonhuman) have the least amount of privilege that they need to reach operational objectives. Ideally, humans would at the most only have read-only access to production environments. AWS resources would be created through IaC that runs through a DevSecOps pipeline where policy-as-code checks review resources for compliance against your policies before deployment. DevSecOps pipeline roles should have IAM policies that prevent the deployment of resources that don’t conform to your organization’s compliance strategy. Use IAM conditions wherever possible to help ensure that only requests that match specific, predefined parameters are allowed.

The following policy is a simple example of a Deny policy that uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) condition keys to help prevent the creation of unencrypted RDS instances and clusters. Most AWS services support condition keys that allow for evaluating the presence of specific service settings. Use these condition keys to help ensure that key security features, such as encryption, are set during a resource creation call.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "DenyUnencryptedRDSResourceCreation",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
      "rds:CreateDBInstance",
      "rds:CreateDBCluster"
      ]
      "Resource": "*",
      "Condition": {
        "BoolIfExists": {
          rds:StorageEncrypted": "false"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Service control policies

You can use an SCP to specify the maximum permissions for member accounts in your organization. You can restrict which AWS services, resources, and individual API actions the users and roles in each member account can access. You can also define conditions for when to restrict access to AWS services, resources, and API actions. If you haven’t used SCPs before and want to learn more, see How to use service control policies to set permission guardrails across accounts in your AWS Organization.

Use SCPs to help prevent common misconfigurations mapped to NIST SP 800-53 controls, such as the following:

  • Prevent governed accounts from leaving the organization or turning off security monitoring services.
  • Build protections and contextual access controls around privileged principals.
  • Mitigate the risk of data mishandling by enforcing data perimeters and requiring encryption on data at rest.

Although SCPs aren’t the optimal choice for preventing every misconfiguration, they can help prevent many of them. As a feature of AWS Organizations, SCPs provide inheritable controls to member accounts of the OUs that they are applied to. For deployments in Regions where AWS Organizations isn’t available, you can use IAM policies and permissions boundaries to achieve preventative functionality that is similar to what SCPs provide.

The following is an example of policy mapping statements to NIST controls or control families. Note the placeholder values, which you will need to replace with your own information before use. Note that the SIDs map to Security Hub NIST 800-53 Security Standard control numbers or NIST control families.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "Account1",
      "Action": [
        "organizations:LeaveOrganization"
      ],
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Resource": "*"
    },
    {
      "Sid": "NISTAccessControlFederation",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "iam:CreateOpenIDConnectProvider",
        "iam:CreateSAMLProvider",
        "iam:DeleteOpenIDConnectProvider",
        "iam:DeleteSAMLProvider",
        "iam:UpdateOpenIDConnectProviderThumbprint",
        "iam:UpdateSAMLProvider"
      ],
      "Resource": "*",
      "Condition": {
        "ArnNotLike": {
          "aws:PrincipalARN": "arn:aws:iam::${Account}:role/[PRIVILEGED_ROLE]"
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Sid": "CloudTrail1",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "cloudtrail:DeleteTrail",
        "cloudtrail:PutEventSelectors",
        "cloudtrail:StopLogging",
        "cloudtrail:UpdateTrail",
        "cloudtrail:CreateTrail"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:cloudtrail:${Region}:${Account}:trail/[CLOUDTRAIL_NAME]",
      "Condition": {
        "ArnNotLike": {
          "aws:PrincipalARN": "arn:aws:iam::${Account}:role/[PRIVILEGED_ROLE]"
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Sid": "Config1",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "config:DeleteConfigurationAggregator",
        "config:DeleteConfigurationRecorder",
        "config:DeleteDeliveryChannel",
        "config:DeleteConfigRule",
        "config:DeleteOrganizationConfigRule",
        "config:DeleteRetentionConfiguration",
        "config:StopConfigurationRecorder",
        "config:DeleteAggregationAuthorization",
        "config:DeleteEvaluationResults"
      ],
      "Resource": "*",
      "Condition": {
        "ArnNotLike": {
          "aws:PrincipalARN": "arn:aws:iam::${Account}:role/[PRIVILEGED_ROLE]"
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Sid": "CloudFormationSpecificStackProtectionNISTIncidentResponseandSystemIntegrityControls",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "cloudformation:CreateChangeSet",
        "cloudformation:CreateStack",
        "cloudformation:CreateStackInstances",
        "cloudformation:CreateStackSet",
        "cloudformation:DeleteChangeSet",
        "cloudformation:DeleteStack",
        "cloudformation:DeleteStackInstances",
        "cloudformation:DeleteStackSet",
        "cloudformation:DetectStackDrift",
        "cloudformation:DetectStackResourceDrift",
        "cloudformation:DetectStackSetDrift",
        "cloudformation:ExecuteChangeSet",
        "cloudformation:SetStackPolicy",
        "cloudformation:StopStackSetOperation",
        "cloudformation:UpdateStack",
        "cloudformation:UpdateStackInstances",
        "cloudformation:UpdateStackSet",
        "cloudformation:UpdateTerminationProtection"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:cloudformation:*:*:stackset/[STACKSET_PREFIX]*",
        "arn:aws:cloudformation:*:*:stack/[STACK_PREFIX]*",
        "arn:aws:cloudformation:*:*:stack/[STACK_NAME]"
      ],
      "Condition": {
        "ArnNotLike": {
          "aws:PrincipalARN": "arn:aws:iam::${Account}:role/[PRIVILEGED_ROLE]"
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Sid": "EC23",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "ec2:DisableEbsEncryptionByDefault"
      ],
      "Resource": "*",
      "Condition": {
        "ArnNotLike": {
          "aws:PrincipalARN": "arn:aws:iam::${Account}:role/[PRIVILEGED_ROLE]"
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Sid": "GuardDuty1",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "guardduty:DeclineInvitations",
        "guardduty:DeleteDetector",
        "guardduty:DeleteFilter",
        "guardduty:DeleteInvitations",
        "guardduty:DeleteIPSet",
        "guardduty:DeleteMembers",
        "guardduty:DeletePublishingDestination",
        "guardduty:DeleteThreatIntelSet",
        "guardduty:DisassociateFromMasterAccount",
        "guardduty:DisassociateMembers",
        "guardduty:StopMonitoringMembers"
      ],
      "Resource": "*"
    },
    {
      "Sid": "IAM4",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": "iam:CreateAccessKey",
      "Resource": [
        "arn::iam::*:root",
        "arn::iam::*:Administrator"
      ]
    },
    {
      "Sid": "KMS3",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "kms:ScheduleKeyDeletion",
        "kms:DeleteAlias",
        "kms:DeleteCustomKeyStore",
        "kms:DeleteImportedKeyMaterial"
      ],
      "Resource": "*",
      "Condition": {
        "ArnNotLike": {
          "aws:PrincipalArn": "arn:aws:iam::${Account}:role/[PRIVILEGED_ROLE]"
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Sid": "Lambda1",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "lambda:AddPermission"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "*"
      ],
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "lambda:Principal": [
            "*"
          ]
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Sid": "ProtectSecurityLambdaFunctionsNISTIncidentResponseControls",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "lambda:AddPermission",
        "lambda:CreateEventSourceMapping",
        "lambda:CreateFunction",
        "lambda:DeleteEventSourceMapping",
        "lambda:DeleteFunction",
        "lambda:DeleteFunctionConcurrency",
        "lambda:PutFunctionConcurrency",
        "lambda:RemovePermission",
        "lambda:UpdateEventSourceMapping",
        "lambda:UpdateFunctionCode",
        "lambda:UpdateFunctionConfiguration"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:*:*:function:[INFRASTRUCTURE_AUTOMATION_PREFIX]",
      "Condition": {
        "ArnNotLike": {
          "aws:PrincipalArn": "arn:aws:iam::${Account}:role/[PRIVILEGED_ROLE]"
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Sid": "SecurityHub",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "securityhub:DeleteInvitations",
        "securityhub:BatchDisableStandards",
        "securityhub:DeleteActionTarget",
        "securityhub:DeleteInsight",
        "securityhub:UntagResource",
        "securityhub:DisableSecurityHub",
        "securityhub:DisassociateFromMasterAccount",
        "securityhub:DeleteMembers",
        "securityhub:DisassociateMembers",
        "securityhub:DisableImportFindingsForProduct"
      ],
      "Resource": "*",
      "Condition": {
        "ArnNotLike": {
          "aws:PrincipalARN": "arn:aws:iam::${Account}:role/[PRIVILEGED_ROLE]"
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Sid": "ProtectAlertingSNSNISTIncidentResponseControls",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "sns:AddPermission",
        "sns:CreateTopic",
        "sns:DeleteTopic",
        "sns:RemovePermission",
        "sns:SetTopicAttributes"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:sns:*:*:[SNS_TOPIC_TO_PROTECT]",
      "Condition": {
        "ArnNotLike": {
          "aws:PrincipalArn": "arn:aws:iam::${Account}:role/[PRIVILEGED_ROLE]"
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Sid": "S3 2 3 6",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "s3:PutAccountPublicAccessBlock"
      ],
      "Resource": "*",
      "Condition": {
        "ArnNotLike": {
          "aws:PrincipalARN": "arn:aws:iam::${Account}:role/[PRIVILEGED_ROLE]"
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "Sid": "ProtectS3bucketsanddatafromdeletionNISTSystemIntegrityControls",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "s3:DeleteBucket",
        "s3:DeleteBucketPolicy",
        "s3:DeleteObject",
        "s3:DeleteObjectVersion",
        "s3:DeleteObjectTagging",
        "s3:DeleteObjectVersionTagging"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET_TO_PROTECT",
        "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET_TO_PROTECT/path/to/key*",
        "arn:aws:s3:::Another_BUCKET_TO_PROTECT",
        "arn:aws:s3:::CriticalBucketPrefix-*"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

For a collection of SCP examples that are ready for your testing, modification, and adoption, see the service-control-policy-examples GitHub repository, which includes examples of Region and service restrictions.

For a deeper dive on SCP best practices, see Achieving operational excellence with design considerations for AWS Organizations SCPs.

You should thoroughly test SCPs against development OUs and accounts before you deploy them against production OUs and accounts.

Proactive controls

Proactive controls are security controls that are designed to prevent the creation of noncompliant resources. These controls can reduce the number of security events that responsive and detective controls handle. These controls help ensure that deployed resources are compliant before they are deployed; therefore, there is no detection event that requires response or remediation.

CloudFormation Guard

CloudFormation Guard (cfn-guard) is an open source, general-purpose, policy-as-code evaluation tool. Use cfn-guard to scan Information as Code (IaC) against a collection of policies, defined as JSON, before deployment of resources into an environment.

Cfn-guard can scan CloudFormation templates, Terraform plans, Kubernetes configurations, and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) output. Cfn-guard is fully extensible, so your teams can choose the rules that they want to enforce, and even write their own declarative rules in a YAML-based format. Ideally, the resources deployed into a production environment on AWS flow through a DevSecOps pipeline. Use cfn_guard in your pipeline to define what is and is not acceptable for deployment, and help prevent misconfigured resources from deploying. Developers can also use cfn_guard on their local command line, or as a pre-commit hook to move the feedback timeline even further “left” in the development cycle.

Use policy as code to help prevent the deployment of noncompliant resources. When you implement policy as code in the DevOps cycle, you can help shorten the development and feedback cycle and reduce the burden on security teams. The CloudFormation team maintains a GitHub repo of cfn-guard rules and mappings, ready for rapid testing and adoption by your teams.

Figure 4 shows how you can use Guard with the NIST 800-53 cfn_guard Rule Mapping to scan infrastructure as code against NIST 800-53 mapped rules.

Figure 4: CloudFormation Guard scan results

Figure 4: CloudFormation Guard scan results

You should implement policy as code as pre-commit checks so that developers get prompt feedback, and in DevSecOps pipelines to help prevent deployment of noncompliant resources. These checks typically run as Bash scripts in a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline such as AWS CodeBuild or GitLab CI. To learn more, see Integrating AWS CloudFormation Guard into CI/CD pipelines.

To get started, see the CloudFormation Guard User Guide. You can also view the GitHub repos for CloudFormation Guard and the AWS Guard Rules Registry.

Many other third-party policy-as-code tools are available and include NIST SP 800-53 compliance policies. If cfn-guard doesn’t meet your needs, or if you are looking for a more native integration with the AWS CDK, for example, see the NIST-800-53 rev 5 rules pack in cdk-nag.

Responsive controls

Responsive controls are designed to drive remediation of adverse events or deviations from your security baseline. Examples of technical responsive controls include setting more stringent security group rules after a security group is created, setting a public access block on a bucket automatically if it’s removed, patching a system, quarantining a resource exhibiting anomalous behavior, shutting down a process, or rebooting a system.

Automated Security Response on AWS

The Automated Security Response on AWS (ASR) is an add-on that works with Security Hub and provides predefined response and remediation actions based on industry compliance standards and current recommendations for security threats. This AWS solution creates playbooks so you can choose what you want to deploy in your Security Hub administrator account (which is typically your Security Tooling account, in our recommended multi-account architecture). Each playbook contains the necessary actions to start the remediation workflow within the account holding the affected resource. Using ASR, you can resolve common security findings and improve your security posture on AWS. Rather than having to review findings and search for noncompliant resources across many accounts, security teams can view and mitigate findings from the Security Hub console of the delegated administrator.

The architecture diagram in Figure 5 shows the different portions of the solution, deployed into both the Administrator account and member accounts.

Figure 5: ASR architecture diagram

Figure 5: ASR architecture diagram

The high-level process flow for the solution components deployed with the AWS CloudFormation template is as follows:

  1. DetectAWS Security Hub provides customers with a comprehensive view of their AWS security state. This service helps them to measure their environment against security industry standards and best practices. It works by collecting events and data from other AWS services, such as AWS Config, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Firewall Manager. These events and data are analyzed against security standards, such as the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark. Exceptions are asserted as findings in the Security Hub console. New findings are sent as Amazon EventBridge events.
  2. Initiate – You can initiate events against findings by using custom actions, which result in Amazon EventBridge events. Security Hub Custom Actions and EventBridge rules initiate Automated Security Response on AWS playbooks to address findings. One EventBridge rule is deployed to match the custom action event, and one EventBridge event rule is deployed for each supported control (deactivated by default) to match the real-time finding event. Automated remediation can be initiated through the Security Hub Custom Action menu, or, after careful testing in a non-production environment, automated remediations can be activated. This can be activated per remediation—it isn’t necessary to activate automatic initiations on all remediations.
  3. Orchestrate – Using cross-account IAM roles, Step Functions in the admin account invokes the remediation in the member account that contains the resource that produced the security finding.
  4. Remediate – An AWS Systems Manager Automation Document in the member account performs the action required to remediate the finding on the target resource, such as disabling AWS Lambda public access.
  5. Log – The playbook logs the results to an Amazon CloudWatch Logs group, sends a notification to an Amazon SNS topic, and updates the Security Hub finding. An audit trail of actions taken is maintained in the finding notes. On the Security Hub dashboard, the finding workflow status is changed from NEW to either NOTIFIED or RESOLVED. The security finding notes are updated to reflect the remediation that was performed.

The NIST SP 800-53 Playbook contains 52 remediations to help security and compliance teams respond to misconfigured resources. Security teams have a choice between launching these remediations manually, or enabling the associated EventBridge rules to allow the automations to bring resources back into a compliant state until further action can be taken on them. When a resource doesn’t align with the Security Hub NIST SP 800-53 security standard automated checks and the finding appears in Security Hub, you can use ASR to move the resource back into a compliant state. Remediations are available for 17 of the common core services for most AWS workloads.

Figure 6 shows how you can remediate a finding with ASR by selecting the finding in Security Hub and sending it to the created custom action.

Figure 6: ASR Security Hub custom action

Figure 6: ASR Security Hub custom action

Findings generated from the Security Hub NIST SP 800-53 security standard are displayed in the Security Hub findings or security standard dashboards. Security teams can review the findings and choose which ones to send to ASR for remediation. The general architecture of ASR consists of EventBridge rules to listen for the Security Hub custom action, an AWS Step Functions workflow to control the process and implementation, and several AWS Systems Manager documents (SSM documents) and AWS Lambda functions to perform the remediation. This serverless, step-based approach is a non-brittle, low-maintenance way to keep persistent remediation resources in an account, and to pay for their use only as needed. Although you can choose to fork and customize ASR, it’s a fully developed AWS solution that receives regular bug fixes and feature updates.

To get started, see the ASR Implementation Guide, which will walk you through configuration and deployment.

You can also view the code on GitHub at the Automated Security Response on AWS GitHub repo.

Reporting

Several options are available to concisely gather results into digestible reports that compliance professionals can use as artifacts during the Risk Management Framework (RMF) process when seeking an Authorization to Operate (ATO). By automating reporting and delegating least-privilege access to compliance personnel, security teams may be able to reduce time spent reporting compliance status to auditors or oversight personnel.

Let your compliance folks in

Remove some of the burden of reporting from your security engineers, and give compliance teams read-only access to your Security Hub dashboard in your Security Tooling account. Enabling compliance teams with read-only access through AWS IAM Identity Center (or another sign-on solution) simplifies governance while still maintaining the principle of least privilege. By adding compliance personnel to the AWSSecurityAudit managed permission set in IAM Identity Center, or granting this policy to IAM principals, these users gain visibility into operational accounts without the ability to make configuration changes. Compliance teams can self-serve the security posture details and audit trails that they need for reporting purposes.

Meanwhile, administrative teams are freed from regularly gathering and preparing security reports, so they can focus on operating compliant workloads across their organization. The AWSSecurityAudit permission set grants read-only access to security services such as Security Hub, AWS Config, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS IAM Access Analyzer. This provides compliance teams with wide observability into policies, configuration history, threat detection, and access patterns—without the privilege to impact resources or alter configurations. This ultimately helps to strengthen your overall security posture.

For more information about AWS managed policies, such as the AWSSecurityAudit managed policy, see the AWS managed policies.

To learn more about permission sets in IAM Identity Center, see Permission sets.

AWS Audit Manager

AWS Audit Manager helps you continually audit your AWS usage to simplify how you manage risk and compliance with regulations and industry standards. Audit Manager automates evidence collection so you can more easily assess whether your policies, procedures, and activities—also known as controls—are operating effectively. When it’s time for an audit, Audit Manager helps you manage stakeholder reviews of your controls. This means that you can build audit-ready reports with much less manual effort.

Audit Manager provides prebuilt frameworks that structure and automate assessments for a given compliance standard or regulation, including NIST 800-53 Rev. 5. Frameworks include a prebuilt collection of controls with descriptions and testing procedures. These controls are grouped according to the requirements of the specified compliance standard or regulation. You can also customize frameworks and controls to support internal audits according to your specific requirements.

For more information about using Audit Manager to generate automated compliance reports, see the AWS Audit Manager User Guide.

Security Hub Compliance Analyzer (SHCA)

Security Hub is the premier security information aggregating tool on AWS, offering automated security checks that align with NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5. This alignment is particularly critical for organizations that use the Security Hub NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 framework. Each control within this framework is pivotal for documenting the compliance status of cloud environments, focusing on key aspects such as:

  • Related requirements – For example, NIST.800-53.r5 CM-2 and NIST.800-53.r5 CM-2(2)
  • Severity – Assessment of potential impact
  • Description – Detailed control explanation
  • Remediation – Strategies for addressing and mitigating issues

Such comprehensive information is crucial in the accreditation and continuous monitoring of cloud environments.

Enhance compliance and RMF submission with the Security Hub Compliance Analyzer

To further augment the utility of this data for customers seeking to compile artifacts and articulate compliance status, the AWS ProServe team has introduced the Security Hub Compliance Analyzer (SHCA).

SHCA is engineered to streamline the RMF process. It reduces manual effort, delivers extensive reports for informed decision making, and helps assure continuous adherence to NIST SP 800-53 standards. This is achieved through a four-step methodology:

  1. Active findings collection – Compiles ACTIVE findings from Security Hub that are assessed using NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 standards.
  2. Results transformation – Transforms these findings into formats that are both user-friendly and compatible with RMF tools, facilitating understanding and utilization by customers.
  3. Data analysis and compliance documentation – Performs an in-depth analysis of these findings to pinpoint compliance and security shortfalls. Produces comprehensive compliance reports, summaries, and narratives that accurately represent the status of compliance for each NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 control.
  4. Findings archival – Assembles and archives the current findings for downloading and review by customers.

The diagram in Figure 7 shows the SHCA steps in action.

Figure 7: SHCA steps

Figure 7: SHCA steps

By integrating these steps, SHCA simplifies compliance management and helps enhance the overall security posture of AWS environments, aligning with the rigorous standards set by NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5.

The following is a list of the artifacts that SHCA provides:

  • RMF-ready controls – Controls in full compliance (as per AWS Config) with AWS Operational Recommendations for NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, ready for direct import into RMF tools.
  • Controls needing attention – Controls not fully compliant with AWS Operational Recommendations for NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, indicating areas that require improvement.
  • Control compliance summary (CSV) – A detailed summary, in CSV format, of NIST SP 800-53 controls, including their compliance percentages and comprehensive narratives for each control.
  • Security Hub NIST 800-53 Analysis Summary – This automated report provides an executive summary of the current compliance posture, tailored for leadership reviews. It emphasizes urgent compliance concerns that require immediate action and guides the creation of a targeted remediation strategy for operational teams.
  • Original Security Hub findings – The raw JSON file from Security Hub, captured at the last time that the SHCA state machine ran.
  • User-friendly findings summary –A simplified, flattened version of the original findings, formatted for accessibility in common productivity tools.
  • Original findings from Security Hub in OCSF – The original findings converted to the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) format for future applications.
  • Original findings from Security Hub in OSCAL – The original findings translated into the Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) format for subsequent usage.

As shown in Figure 8, the Security Hub NIST 800-53 Analysis Summary adopts an OpenSCAP-style format akin to Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs), which are grounded in the Department of Defense’s (DoD) policy and security protocols.

Figure 8: SHCA Summary Report

Figure 8: SHCA Summary Report

You can also view the code on GitHub at Security Hub Compliance Analyzer.

Conclusion

Organizations can use AWS security and compliance services to help maintain compliance with the NIST SP 800-53 standard. By implementing preventative IAM and SCP policies, organizations can restrict users from creating noncompliant resources. Detective controls such as Security Hub and Prowler can help identify misconfigurations, while proactive tools such as CloudFormation Guard can scan IaC to help prevent deployment of noncompliant resources. Finally, the Automated Security Response on AWS can automatically remediate findings to help resolve issues quickly. With this layered security approach across the organization, companies can verify that AWS deployments align to the NIST framework, simplify compliance reporting, and enable security teams to focus on critical issues. Get started on your continuous compliance journey today. Using AWS solutions, you can align deployments with the NIST 800-53 standard. Implement the tips in this post to help maintain continuous compliance.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, start a new thread on the AWS Security, Identity, & Compliance re:Post or contact AWS Support.

Josh Moss

Josh Moss
Josh is a Senior Security Consultant at AWS who specializes in security automation, as well as threat detection and incident response. Josh brings his over fifteen years of experience as a hacker, security analyst, and security engineer to his Federal customers as an AWS Professional Services Consultant.

Rick Kidder

Rick Kidder
Rick, with over thirty years of expertise in cybersecurity and information technology, serves as a Senior Security Consultant at AWS. His specialization in data analysis is centered around security and compliance within the DoD and industry sectors. At present, Rick is focused on providing guidance to DoD and Federal customers in his role as a Senior Cloud Consultant with AWS Professional Services.

Scott Sizemore

Scott Sizemore
Scott is a Senior Cloud Consultant on the AWS World Wide Public Sector (WWPS) Professional Services Department of Defense (DoD) team. Prior to joining AWS, Scott was a DoD contractor supporting multiple agencies for over 20 years.

AWS Wickr achieves FedRAMP High authorization

Post Syndicated from Anne Grahn original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-wickr-achieves-fedramp-high-authorization/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is excited to announce that AWS Wickr has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorization at the High impact level from the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB).

FedRAMP is a U.S. government–wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud services by providing a standardized approach to security and risk assessment for cloud technologies and federal agencies.

Customers find security and control in Wickr

Wickr is an end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration service with features designed to help keep your communications secure, private, and compliant. Wickr protects one-to-one and group messaging, voice and video calling, file sharing, screen sharing, and location sharing with 256-bit encryption, and provides data retention capabilities.

You can create Wickr networks through the AWS Management Console. Administrative controls allow your Wickr administrators to add, remove, and invite users, and organize them into security groups to manage messaging, calling, security, and federation settings. You maintain full control over data, which includes addressing information governance polices, configuring ephemeral messaging options, and deleting credentials for lost or stolen devices.

You can log internal and external communications—including conversations with guest users, contractors, and other partner networks—in a private data store that you manage. This allows you to retain messages and files that are sent to and from your organization, to help meet requirements such as those that fall under the Federal Records Act (FRA) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The FedRAMP milestone

In obtaining a FedRAMP High authorization, Wickr has been measured against a rigorous set of security controls, procedures, and policies established by the U.S. Federal Government, based on National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards.

“For many federal agencies and organizations, having the ability to securely communicate and share information—whether in an office or out in the field—is key to helping achieve their critical missions. AWS Wickr helps our government customers collaborate securely through messaging, calling, file and screen sharing with end-to-end encryption. The FedRAMP High authorization for Wickr demonstrates our commitment to delivering solutions that give government customers the control and confidence they need to support their sensitive and regulated workloads.” — Christian Hoff, Director, US Federal Civilian & Health at AWS

FedRAMP on AWS

AWS is continually expanding the scope of our compliance programs to help you use authorized services for sensitive and regulated workloads. We now offer 150 services that are authorized in the AWS US East/West Regions under FedRAMP Moderate authorization, and 132 services authorized in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions under FedRAMP High authorization.

The FedRAMP High authorization of Wickr further validates our commitment at AWS to public-sector customers. With Wickr, you can combine the security of end-to-end encryption with the administrative flexibility you need to secure mission-critical communications, and keep up with recordkeeping requirements. Wickr is available under FedRAMP High in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

For up-to-date information, see our AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. To learn more about AWS Wickr, visit the AWS Wickr product page, or email [email protected].

If you have feedback about this blog post, let us know in the Comments section below.

Anne Grahn

Anne Grahn

Anne is a Senior Worldwide Security GTM Specialist at AWS, based in Chicago. She has more than a decade of experience in the security industry, and focuses on effectively communicating cybersecurity risk. She maintains a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.

Randy Brumfield

Randy Brumfield

Randy leads technology business for new initiatives and the Cloud Support Engineering team for AWS Wickr. Prior to joining AWS, Randy spent close to two and a half decades in Silicon Valley across several start-ups, networking companies, and system integrators in various corporate development, product management, and operations roles. Randy currently resides in San Jose, California.

AWS FedRAMP Revision 5 baselines transition update

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

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

Background

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

Key milestones and deliverables

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

Key Rev. 5 AWS documents for customers:

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

AWS GovCloud (US) authorization timeline:

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

AWS US East/West commercial authorization timeline:

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

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

How to contact us

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

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

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

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Kevin Donohue

Kevin Donohue

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

Customer Compliance Guides now available on AWS Artifact

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Compliance Guides help customers address three primary challenges:

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

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

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

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Kevin Donohue

Kevin Donohue

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

Travis Goldbach

Travis Goldbach

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

Faster AWS cloud connections with TLS 1.3

Post Syndicated from Kate Rodgers original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/faster-aws-cloud-connections-with-tls-1-3/

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we strive to continuously improve customer experience by delivering a cloud computing environment that supports the most modern security technologies. To improve the overall performance of your connections, we have already started to enable TLS version 1.3 globally across our AWS service API endpoints, and will complete this process by December 31, 2023. By using TLS 1.3, you can decrease your connection time by removing one network round trip for every connection request, and can benefit from some of the most modern and secure cryptographic cipher suites available today.

If you are using current software tools (2014 or later) including our AWS SDKs or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), you will automatically receive the benefits of TLS 1.3 with no action required on your part. This is because AWS services will negotiate the highest TLS protocol version that your client software supports. If you want to continue using TLS 1.2, you will still have full control through your client configurations. AWS will retain support for TLS 1.2, in addition to TLS 1.3, into the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, here’s the latest information on the on-going deprecation of TLS 1.0/1.1.

If you have any questions, start a new thread on AWS re:Post, or contact AWS Support or your technical account manager. If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.

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Kate Rodgers

Kate Rodgers

Kate is a Senior Technical Program Manager in AWS Security with over 10 years of experience in industry as an engineer and program manager. Today she works with AWS services, infrastructure, and administrative teams to drive innovative solutions that improve the AWS security posture.

James McDuffie

James McDuffie

James is a Senior Technical Account Manager. He has over 20 years of experience in software development, with previous roles in Software and Hardware Security Architecture in Industrial IoT. He is an active member of the AWS Security community, and he works closely with our customers to help them solve complex security challenges at scale.

Cloudflare achieves FedRAMP authorization to secure more of the public sector

Post Syndicated from Aron Nakazato original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-achieves-fedramp-authorization/

Cloudflare achieves FedRAMP authorization to secure more of the public sector

This post is also available in Deutsch, Français and Español.

Cloudflare achieves FedRAMP authorization to secure more of the public sector

We are excited to announce our public sector suite of services, Cloudflare for Government, has achieved FedRAMP Moderate Authorization. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (“FedRAMP”) is a US-government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. FedRAMP Moderate Authorization demonstrates Cloudflare’s continued commitment to customer trust, and Cloudflare for Government’s ability to secure and protect US public sector organizations.

Key differentiators

We believe public sector customers deserve the same experience as any other customer — so rather than building a separate platform, we leveraged our existing platform for Cloudflare for Government. Cloudflare’s platform protects and accelerates any Internet application without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. It’s also one of the largest and fastest global networks on the planet.

One of the things that distinguishes Cloudflare for Government from other FedRAMP cloud providers is the number of data centers we have in scope, with each able to run our full stack of FedRAMP Authorized services locally, with a single control plane on our private backbone. Networking and security services can only improve the user experience if they are run as close to the user as possible, even if the user doesn’t live on an east or west coast hub. While other cloud service providers may only have a handful of data centers within their FedRAMP environment, Cloudflare for Government includes over 30 of our US-based data centers. This provides Cloudflare for Government customers with the same speed, availability, and security that non-highly regulated customers have come to expect from us.

Cloudflare for Government services

Cloudflare for Government is a suite of services for U.S. government and public sector agencies, delivered from our global, highly resilient cloud network with built-in security and performance.

Cloudflare achieves FedRAMP authorization to secure more of the public sector

Application services

Web Application Firewall with API protection provides an intelligent, integrated and scalable solution to protect your critical web applications. Rate Limiting protects against denial of service attacks, brute force login attempts, and other abusive behavior that targets the application layer. Load Balancing improves application performance and availability by steering traffic from unhealthy origin servers and dynamically distributing it to the most available and responsive server pools.

Bot Management manages good and bad bots in real-time, helps prevent credential stuffing, content scraping, content spam, inventory hoarding, credit card stuffing, and application DDoS. CDN provides ultra-fast static and dynamic content delivery over our global network; it offers users the ability to exercise precise control over how content is cached, helps reduce bandwidth costs and take advantage of built-in unmetered DDoS protections. Enterprise grade DNS offers the fastest response time, unparalleled redundancy, and advanced security with built-in DDoS mitigation and DNSSEC.

Zero trust

Zero Trust Network Access creates secure boundaries for applications by allowing access to resources after verifying identity, context, and policy adherence for each specific request. Remote Browser Isolation provides a fast and reliable solution for remote browsing by running all browser code in the cloud. Secure Web Gateway protects users and data by inspecting user traffic, filtering and blocking malicious content, and identifying compromised devices.

Network services

Cloudflare for Government can replace your legacy WAN architecture with Cloudflare’s WAN-as-a-Service which provides expansive connectivity, cloud-based security, performance and control. L3/4 DDoS can protect your websites, applications, and network — Cloudflare blocks an average of 87 billion threats per day! Network Interconnect enables you to directly connect your on-premise networks and cloud hosted environments to Cloudflare for Government.

Developer platform

Workers provides a serverless execution environment that allows you to create entirely new applications or augment existing ones without configuring or maintaining infrastructure. Workers KV is a global, low-latency, key-value data store. It supports exceptionally high read volumes with low-latency, making it possible to build highly dynamic APIs and websites which respond as quickly as a cached static file would. Durable Objects provides low-latency coordination and consistent storage for the Workers platform through two features: global uniqueness and a transactional storage API.

What’s next for Cloudflare for Government

Our achievement of FedRAMP Moderate for our Cloudflare for Government suite of products is the first step in our journey to help secure government entities. As you may have read earlier this week, our focus hasn’t been only with the US public sector. Our Zero Trust products are being leveraged to protect critical infrastructure in Japan, Australia, Germany, Portugal, and the UK. We’re also securing organizations qualified under Project Galileo and Athenian with our Cloudflare One Zero Trust suite at no cost.  We will expand the Cloudflare for Government suite to allow governments all over the world to have the opportunity to use our services to protect their assets and users.

We aim to help agencies build stronger cybersecurity, without compromising the customer experience of the government services that all US citizens rely on. We invite all our Cloudflare for Government public and private partners to learn more about our capabilities and work with us to develop solutions to the rapidly evolving security demands required in complex environments. Please reach out to us at [email protected] with any questions.

For more information on Cloudflare’s FedRAMP status, please visit the FedRAMP Marketplace.

AWS achieves FedRAMP P-ATO for 20 services in the AWS US East/West Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

Post Syndicated from Steve Earley original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-fedramp-p-ato-for-20-services-in-the-aws-us-east-west-regions-and-aws-govcloud-us-regions/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce that 20 additional AWS services have achieved Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Joint Authorization Board (JAB). The following are the 20 AWS services with FedRAMP authorization for the U.S. federal government and organizations with regulated workloads:

  • AWS App Mesh provides application-level networking to help your services communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure.
  • AWS Audit Manager helps you to continuously audit your AWS usage to simplify how risk and compliance are assessed with regulations and industry standards.
  • AWS Chatbot is an interactive agent that helps you monitor, operate, and troubleshoot AWS workloads in your chat channels.
  • Amazon Chime SDK is a collection of client software development kits that use resources in your AWS account to add collaborative audio calling, video calling, and screen share features to your web or mobile applications.
  • AWS Cloud9 is a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that helps you write, run, and debug your code with just a browser.
  • Amazon Detective helps you analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities.
  • EC2 Image Builder simplifies the building, testing, and deployment of virtual machine and container images for use on AWS or on-premises.
  • Amazon FinSpace is a data management and analytics service that is purpose built for the financial services industry (FSI).
  • AWS Firewall Manager is a security management service that allows you to centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and applications in AWS Organizations.
  • Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts.
  • Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service.
  • Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics is a fully managed service that you can use to process and analyze streaming data using Java, SQL, or Scala.
  • Amazon Lex is an AWS service for building conversational interfaces into applications using voice and text.
  • Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is an AWS streaming data service that manages Apache Kafka infrastructure and operations.
  • Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ to help you set up and operate message brokers on AWS.
  • Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, fully managed graph database service that helps you build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets.
  • AWS Network Firewall is a managed service that helps you to deploy essential network protections for your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).
  • Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) is a purpose-built ledger database that provides a complete and cryptographically verifiable history of changes made to your application data.
  • AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) is designed to help you securely share resources across AWS accounts, within your organization or organizational units (OUs) in AWS Organizations, and with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and users for supported resource types.
  • Amazon Timestream is a fast, scalable, and serverless time series database service for AWS IoT Core and operational applications that can help you to store and analyze trillions of events per day up to 1,000 times faster and at as little as 1/10th the cost of relational databases.

These 20 services are now listed on the FedRAMP Marketplace and the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page.

Service authorizations by AWS Region

The following table shows our most recent FedRAMP service authorizations by Region and authorization level:

Service FedRAMP Moderate in the AWS US East/West Region FedRAMP High in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region
AWS App Mesh  
AWS Audit Manager  
AWS Chatbot  
Amazon Chime SDK  
AWS Cloud9  
Amazon Detective  
EC2 Image Builder
Amazon FinSpace  
AWS Firewall Manager
Amazon Forecast  
Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)  
Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics
Amazon Lex  
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
Amazon MQ  
Amazon Neptune
AWS Network Firewall
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB)  
AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM)
Amazon Timestream  

AWS is continually expanding the scope of our compliance programs to help customers use authorized services for sensitive and regulated workloads. AWS now offers 123 AWS services authorized in the AWS US East/West Regions under FedRAMP Moderate Authorization, and 105 services authorized in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions under FedRAMP High Authorization.

To learn what other public sector customers are doing on AWS, see our Government, Education, and Nonprofits Case Studies and Customer Success Stories. Stay tuned for future updates on our Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. Let us know how this post will help your mission by reaching out to your AWS Account Team. Lastly, if you have feedback about this blog post, let us know in the Comments section.

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

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Steve Earley

Steve Earley

Steve leads the Government Audits Team and the commercial Customer Audit Program for AWS. For over 20 years, he has led security organizations and assessed control environments in both public and private sectors as a security executive with multiple organizations. At AWS, he provides direction for AWS services and features seeking adherence to federal compliance requirements while championing for customer-centric innovation.

Whitney Peters

Whitney Peters

Whitney is a part of the U.S. Government Audits Team for AWS. For the past six years, she has guided services internally and externally through various federal compliance frameworks to achieve their Authority to Operate (ATO).

James Mueller

James Mueller

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

AWS announces migration plans for NIST 800-53 Revision 5

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

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

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

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

NIST 800-53 Revision 5

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

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

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

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

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James Mueller

James Mueller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.

Matthew Donkin

Matthew Donkin

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

TLS 1.2 to become the minimum TLS protocol level for all AWS API endpoints

Post Syndicated from Janelle Hopper original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/tls-1-2-required-for-aws-endpoints/

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we continuously innovate to deliver you a cloud computing environment that works to help meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations. To respond to evolving technology and regulatory standards for Transport Layer Security (TLS), we will be updating the TLS configuration for all AWS service API endpoints to a minimum of version TLS 1.2. This update means you will no longer be able to use TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1 with all AWS APIs in all AWS Regions by June 28, 2023. In this post, we will tell you how to check your TLS version, and what to do to prepare.

We have continued AWS support for TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1 to maintain backward compatibility for customers that have older or difficult to update clients, such as embedded devices. Furthermore, we have active mitigations in place that help protect your data for the issues identified in these older versions. Now is the right time to retire TLS 1.0 and 1.1, because increasing numbers of customers have requested this change to help simplify part of their regulatory compliance, and there are fewer and fewer customers using these older versions.

If you are one of the more than 95% of AWS customers who are already using TLS 1.2 or later, you will not be impacted by this change. You are almost certainly already using TLS 1.2 or later if your client software application was built after 2014 using an AWS Software Development Kit (AWS SDK), AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), Java Development Kit (JDK) 8 or later, or another modern development environment. If you are using earlier application versions, or have not updated your development environment since before 2014, you will likely need to update.

If you are one of the customers still using TLS 1.0 or 1.1, then you must update your client software to use TLS 1.2 or later to maintain your ability to connect. It is important to understand that you already have control over the TLS version used when connecting. When connecting to AWS API endpoints, your client software negotiates its preferred TLS version, and AWS uses the highest mutually agreed upon version.

To minimize the availability impact of requiring TLS 1.2, AWS is rolling out the changes on an endpoint-by-endpoint basis over the next year, starting now and ending in June 2023. Before making these potentially breaking changes, we monitor for connections that are still using TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1. If you are one of the AWS customers who may be impacted, we will notify you on your AWS Health Dashboard, and by email. After June 28, 2023, AWS will update our API endpoint configuration to remove TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1, even if you still have connections using these versions.

What should you do to prepare for this update?

To minimize your risk, you can self-identify if you have any connections using TLS 1.0 or 1.1. If you find any connections using TLS 1.0 or 1.1, you should update your client software to use TLS 1.2 or later.

AWS CloudTrail records are especially useful to identify if you are using the outdated TLS versions. You can now search for the TLS version used for your connections by using the recently added tlsDetails field. The tlsDetails structure in each CloudTrail record contains the TLS version, cipher suite, and the fully qualified domain name (FQDN, also known as the URL) field used for the API call. You can then use the data in the records to help you pinpoint your client software that is responsible for the TLS 1.0 or 1.1 call, and update it accordingly. Nearly half of AWS services currently provide the TLS information in the CloudTrail tlsDetails field, and we are continuing to roll this out for the remaining services in the coming months.

We recommend you use one of the following options for running your CloudTrail TLS queries:

  1. AWS CloudTrail Lake: You can follow the steps, and use the sample TLS query, in the blog post Using AWS CloudTrail Lake to identify older TLS connections. There is also a built-in sample CloudTrail TLS query available in the AWS CloudTrail Lake console.
  2. Amazon CloudWatch Log Insights: There are two built-in CloudWatch Log Insights sample CloudTrail TLS queries that you can use, as shown in Figure 1.
     
    Figure 1: Available sample TLS queries for CloudWatch Log Insights

    Figure 1: Available sample TLS queries for CloudWatch Log Insights

  3. Amazon Athena: You can query AWS CloudTrail logs in Amazon Athena, and we will be adding support for querying the TLS values in your CloudTrail logs in the coming months. Look for updates and announcements about this in future AWS Security Blog posts.

In addition to using CloudTrail data, you can also identify the TLS version used by your connections by performing code, network, or log analysis as described in the blog post TLS 1.2 will be required for all AWS FIPS endpoints. Note that while this post refers to the FIPS API endpoints, the information about querying for TLS versions is applicable to all API endpoints.

Will I be notified if I am using TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1?

If we detect that you are using TLS 1.0 or 1.1, you will be notified on your AWS Health Dashboard, and you will receive email notifications. However, you will not receive a notification for connections you make anonymously to AWS shared resources, such as a public Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, because we cannot identify anonymous connections. Furthermore, while we will make every effort to identify and notify every customer, there is a possibility that we may not detect infrequent connections, such as those that occur less than monthly.

How do I update my client to use TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3?

If you are using an AWS Software Developer Kit (AWS SDK) or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), follow the detailed guidance about how to examine your client software code and properly configure the TLS version used in the blog post TLS 1.2 to become the minimum for FIPS endpoints.

We encourage you to be proactive in order to avoid an impact to availability. Also, we recommend that you test configuration changes in a staging environment before you introduce them into production workloads.

What is the most common use of TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1?

The most common use of TLS 1.0 or 1.1 are .NET Framework versions earlier than 4.6.2. If you use the .NET Framework, please confirm you are using version 4.6.2 or later. For information about how to update and configure the .NET Framework to support TLS 1.2, see How to enable TLS 1.2 on clients in the .NET Configuration Manager documentation.

What is Transport Layer Security (TLS)?

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol that secures internet communications. Your client software can be set to use TLS version 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, or 1.3, or a subset of these, when connecting to service endpoints. You should ensure that your client software supports TLS 1.2 or later.

Is there more assistance available to help verify or update my client software?

If you have any questions or issues, you can start a new thread on the AWS re:Post community, or you can contact AWS Support or your Technical Account Manager (TAM).

Additionally, you can use AWS IQ to find, securely collaborate with, and pay AWS certified third-party experts for on-demand assistance to update your TLS client components. To find out how to submit a request, get responses from experts, and choose the expert with the right skills and experience, see the AWS IQ page. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and select Get Started with AWS IQ to start a request.

What if I can’t update my client software?

If you are unable to update to use TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3, contact AWS Support or your Technical Account Manager (TAM) so that we can work with you to identify the best solution.

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

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Author

Janelle Hopper

Janelle is a Senior Technical Program Manager in AWS Security with over 25 years of experience in the IT security field. She works with AWS services, infrastructure, and administrative teams to identify and drive innovative solutions that improve the AWS security posture.

Author

Daniel Salzedo

Daniel is a Senior Specialist Technical Account Manager – Security. He has over 25 years of professional experience in IT in industries as diverse as video game development, manufacturing, banking, and used car sales. He loves working with our wonderful AWS customers to help them solve their complex security challenges at scale.

Author

Ben Sherman

Ben is a Software Development Engineer in AWS Security, where he focuses on automation to support AWS compliance obligations. He enjoys experimenting with computing and web services both at work and in his free time.

AWS Wickr achieves FedRAMP Moderate authorization

Post Syndicated from Anne Grahn original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-wickr-achieves-fedramp-moderate-authorization/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is excited to announce that AWS Wickr has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorization at the Moderate impact level from the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB).

FedRAMP is a U.S. government–wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud services by providing a standardized approach to security and risk assessment for cloud technologies and federal agencies.

Customers find security and control in Wickr

AWS Wickr is an end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration service with features designed to help keep your communications secure, private, and compliant. Wickr protects one-to-one and group messaging, voice and video calling, file sharing, screen sharing, and location sharing with 256-bit encryption, and provides data retention capabilities.

Administrative controls allow your AWS Wickr administrators to add, remove, and invite users, and organize them into security groups to manage messaging, calling, security, and federation settings. You can reset passwords and delete profiles remotely, helping you reduce the risk of data exposure stemming from a lost or stolen device.

You can log internal and external communications—including conversations with guest users, contractors, and other partner networks—in a private data store that you manage. This allows you to retain messages and files that are sent to and from your organization, to help meet requirements such as those that fall under the Federal Records Act (FRA) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The FedRAMP milestone

In obtaining a FedRAMP Moderate authorization, AWS Wickr has been measured against a set of security controls, procedures, and policies established by the U.S. Federal Government, based on National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards.

“For many federal agencies and organizations, having the ability to securely communicate and share information—whether in an office or out in the field—is key to helping achieve their critical missions. AWS Wickr helps our government customers collaborate securely through messaging, calling, file and screen sharing with end-to-end encryption. The FedRAMP Moderate authorization for Wickr demonstrates our commitment to delivering solutions that give government customers the control and confidence they need to support their sensitive and regulated workloads.” – Christian Hoff, Director, US Federal Civilian & Health at AWS

FedRAMP on AWS

AWS is continually expanding the scope of our compliance programs to help you use authorized services for sensitive and regulated workloads. We now offer148 services authorized in the AWS US East/West Regions under FedRAMP Moderate authorization, and 128 services authorized in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions under FedRAMP High authorization.

The FedRAMP Moderate authorization of AWS Wickr further validates our commitment at AWS to public-sector customers. With AWS Wickr, you can combine the security of end-to-end encryption with the administrative flexibility you need to secure mission-critical communications, and keep up with recordkeeping requirements. AWS Wickr is available under FedRAMP Moderate in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) Region.

For up-to-date information, see our AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. To learn more about AWS Wickr, visit the AWS Wickr product page, or email [email protected].

If you have feedback about this blog post, let us know in the Comments section below.

Anne Grahn

Anne Grahn

Anne is a Senior Worldwide Security GTM Specialist at AWS, based in Chicago. She has more than a decade of experience in the security industry, and focuses on effectively communicating cybersecurity risk. She maintains a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.

Randy Brumfield

Randy Brumfield

Randy leads technology business for new initiatives and the Cloud Support Engineering team for AWS Wickr. Prior to joining AWS, Randy spent close to two and a half decades in Silicon Valley across several start-ups, networking companies, and system integrators in various corporate development, product management, and operations roles. Randy currently resides in San Jose, California.

AWS achieves FedRAMP P-ATO for 15 services in the AWS US East/West and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

Post Syndicated from Alexis Robinson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-fedramp-p-ato-for-15-services-in-the-aws-us-east-west-and-aws-govcloud-us-regions/

AWS is pleased to announce that 15 additional AWS services have achieved Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Joint Authorization Board (JAB).

AWS is continually expanding the scope of our compliance programs to help customers use authorized services for sensitive and regulated workloads. AWS now offers 111 AWS services authorized in the AWS US East/West Regions under FedRAMP Moderate Authorization, and 91 services authorized in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions under FedRAMP High Authorization.

Figure 1. Newly authorized services list

Figure 1. Newly authorized services list

Descriptions of AWS Services now in FedRAMP P-ATO

These additional AWS services now provide the following capabilities for the U.S. federal government and customers with regulated workloads:

  • Amazon Detective simplifies analyzing, investigating, and quickly identifying the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities. Amazon Detective automatically collects log data from your AWS resources, and uses machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to build a linked set of data enabling you to easily conduct faster and more efficient security investigations.
  • Amazon FSx for Lustre provides fully managed shared storage with the scalability and performance of the popular Lustre file system.
  • Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed shared storage built on Windows Server, and delivers a wide range of data access, data management, and administrative capabilities.
  • Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning (ML).
  • Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra-compatible database service.
  • Amazon Lex is an AWS service for building conversational interfaces into applications using voice and text.
  • Amazon Macie is a fully managed data security and data privacy service that uses machine learning and pattern matching to discover and protect your sensitive data in AWS.
  • Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ that simplifies setting up and operating message brokers on AWS.
  • AWS CloudHSM is a cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) that lets you generate and use your own encryption keys on the AWS Cloud.
  • AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service. With Cloud Map, you can define custom names for your application resources, and CloudMap maintains the updated location of these dynamically changing resources.
  • AWS Glue DataBrew is a new visual data preparation tool that lets data analysts and data scientists quickly clean and normalize data to prepare it for analytics and machine learning.
  • AWS Outposts (hardware excluded) is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to customer premises. By providing local access to AWS managed infrastructure, AWS Outposts enables you to build and run applications on premises using the same programming interfaces used in AWS Regions, while using local compute and storage resources for lower latency and local data processing needs.
  • AWS Resource Groups grants you the ability to organize your AWS resources, managing and automating tasks for large numbers of resources at the same time.
  • AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. After an initial assessment, a Snowmobile will be transported to your data center and AWS personnel will configure it so it can be accessed as a network storage target. After you load your data, the Snowmobile is driven back to an AWS regional data center, where AWS imports the data into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
  • AWS Transfer Family securely scales your recurring business-to-business file transfers to Amazon S3 and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) using SFTP, FTPS, and FTP protocols.

The following services are now listed on the FedRAMP Marketplace and the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page.

Service authorizations by Region

Service FedRAMP Moderate in AWS US East/West FedRAMP High in AWS GovCloud (US)
Amazon Detective
Amazon FSx for Lustre
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
Amazon Kendra
Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)
Amazon Lex
Amazon Macie
Amazon MQ
AWS CloudHSM
AWS Cloud Map
AWS Glue DataBrew
AWS Outposts
AWS Resource Groups
AWS Snowmobile
AWS Transfer Family

To learn what other public sector customers are doing on AWS, see our Government, Education, and Nonprofits Case Studies and Customer Success Stories. Stay tuned for future updates on our Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. Let us know how this post will help your mission by reaching out to your AWS Account Team. Lastly, if you have feedback about this blog post, let us know in the Comments section.

Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.

Author

Alexis Robinson

Alexis is the Head of the U.S. Government Security and Compliance Program for AWS. For over 10 years, she has served federal government clients advising on security best practices and conducting cyber and financial assessments. She currently supports the security of the AWS internal environment including cloud services applicable to AWS East/West and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

AWS achieves FedRAMP P-ATO for 18 additional services in the AWS US East/West and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions

Post Syndicated from Alexis Robinson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-fedramp-p-ato-for-18-additional-services-in-the-aws-us-east-west-and-aws-govcloud-us-regions/

We’re pleased to announce that 18 additional AWS services have achieved Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Joint Authorization Board (JAB). The following are the 18 additional services with FedRAMP authorization for the US federal government, and organizations with regulated workloads:

  • Amazon Cognito lets you add user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to their web and mobile apps quickly and easily.
  • Amazon Comprehend Medical is a HIPAA-eligible natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to extract health data from medical text–no machine learning experience is required.
  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed container service that gives you the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications in the AWS cloud or on-premises.
  • Amazon Pinpoint is a flexible and scalable outbound and inbound marketing communications service.
  • Amazon QuickSight is a scalable, serverless, embeddable, machine learning-powered business intelligence (BI) service built for the cloud that lets you easily create and publish interactive BI dashboards that include Machine Learning-powered insights.
  • Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable email service that enables developers to send mail from within any application.
  • Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and other data from scanned documents that goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract data from forms and tables.
  • AWS Backup enables you to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services.
  • AWS CloudHSM is a cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) that enables you to easily generate and use your own encryption keys on the AWS Cloud.
  • AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
  • AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, process data, and scale your operations without having to worry about building or managing your own ground station infrastructure.
  • AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise. AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate provides a fully managed Chef Automate server and suite of automation tools that give you workflow automation for continuous deployment, automated testing for compliance and security, and a user interface that gives you visibility into your nodes and node statuses. AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise is a fully managed configuration management service that hosts Puppet Enterprise, a set of automation tools from Puppet for infrastructure and application management.
  • AWS Personal Health Dashboard provides alerts and guidance for AWS events that might affect your environment, and provides proactive and transparent notifications about your specific AWS environment.
  • AWS Resource Groups grants you the ability to organize your AWS resources, and manage and automate tasks on large numbers of resources at one time.
  • AWS Security Hub is a cloud security posture management service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts, and enables automated remediation.
  • AWS Storage Gateway is a set of hybrid cloud storage services that gives you on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage.
  • AWS Systems Manager provides a unified user interface so you can track and resolve operational issues across your AWS applications and resources from a central place.
  • AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture.

The following services are now listed on the FedRAMP Marketplace and the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page.

Service authorizations by Region

Service FedRAMP Moderate in AWS US East/West FedRAMP High in AWS GovCloud (US)
Amazon Cognito  
Amazon Comprehend Medical
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)  
Amazon Pinpoint  
Amazon QuickSight  
Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)  
Amazon Textract
AWS Backup
AWS CloudHSM  
AWS CodePipeline
AWS Ground Station  

AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and

AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise

 
AWS Personal Health Dashboard
AWS Resource Groups  
AWS Security Hub  
AWS Storage Gateway
AWS Systems Manager
AWS X-Ray

 
AWS is continually expanding the scope of our compliance programs to help customers use authorized services for sensitive and regulated workloads. Today, AWS offers 100 AWS services authorized in the AWS US East/West Regions under FedRAMP Moderate Authorization, and 90 services authorized in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions under FedRAMP High Authorization.

To learn what other public sector customers are doing on AWS, see our Customer Success Stories page. For up-to-date information when new services are added, see our AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page.

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

Want more AWS Security how-to content, news, and feature announcements? Follow us on Twitter.

Author

Alexis Robinson

Alexis is the Head of the U.S. Government Security & Compliance Program for AWS. For over 10 years, she has served federal government clients advising on security best practices and conducting cyber and financial assessments. She currently supports the security of the AWS internal environment including cloud services applicable to AWS East/West and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

17 additional AWS services authorized for DoD workloads in the AWS GovCloud Regions

Post Syndicated from Tyler Harding original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/17-additional-aws-services-authorized-for-dod-workloads-in-the-aws-govcloud-regions/

I’m pleased to announce that the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has authorized 17 additional Amazon Web Services (AWS) services and features in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, bringing the total to 105 services and major features that are authorized for use by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). AWS now offers additional services to DoD mission owners in these categories: business applications; computing; containers; cost management; developer tools; management and governance; media services; security, identity, and compliance; and storage.

Why does authorization matter?

DISA authorization of 17 new cloud services enables mission owners to build secure innovative solutions to include systems that process unclassified national security data (for example, Impact Level 5). DISA’s authorization demonstrates that AWS effectively implemented more than 421 security controls by using applicable criteria from NIST SP 800-53 Revision 4, the US General Services Administration’s FedRAMP High baseline, and the DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide.

Recently authorized AWS services at DoD Impact Levels (IL) 4 and 5 include the following:

Business Applications

Compute

Containers

Cost Management

  • AWS Budgets – Set custom budgets to track your cost and usage, from the simplest to the most complex use cases
  • AWS Cost Explorer – An interface that lets you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time
  • AWS Cost & Usage Report – Itemize usage at the account or organization level by product code, usage type, and operation

Developer Tools

  • AWS CodePipeline – Automate continuous delivery pipelines for fast and reliable updates
  • AWS X-Ray – Analyze and debug production and distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture

Management & Governance

Media Services

  • Amazon Textract – Extract printed text, handwriting, and data from virtually any document

Security, Identity & Compliance

  • Amazon Cognito – Secure user sign-up, sign-in, and access control
  • AWS Security Hub – Centrally view and manage security alerts and automate security checks

Storage

  • AWS Backup – Centrally manage and automate backups across AWS services

Figure 1 shows the IL 4 and IL 5 AWS services that are now authorized for DoD workloads, broken out into functional categories.
 

Figure 1: The AWS services newly authorized by DISA

Figure 1: The AWS services newly authorized by DISA

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

Want more AWS Security how-to content, news, and feature announcements? Follow us on Twitter.

Author

Tyler Harding

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

TLS 1.2 will be required for all AWS FIPS endpoints beginning March 31, 2021

Post Syndicated from Janelle Hopper original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/tls-1-2-required-for-aws-fips-endpoints/

To help you meet your compliance needs, we’re updating all AWS Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) endpoints to a minimum of Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2. We have already updated over 40 services to require TLS 1.2, removing support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1. Beginning March 31, 2021, if your client application cannot support TLS 1.2, it will result in connection failures. In order to avoid an interruption in service, we encourage you to act now to ensure that you connect to AWS FIPS endpoints at TLS version 1.2. This change does not affect non-FIPS AWS endpoints.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to notify impacted customers directly via their Personal Health Dashboard and email. However, if you’re connecting anonymously to AWS shared resources, such as through a public Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, then you would not have received a notification, as we cannot identify anonymous connections.

Why are you removing TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 support from FIPS endpoints?

At AWS, we’re continually expanding the scope of our compliance programs to meet the needs of customers who want to use our services for sensitive and regulated workloads. Compliance programs, including FedRAMP, require a minimum level of TLS 1.2. To help you meet compliance requirements, we’re updating all AWS FIPS endpoints to a minimum of TLS version 1.2 across all AWS Regions. Following this update, you will not be able to use TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 for connections to FIPS endpoints.

How can I detect if I am using TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1?

To detect the use of TLS 1.0 or 1.1, we recommend that you perform code, network, or log analysis. If you are using an AWS Software Developer Kit (AWS SDK) or Command Line Interface (CLI), we have provided hyperlinks to detailed guidance in our previous TLS blog post about how to examine your client application code and properly configure the TLS version used.

When the application source code is unavailable, you can use a network tool, such as TCPDump (Linux) or Wireshark (Linux or Windows), to analyze your network traffic to find the TLS versions you’re using when connecting to AWS endpoints. For a detailed example of using these tools, see the example, below.

If you’re using Amazon S3, you can also use your access logs to view the TLS connection information for these services and identify client connections that are not at TLS 1.2.

What is the most common use of TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1?

The most common client applications that use TLS 1.0 or 1.1 are Microsoft .NET Framework versions earlier than 4.6.2. If you use the .NET Framework, please confirm you are using version 4.6.2 or later. For information on how to update and configure .NET Framework to support TLS 1.2, see How to enable TLS 1.2 on clients.

How do I know if I am using an AWS FIPS endpoint?

All AWS services offer TLS 1.2 encrypted endpoints that you can use for all API calls. Some AWS services also offer FIPS 140-2 endpoints for customers who need to use FIPS-validated cryptographic libraries to connect to AWS services. You can check our list of all AWS FIPS endpoints and compare the list to your application code, configuration repositories, DNS logs, or other network logs.

EXAMPLE: TLS version detection using a packet capture

To capture the packets, multiple online sources, such as this article, provide guidance for setting up TCPDump on a Linux operating system. On a Windows operating system, the Wireshark tool provides packet analysis capabilities and can be used to analyze packets captured with TCPDump or it can also directly capture packets.

In this example, we assume there is a client application with the local IP address 10.25.35.243 that is making API calls to the CloudWatch FIPS API endpoint in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. To analyze the traffic, first we look up the endpoint URL in the AWS FIPS endpoint list. In our example, the endpoint URL is monitoring.us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com. Then we use NSLookup to find the IP addresses used by this FIPS endpoint.

Figure 1: Use NSLookup to find the IP addresses used by this FIPS endpoint

Figure 1: Use NSLookup to find the IP addresses used by this FIPS endpoint

Wireshark is then used to open the captured packets, and filter to just the packets with the relevant IP address. This can be done automatically by selecting one of the packets in the upper section, and then right-clicking to use the Conversation filter/IPv4 option.

After the results are filtered to only the relevant IP addresses, the next step is to find the packet whose description in the Info column is Client Hello. In the lower packet details area, expand the Transport Layer Security section to find the version, which in this example is set to TLS 1.0 (0x0301). This indicates that the client only supports TLS 1.0 and must be modified to support a TLS 1.2 connection.

Figure 2: After the conversation filter has been applied, select the Client Hello packet in the top pane. Expand the Transport Layer Security section in the lower pane to view the packet details and the TLS version.

Figure 2: After the conversation filter has been applied, select the Client Hello packet in the top pane. Expand the Transport Layer Security section in the lower pane to view the packet details and the TLS version.

Figure 3 shows what it looks like after the client has been updated to support TLS 1.2. This second packet capture confirms we are sending TLS 1.2 (0x0303) in the Client Hello packet.

Figure 3: The client TLS has been updated to support TLS 1.2

Figure 3: The client TLS has been updated to support TLS 1.2

Is there more assistance available?

If you have any questions or issues, you can start a new thread on one of the AWS forums, or contact AWS Support or your technical account manager (TAM). The AWS support tiers cover development and production issues for AWS products and services, along with other key stack components. AWS Support doesn’t include code development for client applications.

Additionally, you can use AWS IQ to find, securely collaborate with, and pay AWS-certified third-party experts for on-demand assistance to update your TLS client components. Visit the AWS IQ page for information about how to submit a request, get responses from experts, and choose the expert with the right skills and experience. Log in to your console and select Get Started with AWS IQ to start a request.

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

Want more AWS Security how-to content, news, and feature announcements? Follow us on Twitter.

Author

Janelle Hopper

Janelle is a Senior Technical Program Manager in AWS Security with over 15 years of experience in the IT security field. She works with AWS services, infrastructure, and administrative teams to identify and drive innovative solutions that improve AWS’ security posture.

Author

Daniel Salzedo

Daniel is a Senior Specialist Technical Account Manager – Security. He has over 25 years of professional experience in IT in industries as diverse as video game development, manufacturing, banking and used car sales. He loves working with our wonderful AWS customers to help them solve their complex security challenges at scale.

Over 40 services require TLS 1.2 minimum for AWS FIPS endpoints

Post Syndicated from Janelle Hopper original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/over-40-services-require-tls-1-2-minimum-for-aws-fips-endpoints/

In a March 2020 blog post, we told you about work Amazon Web Services (AWS) was undertaking to update all of our AWS Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) endpoints to a minimum of Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 across all AWS Regions. Today, we’re happy to announce that over 40 services have been updated and now require TLS 1.2:

These services no longer support using TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1 on their FIPS endpoints. To help you meet your compliance needs, we are updating all AWS FIPS endpoints to a minimum of TLS 1.2 across all Regions. We will continue to update our services to support only TLS 1.2 or later on AWS FIPS endpoints, which you can check on the AWS FIPS webpage. This change doesn’t affect non-FIPS AWS endpoints.

When you make a connection from your client application to an AWS service endpoint, the client provides its TLS minimum and TLS maximum versions. The AWS service endpoint will always select the maximum version offered.

What is TLS?

TLS is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide secure communication across a computer network. API calls to AWS services are secured using TLS.

What is FIPS 140-2?

The FIPS 140-2 is a US and Canadian government standard that specifies the security requirements for cryptographic modules that protect sensitive information.

What are AWS FIPS endpoints?

All AWS services offer TLS 1.2 encrypted endpoints that can be used for all API calls. Some AWS services also offer FIPS 140-2 endpoints for customers who need to use FIPS validated cryptographic libraries to connect to AWS services.

Why are we upgrading to TLS 1.2?

Our upgrade to TLS 1.2 across all Regions reflects our ongoing commitment to help customers meet their compliance needs.

Is there more assistance available to help verify or update client applications?

If you’re using an AWS software development kit (AWS SDK), you can find information about how to properly configure the minimum and maximum TLS versions for your clients in the following AWS SDK topics:

You can also visit Tools to Build on AWS and browse by programming language to find the relevant SDK. AWS Support tiers cover development and production issues for AWS products and services, along with other key stack components. AWS Support doesn’t include code development for client applications.

If you have any questions or issues, you can start a new thread on one of the AWS forums, or contact AWS Support or your technical account manager (TAM).

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

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Author

Janelle Hopper

Janelle Hopper is a Senior Technical Program Manager in AWS Security with over 15 years of experience in the IT security field. She works with AWS services, infrastructure, and administrative teams to identify and drive innovative solutions that improve AWS’ security posture.

Author

Marta Taggart

Marta is a Seattle-native and Senior Program Manager in AWS Security, where she focuses on privacy, content development, and educational programs. Her interest in education stems from two years she spent in the education sector while serving in the Peace Corps in Romania. In her free time, she’s on a global hunt for the perfect cup of coffee.

AWS achieves FedRAMP P-ATO for 5 services in AWS US East/West and GovCloud (US) Regions

Post Syndicated from Amendaze Thomas original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-fedramp-p-ato-for-5-services-in-aws-us-east-west-and-govcloud-us-regions/

We’re pleased to announce that five additional AWS services have achieved provisional authorization (P-ATO) by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Joint Authorization Board (JAB). These services provide the following capabilities for the federal government and customers with regulated workloads:

  • Enable your organization’s developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs with AWS Batch.
  • Aggregate, organize, and prioritize your security alerts or findings from multiple AWS services using AWS Security Hub.
  • Provision, manage, and deploy public and private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates using AWS Certificate Manager.
  • Enable customers to set up and govern a new, secure, multi-account AWS environment using AWS Control Tower.
  • Provide a fully managed Kubernetes service with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.

The following services are now listed on the FedRAMP Marketplace and the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page.

AWS US East/West Regions (FedRAMP Moderate Authorization)

AWS GovCloud (US) Regions (FedRAMP High Authorization)

AWS is continually expanding the scope of our compliance programs to help enable your organization to use our services for sensitive and regulated workloads. Today, AWS offers 90 AWS services authorized in the AWS US East/West Regions under FedRAMP Moderate Authorization, and 76 services authorized in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions under FedRAMP High Authorization.

To learn what other public sector customers are doing on AWS, see our Government, Education, and Nonprofits Case Studies and Customer Success Stories. Stay tuned for future updates on our Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. If you have feedback about this blog post, let us know in the Comments section below.

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Amendaze Thomas

Amendaze is the manager of the AWS Government Assessments and Authorization Program (GAAP). He has 15 years of experience providing advisory services to clients in the federal government, and over 13 years of experience supporting CISO teams with risk management framework (RMF) activities.