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Five facts about how the CLOUD Act actually works

Post Syndicated from Bob Kimball original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/five-facts-about-how-the-cloud-act-actually-works/

French | German

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), customer privacy and security are our top priority. We provide our customers with industry-leading privacy and security when they use the AWS Cloud anywhere in the world. In recent months, we’ve noticed an increase in inquiries about how we manage government requests for data. While many of the questions center around a 2018 U.S. law known as the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act), the CLOUD Act in fact did not give the U.S. government any new authority to compel data from providers and provides critical legal guardrails to protect content.

To put this whole issue in context—there have been no data requests to AWS that resulted in disclosure to the U.S. government of enterprise or government content data stored outside the U.S. since we started reporting the statistic in 2020. Our commitment to protecting customer data is underpinned by several layers of legal, technical, and operational protection. For example, AWS has designed its core products and services to prevent anyone but the customer and those authorized by the customer from accessing the customer’s content. And in these instances, any government that wants access to the customer’s content would have to seek that data directly from the customer. Additionally, U.S. law itself provides numerous statutory protections that help lower the risk that AWS could be required to disclose enterprise or government content data, and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has implemented additional operational protections over the past eight years.

With that in mind, we want to address some common misconceptions about the CLOUD Act and provide some clarity about how this law impacts—or doesn’t impact—AWS customers worldwide. We’re also expanding our FAQs on the CLOUD Act to help our customers and partners better navigate this topic.

Fact 1: The CLOUD Act does not give the U.S. government unfettered or automatic access to data stored in the cloud

The CLOUD Act was passed to address challenges law enforcement faced in obtaining data stored abroad in cross-border investigations involving serious crimes, ranging from terrorism and violent crime to sexual exploitation of children and cybercrime. The CLOUD Act primarily enabled the U.S. to enter into reciprocal executive agreements with trusted foreign partners to obtain access to electronic evidence for investigations of serious crimes, wherever the evidence happens to be located, by lifting blocking statutes under U.S. law. Many governments rely on domestic laws to require providers within their jurisdiction to disclose electronic data under the companies’ control, regardless of where the data is stored. Similarly, The CLOUD Act clarified that U.S. law enforcement can use existing authorities such as a court-approved search warrant to compel data within a provider’s control, regardless of where the data is stored; the executive agreements enable the effectiveness of these reciprocal laws, supported by strong procedural and substantive safeguards.

Access to data under U.S. law is far from unfettered or automatic, and law enforcement must meet strict legal standards. Under U.S. law, providers are actually prohibited from disclosing data to the U.S. government absent a legal exception. To compel a provider to disclose content data, law enforcement must convince an independent federal judge that probable cause exists related to a particular crime, and that evidence of the crime will be found in the place to be searched (that is, a specific electronic account such as an email account). This legal standard must be established through specific and trustworthy facts. Each search warrant must pass this stringent probable cause determination using credible facts, particularity, and legality, must receive approval from an independent judge, and must meet requirements regarding scope and jurisdiction. In May 2023, the DOJ also issued a policy that prosecutors seeking evidence known to be located abroad must obtain approval from Department’s Office of International Affairs (OIA) prior to obtaining an order for such evidence. The DOJ policy on evidence abroad notes that every nation enacts laws to protect its sovereignty; OIA works to address these issues and assist prosecutors in selecting an appropriate mechanism to secure evidence.

Fact 2: AWS has not disclosed any enterprise or government customer content data under the CLOUD Act since we started tracking the statistic

AWS has rigorous procedures in place for handling law enforcement requests from any country to validate legitimacy and verify that they comply with applicable law. AWS recognizes the legitimate needs of law enforcement agencies in investigating criminal and terrorist activity, but they must observe legal safeguards for conducting such investigations. We do not disclose customer data in response to any government request unless we are obligated to do so by a legally valid and binding order. We have publicly committed to this in our legal terms. Additionally, we will challenge government requests that conflict with the law, are overbroad, or are otherwise inappropriate (for example, if such a request would violate individuals’ fundamental rights). When we receive such requests for enterprise customer content, we make every reasonable effort to redirect law enforcement to the customer and notify the customer when legally permitted. If we are required to disclose customer content, we notify customers before disclosure to provide them an opportunity to seek protection from disclosure unless prohibited by law. If after exhausting these steps, AWS remains compelled to disclose customer data, and we have the technical ability to do so (which, as described above, in many instances we do not), we disclose only the minimum necessary to satisfy the legal process.

Consistent with our policy to redirect law enforcement to customers, the DOJ’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section has also issued guidance advising prosecutors to generally seek data directly from an enterprise, such as a company that stores data with a cloud provider, rather than from the provider.

A clear measure of the effectiveness of our measures and the rigorous legal requirements embodied in law is the fact that since we began reporting this statistic in 2020, AWS has not disclosed any enterprise or government customer content data stored outside the U.S. to the U.S. government. This record reflects the technical safeguards AWS offers, the robust legal protections within U.S. law, policies implemented by the DOJ, and the nature of law enforcement investigations which primarily focus on collecting electronic evidence from consumer accounts.

Fact 3: The CLOUD Act does not only apply to U.S.-headquartered companies—it applies to all providers that do business in the United States

The CLOUD Act applies to all electronic communication service or remote computing service providers that operate or have a legal presence in the U.S.—regardless of where their headquarters are located. For example, European-headquartered cloud providers with U.S. operations are also subject to the Act’s requirements. OVHcloud, a French headquartered cloud service provider that operates in the U.S., notes in its CLOUD Act FAQ page that “OVHcloud will comply with lawful requests from public authorities. Under the CLOUD Act, that could include data stored outside of the United States.” Similarly, other cloud providers headquartered in the E.U. and elsewhere, also have operations in the U.S.

Fact 4: The principles in the CLOUD Act are consistent with international law and the laws of other countries

The CLOUD Act did not introduce a new legal concept regarding the scope of electronic data that must be disclosed as part of legitimate criminal investigations. Many countries require disclosure of customer data wherever it’s stored in response to legal process involving serious crimes. The United Kingdom’s (U.K.’s) Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Act, for instance, allows U.K. law enforcement agencies to obtain stored electronic data located outside of the U.K. in connection to a criminal investigation. According to a 2024 filing by the U.S. DOJ, the laws of several European Union member states, including Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, and Spain, have similar requirements. In fact, since 2023, most law enforcement requests that AWS receives come from authorities outside of the United States.

This concept is also enshrined within the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, which was the first international treaty aimed at improving cooperation in investigations of cybercrimes. Additionally, the EU’s e-Evidence Regulation, 2023/1543, adopted in August 2023, authorizes Member States to “order a service provider…to produce or preserve electronic evidence regardless of the location of data.” The GDPR also allows for transfers of personal data in response to compelled disclosure requests from third countries, provided that the relevant party can cite an appropriate legal basis and transfer mechanism or derogation (see EDPB’s recent Guidelines 02/2024 on Article 48).

AWS is advocating for governments to conclude reciprocal executive agreements under the CLOUD Act, including between the U.S. and the European Union, and the U.S. and Canada. We believe these agreements are important to definitively resolve potential conflicts of law and enable effective investigation of serious crimes to advance public safety, while recognizing the strong substantive and procedural safeguards that already exist under U.S. law.

Fact 5: The CLOUD Act does not limit the technical measures and operational controls AWS offers to customers to prevent unauthorized access to customer data

We can only respond to legal requests for data where we have the technical ability to do so. AWS has a number of products and services designed to make sure that no one—not even AWS operators—can access customer content. AWS customers also have a range of additional technical measures and operational controls to prevent access to data. For example, many of the AWS core systems and services are designed with zero operator access, meaning the services don’t have any technical means for AWS operators to access customer data in response to a legal request.

The AWS Nitro System, which is the foundation of AWS computing services, uses specialized hardware and software to protect data from outside access during processing on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). By providing a strong physical and logical security boundary, Nitro is designed so that no unauthorized person—not even AWS operators—can access customer workloads on EC2. The design of the Nitro System has been validated by the NCC Group, an independent cybersecurity firm. The controls that help prevent operator access are so fundamental to the Nitro System that we’ve added them in our AWS Service Terms to provide an additional contractual assurance to all of our customers.

We also give customers features and controls to encrypt data, whether in transit, at rest, or in memory. All AWS services already support encryption, with most also supporting encryption with customer managed keys that are inaccessible to AWS. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is the first highly scalable, cloud-native key management system with FIPS 140-3 Security Level 3 certification. In plain English, this means AWS offers encryption that is super strong and where our customers control who gets a key.

Continuing our customer obsession

At AWS, our customer-first approach drives everything we do—from how we design our services to how we protect your data. We understand that your trust is earned through transparency, strong technical controls, and unwavering advocacy for your interests. That’s why we’ve been clear about how we handle government requests for data, including the impact of the CLOUD Act, and the multiple layers of protection—legal, operational, and technical—to safeguard your data.

We encourage you to learn more about this important topic by reviewing our expanded CLOUD Act FAQ. We will continue to innovate on your behalf, building new features and services that put you in control of your data, and maintaining our commitment to the highest standards of privacy and security.


French version

CLOUD Act : cinq points clés pour comprendre son fonctionnement réel

Chez Amazon Web Services (AWS), la confidentialité et la sécurité des clients constituent notre priorité absolue. Nous mettons à leur disposition une confidentialité et une sécurité à la pointe de l’industrie lorsqu’ils utilisent le Cloud AWS, partout dans le monde. Ces derniers mois, nous avons constaté une augmentation des questions concernant notre gestion des demandes d’accès aux données émanant d’autorités gouvernementales. Si de nombreuses interrogations portent sur une loi américaine de 2018 connue sous le nom de Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act), cette loi n’a en réalité octroyé aucune nouvelle prérogative au gouvernement américain pour contraindre les fournisseurs à divulguer des données. Elle prévoit des garde-fous juridiques essentiels pour protéger les données des utilisateurs.

Replaçons cette question en perspective : depuis que nous avons commencé à publier des rapports sur les demandes d’informations en 2020, aucune demande n’a abouti à la divulgation auprès du gouvernement américain, de données d’entreprises ou de gouvernements stockées hors des États-Unis. Notre engagement à protéger les données de nos clients repose sur plusieurs niveaux de protection juridique, technique et opérationnelle. A titre d’exemple, les principaux produits et services d’AWS ont été conçus by design de manière à empêcher quiconque, hormis le client et les personnes autorisées par celui-ci, d’accéder à ses données. Ainsi, toute autorité gouvernementale souhaitant accéder aux données d’un client doit en faire la demande directement auprès de celui-ci. En outre, la législation américaine prévoit elle-même de nombreuses protections statutaires qui limitent la possibilité qu’AWS soit contrainte de divulguer des données d’entreprises ou de gouvernements. Le Département de la Justice américain (DOJ) a mis en place des mesures de protections supplémentaires au cours des huit dernières années d’un point de vue opérationnel.

Dans ce contexte, nous souhaitons revenir sur certaines idées reçues courantes à propos du CLOUD Act et apporter des éclaircissements sur l’impact – ou l’absence d’impact – de cette loi sur les clients d’AWS dans le monde entier. Afin d’aider nos clients et partenaires à mieux appréhender ce sujet, nous avons également complété notre FAQ sur le CLOUD Act.

Fait n°1 : Le CLOUD Act n’accorde pas au gouvernement américain un accès illimité ou automatique aux données stockées dans le cloud

Le CLOUD Act a été adopté pour répondre aux défis rencontrés par les autorités judiciaires dans l’obtention des données stockées à l’étranger dans le cadre d’enquêtes transfrontalières sur des crimes graves, allant du terrorisme et des crimes violents à l’exploitation sexuelle d’enfants et à la cybercriminalité. Le CLOUD Act a principalement permis aux États-Unis de conclure des accords exécutifs réciproques avec des partenaires étrangers de confiance. Ces accords visent à faciliter l’accès aux preuves électroniques dans le cadre d’enquêtes sur des crimes graves, indépendamment de la localisation de ces preuves. Pour ce faire, le CLOUD Act lève certaines restrictions prévues par la législation américaine.

De nombreux gouvernements s’appuient sur leurs lois nationales pour exiger des fournisseurs assujettis à ces lois qu’ils divulguent des données électroniques sous leur contrôle, indépendamment du lieu de stockage de ces données. De même, le CLOUD Act a clarifié que les autorités judiciaires américaines pouvaient s’appuyer sur les dispositifs légaux existants, tel qu’un mandat de perquisition autorisé par un tribunal, pour exiger d’un fournisseur la divulgation de données sous son contrôle, indépendamment de leur localisation. Les accords exécutifs bilatéraux permettent la mise en œuvre effective de ces accords de réciprocité, encadrée par des garanties procédurales et juridiques rigoureuses.

L’accès à des données en vertu de la loi américaine est loin d’être illimité ou automatique, et les autorités judiciaires doivent respecter des conditions juridiques strictes. En vertu de la loi américaine, il est de fait interdit aux fournisseurs de divulguer des données au gouvernement américain, sauf exception spécifique. Pour contraindre un fournisseur à la divulgation de données, les autorités judiciaires doivent démontrer devant un juge fédéral indépendant qu’il existe des indices graves et concordants relatifs à un crime et qu’il est probable que des éléments de preuve de ce crime se trouvent dans le périmètre visé par la perquisition (par exemple, un compte électronique spécifique tel qu’une messagerie). La mise en œuvre de cette exception doit s’appuyer sur des éléments factuels précis et vérifiables.

Chaque mandat de perquisition est soumis à cette évaluation stricte de la présence d’indices graves et concordants, qui doit reposer sur des faits crédibles, respecter les critères de spécificité et de légalité, être autorisé par un juge indépendant et satisfaire aux conditions de compétence matérielle et juridictionnelle. En mai 2023, le DOJ a par ailleurs publié des directives imposant aux procureurs qui recherchent des preuves localisées à l’étranger d’obtenir préalablement l’autorisation du Bureau des Affaires Internationales (OIA) avant d’obtenir toute ordonnance. La politique du DOJ concernant les preuves situées à l’étranger reconnaît que chaque État adopte des lois pour protéger sa souveraineté. L’OIA intervient pour traiter ces questions et accompagner les procureurs dans l’identification des mécanismes appropriés d’obtention des preuves.

Fait n°2 : Depuis la mise en place du suivi statistique, AWS n’a divulgué aucune donnée d’entreprise ou de gouvernement en vertu du CLOUD Act

AWS applique des procédures strictes pour traiter les demandes des autorités judiciaires de tout pays, en vérifiant leur légitimité et leur conformité à la réglementation applicable. Si AWS reconnaît les besoins légitimes des autorités judiciaires dans leurs enquêtes sur les activités criminelles et terroristes, les autorités doivent respecter les mesures de protection juridiques encadrant ces enquêtes. En effet, notre politique est claire : nous ne divulguons pas les données des clients en réponse à une demande gouvernementale, sauf si nous en sommes contraints par une ordonnance juridiquement valide et contraignante. Nous avons pris cet engagement publiquement dans nos conditions juridiques.

Nous contestons les demandes gouvernementales qui s’avèrent illégales, disproportionnées ou inappropriées (notamment celles qui porteraient atteintes aux droits fondamentaux des individus). Pour les demandes concernant les données d’entreprises clientes, nous mettons tout en œuvre pour rediriger les autorités judiciaires vers le client et l’informer lorsque la loi le permet. En cas d’obligation de divulgation des données d’un client, nous l’en informons au préalable pour lui permettre de se prémunir contre cette divulgation, sauf interdiction par la loi. Si, après ces étapes, AWS reste contrainte de divulguer des données client et dispose de la capacité technique de le faire (ce qui, comme mentionné précédemment, est rarement le cas), nous limitons la divulgation au strict minimum requis par la procédure judiciaire.

Conformément à notre politique de redirection des autorités judiciaires vers les clients, le département des crimes informatiques et de la propriété intellectuelle du DOJ américain a également émis des lignes directrices recommandant aux procureurs de privilégier l’obtention des données directement auprès de l’entreprise concernée, plutôt qu’auprès du fournisseur cloud hébergeant ces données.

Une preuve tangible de l’efficacité de nos mesures et des exigences juridiques rigoureuses inscrites dans la loi : depuis le début du suivi de cette statistique en 2020, AWS n’a divulgué au gouvernement américain aucune donnée de client d’entreprise ou de gouvernement stockée hors des États-Unis. Ce bilan résulte des garanties techniques offertes par AWS, des conditions juridiques strictes prévues par la législation américaine, des politiques mises en œuvre par le DOJ, et de la nature des enquêtes des autorités judiciaires qui ciblent principalement la collecte de preuves électroniques issues de comptes de particuliers.

Fait n°3 : Le CLOUD Act ne s’applique pas uniquement aux entreprises dont le siège est situé aux États-Unis, mais à toute entreprise exerçant une activité commerciale aux États-Unis

Le CLOUD Act s’applique à l’ensemble des fournisseurs de services de communication électronique ou de services informatiques à distance qui exercent une activité ou disposent d’une présence juridique aux États-Unis, indépendamment de la localisation de leur siège social. Par conséquent, les fournisseurs de services cloud européens ayant des activités aux États-Unis sont également assujettis aux dispositions de cette loi. À titre d’exemple, OVHcloud, entreprise française de services cloud présente aux États-Unis, précise dans sa FAQ relative au CLOUD Act qu’”OVHcloud se conformera aux demandes légales des autorités publiques. En vertu du CLOUD Act, cela pourrait inclure des données stockées en dehors des États-Unis.” De même, d’autres fournisseurs de cloud dont le siège est situé dans l’Union européenne ou ailleurs exercent également des activités aux États-Unis.

Fait n°4 : Les principes du CLOUD Act s’inscrivent dans le cadre du droit international et des législations nationales

Le CLOUD Act n’a pas introduit de nouveau concept juridique concernant l’accès aux données électroniques dans le cadre d’enquêtes pénales. De nombreux États exigent la divulgation de données clients quel que soit leur lieu de stockage en réponse à des procédures judiciaires impliquant des crimes graves. La loi britannique Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Act, par exemple, permet aux autorités judiciaires britanniques d’obtenir des données électroniques stockées hors du Royaume-Uni dans le cadre d’une enquête pénale. Selon un document du DOJ américain publié en 2024, plusieurs États membres de l’Union européenne, dont la Belgique, le Danemark, la France, l’Irlande et l’Espagne, disposent d’exigences similaires. En réalité, depuis 2023, la majorité des demandes d’accès aux données reçues par AWS émanent d’autorités situées en dehors des États-Unis.

Ce principe est également inscrit dans la Convention de Budapest sur la cybercriminalité, premier traité international visant à renforcer la coopération en matière d’enquêtes sur la cybercriminalité. Par ailleurs, le Règlement européen e-Evidence (2023/1543), adopté en août 2023, habilite les États membres à “ordonner à un fournisseur de services de produire ou de conserver des preuves électroniques, quelle que soit la localisation des données.” Le RGPD prévoit également la possibilité de transferts de données personnelles en réponse aux demandes contraignantes de pays tiers, sous réserve d’une base juridique appropriée et d’un mécanisme de transfert ou d’une dérogation (voir les Lignes directrices 02/2024 du Comité européen de la protection des données sur l’Article 48).

AWS soutient la conclusion d’accords de coopération bilatéraux dans le cadre du CLOUD Act, notamment entre les États-Unis et l’Union européenne, ainsi qu’entre les États-Unis et le Canada. Ces accords sont essentiels pour résoudre les conflits potentiels de lois et permettre des enquêtes efficaces sur les crimes graves afin d’améliorer la sécurité publique, tout en s’appuyant sur les garanties procédurales et juridiques substantielles déjà prévues par la législation américaine.

Fait n°5 : Le CLOUD Act n’a pas d’impact sur les dispositifs techniques et les mesures de contrôle qu’AWS met à disposition de ses clients pour prévenir tout accès non autorisé à leurs données

AWS ne peut répondre aux demandes judiciaires de communication de données que lorsqu’elle dispose de la capacité technique de le faire. Or, AWS a développé de nombreux produits et services garantissant qu’aucun tiers – y compris ses propres employés – ne peut accéder aux données des clients. Les clients d’AWS ont également à leur disposition un ensemble de dispositifs techniques et de mesures de contrôle complémentaires pour protéger leurs données. À titre d’exemple, la plupart des principaux systèmes et services d’AWS sont conçus sans aucune possibilité d’accès technique, selon le principe d’absence d’accès pour les opérateurs (zero operator access). Cela signifie que les services ne disposent d’aucun moyen technique permettant aux opérateurs d’AWS d’accéder aux données des clients en réponse à une demande judiciaire.

Le système AWS Nitro, qui est à la base des services informatiques AWS, utilise des composants matériels et logiciels spécifiques pour protéger les données de tout accès externe lors de leur traitement sur Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). En établissant une barrière physique et logique renforcée, le système Nitro est conçu de sorte qu’aucune personne non autorisée – y compris les opérateurs d’AWS – ne peut accéder aux charges de travail des clients sur EC2. L’architecture du système Nitro a été certifiée par NCC Group, organisme indépendant en cybersécurité. Ces dispositifs de contrôle empêchant tout accès de nos opérateurs sont si essentiels au système Nitro que nous les avons intégrés dans nos Conditions de Service AWS, offrant ainsi une garantie contractuelle supplémentaire à l’ensemble de nos clients.

Nous proposons également à nos clients des fonctionnalités et des mécanismes de chiffrement des données, qu’elles soient en transit, au repos ou en mémoire. L’ensemble des services AWS intègrent le chiffrement, la majorité permettant également le chiffrement via des clés gérées par le client et inaccessibles à AWS. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) est le premier système de gestion de clés natif au cloud, hautement évolutif, à obtenir la certification FIPS 140-3 Niveau 3. Concrètement, AWS propose un chiffrement de niveau supérieur où les clients conservent le contrôle exclusif de l’accès aux clés.

Poursuivre notre obsession client

Chez AWS, notre approche centrée sur le client guide l’ensemble de nos actions, de la conception de nos services à la protection de vos données. La confiance que vous nous accordez repose sur notre transparence, la robustesse de nos dispositifs techniques de contrôle et notre détermination à défendre vos intérêts.

C’est dans cet esprit que nous avons établi une communication claire et transparente sur notre traitement des demandes d’accès aux données émanant des autorités, notamment concernant l’application du CLOUD Act, ainsi que sur les différents niveaux de protection – juridiques, opérationnels et techniques – mis en œuvre pour sécuriser vos données.

Nous vous invitons à approfondir vos connaissances de ce sujet en consultant notre FAQ détaillée sur le CLOUD Act.

Nous poursuivrons nos efforts d’innovation, à votre service, en développant de nouvelles fonctionnalités et de nouveaux services vous garantissant la maîtrise de vos données, tout en maintenant nos engagements en matière de confidentialité et de sécurité.

A propos de l’auteur

Bob Kimball occupe le poste de Chief Regulatory Officer après avoir été General Counsel d’AWS. Dans ses fonctions actuelles, il pilote les questions réglementaires mondiales d’AWS, travaillant en étroite collaboration avec les régulateurs et les clients sur des enjeux tels que l’IA, la souveraineté numérique, l’énergie et d’autres sujets clés liés à l’exploitation des infrastructures et services cloud.


German version

Fünf Fakten zur tatsächlichen Funktionsweise des CLOUD Act

Bei Amazon Web Services (AWS) haben Kundendatenschutz und -sicherheit höchste Priorität. Wir bieten unseren Kunden branchenführenden Datenschutz und erstklassige Sicherheit bei der Nutzung der AWS Cloud – weltweit. In den vergangenen Monaten haben wir ein gestiegenes Interesse zum Umgang mit behördlichen Datenanfragen festgestellt. Viele dieser Fragen beziehen sich auf ein US-amerikanisches Gesetz aus dem Jahr 2018, den Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act). Tatsächlich hat der CLOUD Act der US-Regierung keinerlei neue Befugnisse eingeräumt, Daten von Anbietern anzufordern, sondern schafft vielmehr wichtige rechtliche Leitplanken zum Schutz von Inhalten.

Um diese Thematik in den richtigen Kontext zu setzen: Seit wir 2020 mit der statistischen Erfassung begonnen haben, gab es keine Datenanfragen an AWS, die zur Offenlegung von außerhalb der USA gespeicherten Kundeninhalten von Unternehmens- oder Regierungsdaten gegenüber der US-Regierung geführt haben. Unser Engagement zum Schutz von Kundendaten wird durch mehrere Ebenen rechtlichen, technischen und operativen Schutzes untermauert. AWS hat beispielsweise seine Kernprodukte und -services so konzipiert, dass nur Kunden selbst und die von ihnen autorisierten Personen auf die Kundeninhalte zugreifen können. In diesen Fällen müsste jede Regierung, die Zugriff auf Kundeninhalte wünscht, diese Daten direkt beim Kunden anfragen. Darüber hinaus bietet das US-Recht selbst zahlreiche gesetzliche Schutzmaßnahmen, die das Risiko verringern, dass AWS zur Offenlegung von Unternehmens- oder Regierungsdaten verpflichtet werden könnte. Das US-Justizministerium (DOJ) hat in den letzten acht Jahren zusätzliche operative Schutzmaßnahmen implementiert.

Vor diesem Hintergrund möchten wir einige häufige Missverständnisse über den CLOUD Act ansprechen und Klarheit darüber schaffen, wie sich dieses Gesetz auf AWS Kunden weltweit auswirkt – oder eben nicht auswirkt. Außerdem erweitern wir unsere FAQ zum CLOUD Act, um unseren Kunden und Partnern den Umgang mit diesem Thema zu erleichtern.

Fakt 1: Der CLOUD Act gewährt der US-Regierung keinen uneingeschränkten oder automatischen Zugriff auf in der Cloud gespeicherte Daten

Der CLOUD Act wurde verabschiedet, um Herausforderungen zu bewältigen, denen Strafverfolgungsbehörden bei der Beschaffung von im Ausland gespeicherten Daten in grenzüberschreitenden Ermittlungen zu schweren Straftaten begegneten. Dazu gehören Terrorismus und Gewaltverbrechen bis hin zu sexueller Ausbeutung von Kindern und Cyberkriminalität. Der CLOUD Act ermöglicht es den USA in erster Linie, gegenseitige Vollzugsvereinbarungen mit vertrauenswürdigen ausländischen Partnern zu schließen, um Zugang zu elektronischen Beweismitteln für Ermittlungen bei schweren Straftaten zu erhalten, unabhängig vom Speicherort der Beweise, indem Sperrgesetze nach US-Recht aufgehoben wurden. Viele Regierungen stützen sich auf nationale Gesetze, um von Anbietern innerhalb ihres Zuständigkeitsbereichs die Offenlegung elektronischer Daten unter der Kontrolle der Unternehmen zu verlangen, unabhängig davon, wo die Daten gespeichert sind. In ähnlicher Weise stellte der CLOUD Act klar, dass US-Strafverfolgungsbehörden bestehende Befugnisse wie einen gerichtlich genehmigten Durchsuchungsbeschluss nutzen können, um Daten unter der Kontrolle eines Anbieters anzufordern, unabhängig vom Speicherort der Daten; die Vollzugsvereinbarungen ermöglichen die Wirksamkeit dieser gegenseitigen Gesetze, unterstützt durch strenge verfahrensrechtliche und materielle Schutzmaßnahmen.

Der Zugriff auf Daten nach US-Recht ist bei weitem nicht uneingeschränkt oder automatisch möglich, und Strafverfolgungsbehörden müssen strenge rechtliche Standards erfüllen. Nach US-Recht ist es Anbietern sogar untersagt, Daten ohne rechtliche Ausnahmeregelung an die US-Regierung weiterzugeben. Um einen Anbieter zur Offenlegung von Inhaltsdaten zu verpflichten, muss die Strafverfolgungsbehörde einen unabhängigen Bundesrichter davon überzeugen, dass ein hinreichender Verdacht bezüglich einer bestimmten Straftat besteht und dass Beweise für diese Straftat am zu durchsuchenden Ort gefunden werden (das heißt in einem bestimmten elektronischen Konto wie einem E-Mail-Account). Dieser Rechtsstandard muss durch konkrete und vertrauenswürdige Fakten belegt werden. Jeder Durchsuchungsbeschluss muss diese strenge Prüfung des hinreichenden Verdachts anhand glaubwürdiger Fakten, Spezifität und Rechtmäßigkeit bestehen, muss von einem unabhängigen Richter genehmigt werden und muss die Anforderungen hinsichtlich Umfang und Zuständigkeit erfüllen. Im Mai 2023 hat das DOJ außerdem eine Richtlinie erlassen, wonach Staatsanwälte, die nachweislich im Ausland gespeicherte Beweismittel anfordern, vor Erhalt einer entsprechenden Anordnung die Genehmigung des Office of International Affairs (OIA) des Ministeriums einholen müssen. Die DOJ-Richtlinie zu Beweismitteln im Ausland weist darauf hin, dass jede Nation Gesetze zum Schutz ihrer Souveränität erlässt; das OIA arbeitet daran, diesbezügliche Fragen zu klären und Staatsanwälte bei der Auswahl eines geeigneten Mechanismus zur Sicherung von Beweismitteln zu unterstützen.

Fakt 2: AWS hat seit Beginn der statistischen Erfassung keine Kundeninhalte von Unternehmens- oder Regierungskundendaten aufgrund des CLOUD Act offengelegt

AWS verfügt über strenge Verfahren zur Bearbeitung von Anfragen von Strafverfolgungsbehörden aus allen Ländern, um deren Legitimität zu prüfen und sicherzustellen, dass sie geltendem Recht entsprechen. AWS erkennt die legitimen Bedürfnisse von Strafverfolgungsbehörden bei der Untersuchung krimineller und terroristischer Aktivitäten an, aber diese müssen die rechtlichen Schutzmaßnahmen für solche Ermittlungen beachten. Wir geben Kundendaten auf keinerlei behördliche Anfragen heraus, es sei denn, wir sind dazu durch eine rechtlich gültige und verbindliche Anordnung verpflichtet. Dies haben wir in unseren rechtlichen Bedingungen öffentlich zugesichert. Darüber hinaus werden wir behördliche Anfragen anfechten, die gegen das Gesetz verstoßen, zu weitreichend oder anderweitig unangemessen sind (beispielsweise, wenn eine solche Anfrage die Grundrechte von Personen verletzen würde). Wenn wir solche Anfragen nach Inhalten von Unternehmenskunden erhalten, unternehmen wir alle angemessenen Anstrengungen, um Strafverfolgungsbehörden an den Kunden zu verweisen und den Kunden zu benachrichtigen, wenn dies rechtlich zulässig ist. Wenn wir zur Offenlegung von Kundeninhalten verpflichtet sind, benachrichtigen wir die Kunden vor der Offenlegung, um ihnen die Möglichkeit zu geben, sich gegen die Offenlegung zu schützen, sofern dies nicht gesetzlich untersagt ist. Wenn AWS nach Ausschöpfung dieser Schritte weiterhin zur Offenlegung von Kundendaten verpflichtet ist und wir die technische Möglichkeit dazu haben (was, wie oben beschrieben, in vielen Fällen nicht der Fall ist), legen wir nur das zur Erfüllung des rechtlichen Verfahrens unbedingt Notwendige offen.

In Übereinstimmung mit unserer Richtlinie, Strafverfolgungsbehörden an die Kunden zu verweisen, hat auch die Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section des DOJ Leitlinien herausgegeben, die Staatsanwälte anweisen, Daten grundsätzlich direkt von einem Unternehmen anzufordern, wie beispielsweise von einem Unternehmen, das Daten bei einem Cloud-Anbieter speichert, und nicht vom Anbieter selbst.

Ein deutlicher Beleg für die Wirksamkeit unserer Maßnahmen und der strengen gesetzlichen Anforderungen ist die Tatsache, dass AWS seit Beginn der statistischen Erfassung im Jahr 2020 keine außerhalb der USA gespeicherten Kundeninhalte von Unternehmens- oder Regierungskundendaten an die US-Regierung weitergegeben hat. Diese Bilanz spiegelt die technischen Schutzmaßnahmen von AWS, die robusten rechtlichen Schutzmaßnahmen im US-Recht, die vom DOJ umgesetzten Richtlinien und die Art der strafrechtlichen Ermittlungen wider, die sich hauptsächlich auf die Sammlung elektronischer Beweise aus Verbraucherkonten konzentrieren.

Fakt 3: Der CLOUD Act gilt nicht nur für Unternehmen mit Hauptsitz in den USA – er gilt für alle Anbieter, die Geschäfte in den Vereinigten Staaten tätigen

Der CLOUD Act gilt für alle Anbieter von elektronischen Kommunikationsdiensten oder Remote-Computing-Diensten, die in den USA tätig sind oder dort eine rechtliche Präsenz haben – unabhängig vom Standort ihres Hauptsitzes. Beispielsweise unterliegen auch Cloud-Anbieter mit Hauptsitz in Europa, die Geschäfte in den USA tätigen, den Anforderungen des Gesetzes. OVHcloud, ein Cloud-Service-Anbieter mit Hauptsitz in Frankreich, der in den USA tätig ist, vermerkt auf seiner CLOUD Act FAQ-Seite, dass “OVHcloud rechtmäßigen Anfragen von Behörden nachkommen wird. Im Rahmen des CLOUD Act könnte dies auch Daten einschließen, die außerhalb der Vereinigten Staaten gespeichert sind.” Ähnlich verhält es sich mit anderen Cloud-Anbietern mit Hauptsitz in der EU und anderswo, die ebenfalls in den USA tätig sind.

Fakt 4: Die Grundsätze des CLOUD Act stehen im Einklang mit internationalem Recht und den Gesetzen anderer Länder

Der CLOUD Act hat keine neue Rechtsposition bezüglich des Umfangs elektronischer Daten eingeführt, die im Rahmen legitimer strafrechtlicher Ermittlungen offengelegt werden müssen. Viele Länder verlangen die Offenlegung von Kundendaten, unabhängig vom Speicherort, als Reaktion auf rechtliche Verfahren im Zusammenhang mit schweren Straftaten. Der britische Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Act beispielsweise ermöglicht es britischen Strafverfolgungsbehörden, im Zusammenhang mit strafrechtlichen Ermittlungen auf außerhalb des Vereinigten Königreichs gespeicherte elektronische Daten zuzugreifen. Laut einer Einreichung des US-DOJ von 2024 haben mehrere EU-Mitgliedstaaten, darunter Belgien, Dänemark, Frankreich, Irland und Spanien, ähnliche Anforderungen. Tatsächlich kommt seit 2023 die Mehrheit der Strafverfolgungsanfragen, die AWS erhält, von Behörden außerhalb der Vereinigten Staaten.

Dieses Konzept ist auch in der Budapest-Konvention zur Cyberkriminalität verankert, dem ersten internationalen Vertrag zur Verbesserung der Zusammenarbeit bei der Untersuchung von Cyberkriminalität. Darüber hinaus ermächtigt die EU-Verordnung e-Evidence, 2023/1543, die im August 2023 verabschiedet wurde, die Mitgliedstaaten dazu, “einen Dienstanbieter anzuweisen, elektronische Beweismittel unabhängig vom Standort der Daten zu erstellen oder zu sichern”. Die DSGVO erlaubt ebenfalls die Übermittlung personenbezogener Daten als Reaktion auf verpflichtende Offenlegungsanfragen aus Drittländern – vorausgesetzt, die betreffende Partei kann sich auf eine geeignete Rechtsgrundlage und ein Übertragungsinstrument oder eine Ausnahmeregelung berufen (siehe die aktuellen EDSA Leitlinien 02/2024 zu Artikel 48).

AWS setzt sich dafür ein, dass Regierungen gegenseitige Vollzugsvereinbarungen im Rahmen des CLOUD Act abschließen, einschließlich zwischen den USA und der Europäischen Union sowie den USA und Kanada. Wir glauben, dass diese Vereinbarungen wichtig sind, um potenzielle Gesetzeskonflikte endgültig zu lösen und eine effektive Untersuchung schwerer Straftaten zur Förderung der öffentlichen Sicherheit zu ermöglichen. Dabei werden die bereits bestehenden starken materiell- und verfahrensrechtlichen Schutzmaßnahmen nach US-Recht anerkannt.

Fakt 5: Der CLOUD Act beschränkt nicht die technischen Maßnahmen und operativen Kontrollen, die AWS seinen Kunden zum Schutz vor unbefugtem Zugriff auf Kundendaten anbietet

Wir können auf rechtliche Datenanfragen nur dann reagieren, wenn wir die technische Möglichkeit dazu haben. AWS verfügt über eine Reihe von Produkten und Services, die sicherstellen, dass niemand – nicht einmal Mitarbeiter:innen von AWS – auf Kundeninhalte zugreifen können. AWS Kunden verfügen auch über eine Reihe zusätzlicher technischer Maßnahmen und operativer Kontrollen, um den Zugriff auf Daten zu verhindern. Beispielsweise sind viele der AWS Kernsysteme und Services mit Zero-Operator-Zugriff konzipiert, was bedeutet, dass die Services keine technischen Möglichkeiten für AWS Mitarbeiter:innen bieten, auf Kundendaten als Reaktion auf eine rechtliche Anfrage zuzugreifen.

Das AWS Nitro System, das die Grundlage der AWS Rechendienstleistungen bildet, verwendet spezialisierte Hardware und Software, um Daten während der Verarbeitung auf Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) vor externem Zugriff zu schützen. Durch eine starke physische und logische Sicherheitsgrenze ist Nitro so konzipiert, dass keine unbefugte Person – nicht einmal AWS Mitarbeiter:innen – auf Workloads von Kunden auf EC2 zugreifen kann. Das Design des Nitro Systems wurde von der NCC Group, einem unabhängigen Cybersicherheitsunternehmen, validiert. Die Kontrollen, die den Betreiberzugriff verhindern, sind für das Nitro System so grundlegend, dass wir sie in unsere AWS Servicebedingungen aufgenommen haben, um allen unseren Kunden eine zusätzliche vertragliche Zusicherung zu geben.

Wir bieten Kunden auch Funktionen und Kontrollen zur Verschlüsselung von Daten, sei es während der Übertragung, im Ruhezustand oder im Arbeitsspeicher. Alle AWS Services unterstützen bereits Verschlüsselung, wobei die meisten auch die Verschlüsselung mit kundenverwalteten Schlüsseln unterstützen, die für AWS nicht zugänglich sind. Der AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) ist das erste hochskalierbare, Cloud-native Schlüsselverwaltungssystem mit FIPS 140-3 Level 3-Zertifizierung. Vereinfacht ausgedrückt bedeutet dies, dass AWS eine äußerst starke Verschlüsselung anbietet, bei der unsere Kunden kontrollieren, wer einen Schlüssel erhält.

Fortsetzung unserer Kundenorientierung

Bei AWS bestimmt unser kundenorientierter Ansatz alles, was wir tun – von der Gestaltung unserer Services bis zum Schutz Ihrer Daten. Wir verstehen, dass Ihr Vertrauen durch Transparenz, starke technische Kontrollen und unermüdlichen Einsatz für Ihre Interessen verdient wird. Deshalb haben wir klar kommuniziert, wie wir mit behördlichen Datenanfragen umgehen, einschließlich der Auswirkungen des CLOUD Act, und der mehrschichtigen Schutzmaßnahmen – rechtlich, operativ und technisch – zum Schutz Ihrer Daten.

Wir ermutigen Sie, mehr über dieses wichtige Thema zu in unseren erweiterten CLOUD Act FAQs zu lesen. Wir werden weiterhin in Ihrem Interesse innovativ sein, neue Funktionen und Services entwickeln, die Ihnen die Kontrolle über Ihre Daten geben, und unser Engagement für höchste Datenschutz- und Sicherheitsstandards aufrechterhalten.

Über den Autor

Bob Kimball ist Chief Regulatory Officer und ehemaliger General Counsel bei AWS. In seiner aktuellen Position ist Bob ein AWS-Experte für globale regulatorische Fragen und arbeitet eng mit Aufsichtsbehörden und Kunden zu Themen wie KI, digitale Souveränität, Energie und anderen Schlüsselthemen zusammen, die den Betrieb von Cloud-Infrastruktur und -Services betreffen.

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

Bob Kimball
Bob Kimball

Bob Kimball is the Chief Regulatory Officer and former General Counsel at AWS. In his current role, Bob is an AWS leader on global regulatory issues, working closely with regulators and customers on AI, digital sovereignty, energy, and other key topics impacting the operation of cloud infrastructure and services.

AWS successfully completes CCAG 2024 pooled audit with European financial institutions

Post Syndicated from Hassan A. Malik original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-successfully-completes-ccag-2024-pooled-audit-with-eu-financial-institutions/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has completed its annual Collaborative Cloud Audit Group (CCAG) audit engagement with leading European financial institutions.

At AWS, security remains our highest priority. As customers continue to embrace the scalability and flexibility of the cloud, we support them in evolving security, identity, and compliance into core business enablers. The AWS Compliance Program helps customers understand the robust controls in place at AWS and empowers them to architect secure and resilient environments aligned to regulatory expectations.

What is CCAG?

The CCAG is a not-for-profit association representing a growing number of regulated financial services institutions across Europe. Its mission is to execute pooled audits of cloud service providers, enabling participating institutions to exercise their audit rights in alignment with supervisory expectations, including those set out by the European Banking Authority (EBA).

The CCAG audit methodology is grounded in recognized international standards and frameworks, including:

Conducting pooled audits at scale

While there are many established security frameworks, CCAG uses the CSA Cloud Controls Matrix to assess the control environment of cloud service providers. This framework provides foundational security principles tailored to cloud environments and enables risk-informed assurance in regulated industries.

Between February and December 2024, AWS collaborated with CCAG member auditors through a structured, multi-phase audit program. Fieldwork activities were conducted entirely on site across two AWS locations in Europe and North America. The scope of the audit covered selected AWS services and corresponding enterprise-wide controls, aligned to the expectations of European financial regulators.

As part of the audit, CCAG evaluated the ability of AWS to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and sovereignty of customer data across AWS Regions; to detect and respond effectively to security incidents and make sure of forensic readiness; to enforce strict access controls and manage privileged users with precision; and to maintain operational resilience through structured change and configuration management processes. Further areas of assessment included the security of APIs and customer-facing interfaces, the ability to support interoperability and data portability, the governance of supplier relationships and workforce lifecycle management, and the enforcement of centralized policy, risk, and compliance oversight across the AWS environment.

CCAG 2024: A collaborative milestone in assurance

The 2024 engagement exemplified strong alignment between CCAG’s audit strategy and the commitment of AWS to assurance. Through effective governance structures, shared timelines, and continuous dialogue, AWS supported the audit with clarity, responsiveness, and precision.

“CCAG proudly acknowledges the exceptional collaboration with AWS in delivering a strategically significant and highly complex audit. This engagement brought together CCAG’s deep-rooted expertise in banking and financial services—including decades of regulatory insight, audit precision, and sector-specific resilience knowledge—with AWS’s outstanding technical leadership, operational agility, and commitment to transparency.

This partnership exemplified the highest standards of professional alignment, mutual accountability, and excellence. The shared focus on rigor and process integrity enabled CCAG to conduct a risk-informed, regulatory-grade audit within agreed timelines—reinforcing what best-in-class assurance in cloud-enabled financial services can look like.” Audit Coordinators of the CCAG Group

“CCAG proudly acknowledges the exceptional collaboration with AWS in delivering a strategically significant and highly complex audit. This engagement brought together CCAG’s deep-rooted expertise in banking and financial services—including decades of regulatory insight, audit precision, and sector-specific resilience knowledge—with AWS’s outstanding technical leadership, operational agility, and commitment to transparency.

This partnership exemplified the highest standards of professional alignment, mutual accountability, and excellence. The shared focus on rigor and process integrity enabled CCAG to conduct a risk-informed, regulatory-grade audit within agreed timelines—reinforcing what best-in-class assurance in cloud-enabled financial services can look like.” — Audit Coordinators of the CCAG Group

Looking ahead

Following the successful completion of the 2024 cycle, AWS has already initiated the 2025 CCAG engagement. We remain committed to strengthening trust, improving transparency, and continuing to collaborate with customers and regulators to support the secure and compliance-aligned adoption of cloud services across the financial sector.

To learn more about AWS compliance programs, visit AWS Compliance Programs. For audit-specific inquiries, reach out to your AWS account team or contact the Security Assurance team.

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

Hassan A. Malik
Hassan A. Malik

Hassan is a Principal in Security Assurance at AWS, leading strategic customer engagements across EMEA. With over 15 years of experience in Financial Governance, Risk, Compliance, and Audit, he bridges regulatory expectations and operational delivery. At AWS, Hassan drives scalable assurance strategies to meet the trust needs of regulated customers and enable compliance-aligned growth globally.
Andreas Terwellen
Andreas Terwellen

Andreas is a Senior Manager in Security Assurance at AWS, based in Frankfurt. He leads regulatory and third-party audit engagements across Europe. Previously CISO in a listed company and leader in consulting, Andreas now focuses on translating regulatory expectations into audit-ready controls and delivering end-to-end assurance across global environments.

Dutch government successfully completes privacy audit of AWS data protection practices

Post Syndicated from Gokhan Akyuz original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/dutch-government-successfully-completes-privacy-audit-of-aws-data-protection-practices/

We are pleased to announce the successful completion of a comprehensive privacy audit conducted by Ernst & Young (EY) Netherlands on behalf of the Netherlands Ministry of Justice and Security. This customer audit examined the data protection measures implemented by AWS for a limited number of internal AWS operations when AWS is processing personal data as a data controller (referred to as “Legitimate Business Operations” in the audit report).

This audit is the first major assessment focusing on the role of AWS as a data controller, examining how we protect customers’ personal data beyond customer content. The audit specifically addressed the Dutch government’s need to make sure that personal data is processed strictly according to Dutch government organizations’ instructions when used for Legitimate Business Operations of AWS.

Beginning in January 2025, EY Netherlands conducted thorough fieldwork to evaluate the compliance of AWS with our contractual commitments. The audit report was finalized on June 16, 2025, and made publicly available on July 16, 2025, on Strategic Vendor Management for Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS (SLM) website, the team in the Ministry that manages the national agreements between the Dutch government and cloud service providers. The audit report provides insight into our data protection practices and demonstrates the commitment of AWS to data protection and privacy when acting as a data controller.

We remain committed to maintaining the highest standards of data protection and privacy for our customers. This successful audit reinforces our dedication to transparency and compliance with stringent data protection requirements.

For more information about AWS privacy and data protection practices, visit our Data Privacy Center, the EU data protection section of the AWS Cloud Security website, or contact your AWS account team. To learn more about our compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs of the AWS Cloud Security website. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.

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

Gokhan Akyuz

Gokhan Akyuz

Gokhan is a Security Audit Program Manager at AWS, based in Amsterdam. He leads attestation and certification programs, and customer audits across Europe. He has 18 years of experience in IT and cybersecurity audits and risk management in a wide range of industries. Gokhan is a Certified Cloud Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP), and AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.

Spring 2025 SOC 1/2/3 reports are now available with 184 services in scope

Post Syndicated from Paul Hong original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/spring-2025-soc-1-2-3-reports-are-now-available-with-184-services-in-scope/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce that the Spring 2025 System and Organization Controls (SOC) 1, 2, and 3 reports are now available. The reports cover 184 services over the 12-month period from April 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025, giving customers a full year of assurance. The reports demonstrate our continuous commitment to adhering to the heightened expectations for cloud service providers.

Customers can download the Spring 2025 SOC 1, 2, and 3 reports through AWS Artifact, a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact.

AWS strives to continuously bring services into the scope of its compliance programs to help customers meet their architectural and regulatory needs. You can view the current list of services in scope on our Services in Scope page. You can also reach out to your AWS account team if you have any questions or feedback about SOC compliance.

To learn more about AWS compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.

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

Paul Hong

Paul is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He leads multiple security, compliance, and cloud security training initiatives within AWS and has over 12 years of experience in security assurance. Paul holds CISSP, CEH, and CPA certifications. He has a master’s degree in accounting information systems and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from James Madison University, Virginia.

Tushar Jain

Tushar Jain

Tushar is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He leads multiple security and privacy initiatives within AWS. Tushar holds a Master of Business Administration from Indian Institute of Management Shillong, India and a Bachelor of Technology in electronics and telecommunication engineering from Marathwada University, India. He has over 13 years of experience in information security and holds CCSK and CSXF certifications.

Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy

Michael is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He leads multiple security and privacy initiatives within AWS. Michael has 12 years of experience in information security. He holds a master’s degree and a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology. He also holds CISSP, CRISC, CISA, and CISM certifications.

Atulsing Patil

Atulsing Patil

Atulsing is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He has 28 years of consulting experience in information technology and information security management. Atulsing holds a Master of Science in Electronics degree and professional certifications such as CCSP, CISSP, CISM, CDPSE, ISO 27001 Lead Auditor, HITRUST CSF, Archer Certified Consultant, and AWS CCP.

Nathan Samuel

Nathan Samuel

Nathan is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He leads multiple security and privacy initiatives within AWS. Nathan has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and has over 21 years of experience in security assurance. He holds the CISA, CRISC, CGEIT, CISM, CDPSE, and Certified Internal Auditor certifications.

ryan wilks

Ryan Wilks

Ryan is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He leads multiple security and privacy initiatives within AWS. Ryan has 14 years of experience in information security. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University and holds ITIL, CISM, and CISA certifications.

Gabby Iem

Gabby Iem

Gabby is a Program Manager at AWS. She supports multiple initiatives within AWS security assurance and has recently received her bachelor’s degree from Chapman University studying business administration.

Establishing a European trust service provider for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

Post Syndicated from Colm MacCarthaigh original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/establishing-a-european-trust-service-provider-for-the-aws-european-sovereign-cloud/

Last month, we announced new sovereign controls and governance structure for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is a new, independent cloud for Europe, designed to help customers meet their evolving sovereignty needs, including stringent data residency, operational autonomy, and resiliency requirements. Launching by the end of 2025, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be entirely located within the European Union (EU) and operate as an independent cloud for Europe. Last month, we announced plans to launch a dedicated European certificate authority (CA), or trust service provider, to support autonomous trust service operations within the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

We are actively building out the first AWS Region of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in the state of Brandenburg, Germany. We are on track for launch and AWS services are being deployed, configured, and tested for autonomous operations in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud infrastructure will be physically and logically separate from other Regions. We designed the AWS European Sovereign Cloud to have no critical dependencies on non-EU infrastructure. Everything needed to operate the AWS European Sovereign Cloud is in the EU: the talent, the technology, the infrastructure, and the leadership. In addition to independent infrastructure, there will be zero operational control outside of EU borders. Only AWS employees, residing in the EU, will control day-to-day operations, including access to data centers, technical support, and customer service for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

For the first time, we will provide a dedicated sovereign European trust service provider (EU-TSP). This EU-TSP will autonomously operate its own CA key materials and perform certificate issuance functions within the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. A trust service provider is an entity that manages the policies and operations for a set of root and subordinate certificate authorities. A root CA is a cryptographic building block and root of trust upon which end entity certificates can be issued. It represents a private key for signing (issuing) certificates and a root certificate that identifies the root CA and binds the private key to the name of the CA. In short, the EU-TSP is an autonomous trust service provider in Europe, for Europe.

The EU-TSP will be the public root of trust for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, helping to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of network communications. The EU-TSP will provide the default CA used by AWS service endpoints, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), and ACM integrated services. For AWS European Sovereign Cloud customers, this means that even in the event of a material loss of connectivity outside of the EU, the EU-TSP will continue to provide trust services autonomously.

We recently completed the cryptographic key signing ceremony for our EU-TSP at a secure EU location, witnessed by external, third-party auditors. The resulting root CAs have been submitted for inclusion to popular web browsers used by AWS customers. This EU-TSP will be operated in accordance with the requirements of the Certificate Authority/Browser Forum. All the key material for the EU-TSP is located within EU borders, and only EU residents have the ability to operate, control, or reconfigure the EU-TSP.

To maintain verifiable trust, we will engage independent EU-based auditors to assure the EU-TSP controls are designed appropriately, operate effectively, and can help customers satisfy their compliance obligations. We will make the audit reports publicly available.

The EU-TSP will be active and providing autonomous trust services when the AWS European Sovereign Cloud launches at the end of 2025. To learn more, visit AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

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

Colm MacCárthaigh
Colm MacCárthaigh

Colm MacCárthaigh joined AWS in 2008 to work on high-scale systems and security. Today, he is an AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer for EC2. Colm is also an active open source and open standards contributor. He’s a long-time author and project maintainer for the Apache httpd webserver, and a contributor to the Linux kernel and IETF standards. Colm grew up in Ireland and still plays and sings Irish music.

Spring 2025 PCI DSS compliance package available now

Post Syndicated from Will Black original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/spring-2025-pci-dss-compliance-package-available-now/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce that three new AWS services have been added to the scope of our Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) certification:

This certification means that customers can use these services while maintaining PCI DSS compliance, enabling innovation without compromising security. The full list of services can be found on the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. The PCI DSS compliance package includes two key components:

  • Attestation of Compliance (AOC) – demonstrates that AWS was successfully validated against the PCI DSS standard.
  • AWS Responsibility Summary – provides guidance to help AWS customers understand their responsibility in developing and operating a highly secure environment on AWS for handling payment card data.

AWS was evaluated by Coalfire, a third-party Qualified Security Assessor (QSA).

This refreshed certification offers customers greater flexibility in deploying regulated workloads while reducing compliance overhead. Customers can access the PCI DSS reports through AWS Artifact. This self-service portal provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports, streamlining audit processes.

To learn more about our PCI programs and other compliance and security programs, see the AWS Compliance Programs page. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Compliance Support 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.

Will Black

Will Black

Will is a Compliance Program Manager at Amazon Web Services. He leads multiple security and compliance initiatives within AWS. He has ten years of experience in compliance and security assurance and holds a degree in Management Information Systems from Temple University. Additionally, he holds the CCSK and ISO 27001 Lead Implementer certifications.

Tushar Jain

Tushar Jain

Tushar is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He leads multiple security and privacy initiatives within AWS. Tushar holds a Master of Business Administration from Indian Institute of Management Shillong, India and a Bachelor of Technology in electronics and telecommunication engineering from Marathwada University, India. He has over 13 years of experience in information security and holds CCSK and CSXF certifications.

2025 CyberVadis report now available for due diligence on third-party suppliers

Post Syndicated from Tea Jioshvili original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/2025-cybervadis-report-now-available-for-due-diligence-on-third-party-suppliers/

We’re excited to announce that AWS has completed the CyberVadis assessment of its security posture with the highest score (Mature) in all assessed areas. This demonstrates our continued commitment to meet the heightened expectations for cloud service providers. Customers can now use the 2025 AWS CyberVadis report and scorecard to reduce their supplier due-diligence burden.

With the increasing adoption of cloud products and services across multiple sectors and industries, AWS is a critical component of customers’ third-party environments. Regulated customers, such as those in the financial services sector, are held to high standards by regulators and auditors when it comes to exercising effective due diligence on third parties.

Many customers use third-party risk management services such as CyberVadis to better manage risks from their evolving third-party environments and drive operational efficiencies. In support of these efforts, AWS has completed its annual CyberVadis security posture assessment, conducted by CyberVadis security analysts.

CyberVadis is a comprehensive third-party risk assessment process that combines the speed and scalability of automation with the certainty of analyst validation. CyberVadis assessments employ a dynamic and comprehensive approach to third-party risk assessment, replacing outdated static spreadsheets and the need for annual AWS assessment access requests. This cloud-based solution provides advanced capabilities by integrating AWS responses with analytics and sophisticated risk models to deliver an in-depth view of the security posture of AWS.

CyberVadis’s risk assessment methodology evaluates 20 topics covering the entire cybersecurity life cycle across four phases: Identify, Protect, Detect, and React. These topics include Data Privacy, Access Management, and Infrastructure Security. The assessment criteria are based on international information security standards, including ISO 2700x, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, Cybersecurity for ICS, PCI DSS, NIS2 and GDPR.

Customers can use CyberVadis results to map the assessment of AWS to commonly used industry frameworks and standards to instantly gain visibility into controls coverage.

AWS customers can download the complete 2025 AWS Assessment Report directly through CyberVadis’s portal using their own account, or through AWS Artifact.

We value your feedback and questions. Reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page. If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. To learn more about our other compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs.

Tea Jioshvili

Tea Jioshvili

Tea is a Manager in AWS Security Assurance based in Berlin, Germany. Tea leads various third-party audit programs across Europe. For the past 19 years, she has worked in security assurance and compliance, business continuity, and operational risk management in the financial industry.

Manuel Mazarredo

Manu Mazarredo

Manu is a program manager at AWS based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Manu leads compliance and security assurance audits and engagements across AWS Regions and industries. For the past 20 years, he has worked in information systems audits, ethical hacking, project management, quality assurance, and vendor management.

AWS named a Leader in the 2025 Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms

Post Syndicated from Florence Chao original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-named-a-leader-in-the-2025-forrester-wave-serverless-development-platforms/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025, achieving the highest ranking in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories.

The Forrester Wave evaluation provides business leaders with rigorous, fact-based analysis for technology purchasing decisions. Through transparent criteria spanning current offering, strategy, and customer feedback, Forrester evaluates vendors to identify Leaders, Strong Performers, and Contenders. The AWS serverless portfolio unifies traditional and AI-driven development, enabling teams to build intelligent, adaptive systems with minimal infrastructure and code overhead. The evaluation analyzed across key services, including AWS Lambda for serverless compute, AWS Step Functions and Amazon EventBridge for application integration, and AWS Fargate with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) for serverless containers.

Serverless beyond function-as-a-service

The serverless operating model has evolved beyond function-as-a-service approaches. It has become a comprehensive cloud-based software development model that abstracts away underlying cloud infrastructure, complex server configurations, runtime characteristics, and deployment patterns from the development process. Forrester defines key characteristics of serverless development platforms as supporting the deployment of arbitrary business logic, decoupled state from the underlying compute, autonomous scale by demand (often back to zero), flexible consumption-based billing, abstraction of the underlying cloud infrastructure, and event-driven communication.

According to the Forrester report, “AWS provides a mature foundation for event-driven application development with extensive integrations across the AWS ecosystem. AWS continues to evolve its serverless portfolio for market demands including the growing influence of AI workloads. AWS’s platform completeness and integration depth are notable, making it well-suited for organizations seeking to build production-grade event-driven applications at scale with granularity and control.”

AWS capabilities recognized in the report

AWS’s recognition as a Leader in this report underscores, for us, our commitment to providing best-in-class innovation and developer experiences in serverless application development. Findings from AWS’s vendor profile in the report include:

  • Strategy – AWS has a clear and cohesive vision that aligns serverless capabilities across its expansive cloud portfolio. Its innovation strategy is tightly coupled with customer feedback and reinforced through sustained R&D investment.
  • Capabilities – AWS offers strong capabilities across developer experiences, tools, and service integrations. Developers benefit from mature software development kits (SDKs), command line interface (CLI) tools, and infrastructure as code (IaC) options. Its APIs and event-driven integrations are among the best, enabling complex, scalable architectures and workflows.

Evolving serverless developer experience on AWS

AWS has made significant investments to streamline the developer onboarding experience through comprehensive resources and tools. As generative AI infuses every step of software development and transforms the technology landscape, organizations must adapt quickly to maintain their competitive edge. Many are building distributed architectures that use specific large language models (LLMs) based on unique requirements, and the serverless operating model is ideal for these AI-powered applications. Serverless enables organizations to start small and scale seamlessly while handling distributed, event-driven workflows securely at scale.

The newly launched AWS Serverless Model Context Protocol (MCP) server provides AI-powered, contextual guidance throughout the serverless development lifecycle, so developers can receive real-time assistance with service selection, best practices, and implementation patterns while building applications with Lambda. The developer-first approach also includes the Amazon Q Developer plugin for AI-assisted development (including code generation, debugging, and architectural guidance), enhanced AWS SAM CLI capabilities for improved local testing and debugging, the integration with Serverless Land for direct blueprint access on the Lambda console, extensive documentation with practical examples, interactive tutorials, and integration with familiar development environments. AWS has also enhanced the getting started experience through simplified deployment workflows, IaC templates, and automated best practices enforcement. Furthermore, the broad ecosystem of AWS partners, developer advocates, and community contributors provides additional support through workshops, sample applications, and reference architectures. These comprehensive improvements demonstrate our commitment to accelerating serverless adoption by making development more intuitive, efficient, and accessible for teams at any stage of their cloud journey.

Conclusion

AWS has been recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025, receiving top scores in Current Offering and Strategy categories, which, in our opinion, underscores our commitment to innovation and excellence in serverless computing. As the serverless landscape continues to evolve, AWS remains at the forefront, providing a comprehensive suite of services that enable developers to build scalable, efficient, and intelligent applications.As we look to the future, AWS will continue to invest in serverless technologies, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in cloud computing. Whether you’re building AI-powered applications, modernizing legacy systems, or creating entirely new digital experiences, AWS serverless offerings provide the agility, scalability, and innovation you need to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Read the full report to learn why Forrester positioned AWS as a Leader in the Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025.

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .

CISPE Data Protection Code of Conduct Public Register now certifies 122 AWS services as adherent

Post Syndicated from Gokhan Akyuz original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/cispe-data-protection-code-of-conduct-public-register-now-certifies-122-aws-services-as-adherent/

We continue to expand the scope of our assurance programs at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and are pleased to announce that 122 services are now certified as adherent to the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) Data Protection Code of Conduct. This alignment with the CISPE requirements demonstrates our ongoing commitment to adhere to the heightened expectations for data protection by cloud service providers. AWS customers who use AWS certified services can be confident that their data is processed in adherence with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The CISPE Code of Conduct is the first pan-European, sector-specific code for cloud infrastructure service providers and received a favorable opinion that it complies with the GDPR. It helps organizations across Europe accelerate the development of GDPR-aligned, cloud-based services for consumers, businesses, and institutions.

The accredited monitoring body EY CertifyPoint evaluated AWS as of May 19, 2025, and successfully audited 112 certified services. AWS added ten additional services to the current scope in May 2025. As of the date of this post, 122 services are in scope of this certification. The Certificate of Compliance that illustrates AWS compliance status is available on the CISPE Public Register. For up-to-date information, including when additional services are added, search the CISPE Public Register by entering AWS as the Seller of Record; or see the AWS CISPE Data Protection Code of Conduct page.

AWS strives to bring additional services into the scope of its compliance programs to help you meet your architectural and regulatory needs. If you have questions or feedback about AWS compliance with CISPE Code, reach out to your AWS account team.

To learn more about our compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance ProgramsAWS General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Center, and the EU data protection section of the AWS Cloud Security website. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.

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

Gokhan Akyuz

Gokhan Akyuz

Gokhan is an Audit Program Manager at AWS, based in Amsterdam. He leads security audits, attestations, and certification programs across Europe. He has 18 years of experience in audit and risk management in a wide range of industries. Gokhan is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP), and AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.

Amazon Linux 2023 achieves FIPS 140-3 validation

Post Syndicated from Mahak Arora original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/amazon-linux-2023-achieves-fips-140-3-validation/

AWS announced that Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) has achieved Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-3 Level 1 validation of our cryptographic modules, marking a significant milestone in our commitment to providing secure, compliant operating system options for regulated workloads. FIPS certified modules are particularly important for US and Canadian government workloads, healthcare applications requiring HIPAA compliance, financial services, defense contractors, and other regulated industries. FIPS 140-3, which supersedes FIPS 140-2, represents the latest government security standard for cryptographic modules, jointly validated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) through the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP). The validation follows the rigorous requirements outlined in the FIPS 140-3 standard and encompasses critical cryptographic modules including the OpenSSL, Linux Kernel Cryptographic API, NSS, GnuTLS, and Libgcrypt.

These modules have been extensively tested to have robust security capabilities such as approved cryptographic algorithms, secure key management, strong entropy generation, and protected memory boundaries. The validation process was conducted by a NIST-accredited lab, and further reviewed by the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP). Additionally, the certificate details can be verified on the CMVP Active Validation List.

In order to enable FIPS mode on AL2023, customers can refer to our FIPS Mode enablement guide on AL2023. Amazon Linux maintains its compliance information through AWS Compliance Programs portal for FIPS- 140-3 and official NIST Guidelines and Compliance FAQs, for meeting global regulatory requirements. For regular updates and best practices, follow the AWS Security Blog, FIPS related FAQs on Amazon Linux 2 and Amazon Linux 2023 providing detailed configuration steps and operational guidance for regulated environments. You can also reach out to your AWS account team for help finding the resources you need.

If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.

How AWS is simplifying security at scale: Four keys to faster innovation from AWS re:Inforce 2025

Post Syndicated from Amy Herzog original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-aws-is-simplifying-security-at-scale-four-keys-to-faster-innovation-from-aws-reinforce-2025/

When I began my career in security, most people accepted as fact that protecting systems came at the expense of productivity. That didn’t have to be true then, and it’s definitely not true now. The cloud, and specifically the AWS Cloud, is a big reason why. But as technology evolves and systems become more complex, operating at scale demands a fresh approach to security. We take our customers’ security seriously, and that means building guardrails that give organizations the confidence to innovate boldly and scale rapidly.

In my new role as AWS CISO, I see this playing out daily. As I meet with customers, their excitement about technologies like generative AI comes hand in hand with questions about securing complex environments and managing new types of risk. They’re excited about innovation, but they need confidence that their security foundations can keep pace with their ambitions. They want to move fast without compromising security.

Today at re:Inforce, I shared how AWS is working backward from these needs to fundamentally transform how security scales in the cloud. It all starts with a security foundation built on four key pillars: identity and access management, data and network security, monitoring and incident response, and the continuous work of migration, modernization, and patching. Organizations with mature security models across these pillars are the ones moving fastest. Across each of these areas, we’re focused on delivering security capabilities that help customers adopt new technologies and experiment with confidence.

Scaling identity for the cloud

As our customers rapidly scale their cloud operations, they’ve told us that managing identity and access across complex environments becomes increasingly challenging. They need solutions that can grow with their business while maintaining strong security. Identity and access management underpins every aspect of cloud security, and success in this area requires both rigorous authentication controls and comprehensive visibility into access permissions.

I was excited to announce new internal access findings for AWS IAM Access Analyzer today. This capability transforms how organizations manage access to sensitive data at scale, addressing the complexities our customers face as they grow. Using automated reasoning technology, it analyzes complex permission layers across diverse policy types, giving security teams comprehensive visibility into who within their organizations has access to what resources. With daily monitoring and notifications of new access granted, we’re helping teams implement least-privilege access with confidence in even the most complex environments. This provides our customers visibility to strengthen access controls on their critical resources while maintaining the agility their business demands as they scale in the cloud.

Empowering transformation through data and network security

Our customers are eager to transform their businesses, but they need confidence that their security can keep pace with rapid innovation. This is especially true when it comes to protecting their networks and data at scale. During the keynote, Noopur Davis, CISO of Comcast, shared how her organization protects their vast network and customer data while enabling rapid innovation. With millions of customers relying on their services, Comcast’s approach resonated with me: security shouldn’t just defend, it should enable transformation.

We’re delivering on this vision with new capabilities that simplify security at scale. Today, I announced that AWS Certificate Manager now allows you to export ACM-issued public certificates and their private keys for use inside or outside of AWS, giving you automated certificate management with the flexibility to help secure your workloads. We’re also expanding AWS Shield with enhanced network and application protection that performs a network security analysis to identify configuration issues and provides remediation recommendations. You can even use AWS generative AI powered assistant Amazon Q Developer to gain actionable insights using simple natural language. These innovations help teams protect their data and stay ahead of evolving threats even as their environments grow more complex.

Elevating threat detection and response

Our customers have shared their challenges in keeping pace with the evolving threat landscape, especially as they scale their cloud operations. While traditional automation helps manage growing complexity, AI represents an even more powerful opportunity to transform security operations. When implemented thoughtfully, AI dramatically improves our ability to spot complex attack patterns, reduce false positives, and automate responses at massive scale.

Today at re:Inforce, I announced two key security innovations: expanded capabilities in Amazon GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection and enhanced AWS Security Hub that directly address these needs. Together, these services help simplify security at scale. GuardDuty uses AWS-trained AI and machine learning (AI/ML) models to detect sophisticated multi-stage threats and provide actionable insights, while Security Hub prioritizes critical security issues by automatically analyzing and correlating security signals into clear, prioritized actions. This approach gives teams the confidence to scale their operations, knowing they can detect and respond to security risks efficiently across their entire AWS environment.

Accelerating the journey to better security

While advanced capabilities like AI and automation help strengthen security operations, the foundation matters most. Moving to the cloud represents a transformative opportunity to build on a fundamentally stronger security foundation than most organizations can ever hope to achieve with on-premises environments. When migrating to AWS, you reduce the need to manage physical infrastructure security while gaining access to built-in protections that are continuously updated and maintained.

Successful cloud adoption means going beyond simple lift-and-shift. Modernization is key to realizing these benefits. By moving solutions further up the stack to use managed services like AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), or AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), you benefit from security controls that are built in rather than bolted on. These services are continuously patched and maintained by AWS, freeing your teams to focus on innovating for your customers. After all, the fastest path to better security is the one where core protections are already built in.

Partnering for security success

Security transformation isn’t a journey organizations need to take alone. Throughout my career, I’ve seen how the right partnerships can accelerate success, bringing fresh perspectives and deep expertise to complex challenges. Our security partners help customers across the four pillars we discussed today, from implementing identity solutions to modernizing security operations. They understand both the technical complexities and the business realities of scaling security in the cloud, often bringing valuable industry-specific experience that helps organizations move faster with confidence.

Looking ahead

As you scale your operations in the cloud, our goal is to give you the confidence to move quickly while maintaining strong security controls. When security scales naturally with your business, teams can focus on building what’s next instead of managing infrastructure.

To dive deeper into how AWS designs, builds, and operates security at unprecedented scale, I encourage you to join our Innovation Talks at re:Inforce. These hour-long sessions explore the key pillars of modern cloud security: secure foundations, resilient architectures, AI-powered innovations, and large-scale threat intelligence.

As I step into my role as AWS CISO, I’m energized by the opportunity ahead. For nearly 20 years, AWS has maintained a unique culture of security that enables us to innovate rapidly while shipping securely. As we navigate the landscape of generative AI and rapid technological change, earning your trust means not just keeping pace with innovation, but helping to make it even more successful. I couldn’t be more excited to carry this mission forward.

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

Amy Herzog

Amy Herzog

Amy is Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at AWS where she leads a global organization of cloud security professionals in a company in which security is the top priority. Prior to joining AWS, Amy served as CISO for Amazon’s Devices and Services, Media and Entertainment, and Advertising businesses, overseeing the security of consumer technology offerings such as Alexa+ and Ring, and playing a key role in the secure development of Project Kuiper, Amazon’s initiative to provide fast, reliable broadband to customers and communities around the world through low earth orbit satellites. Amy’s career spans more than two decades at the intersection of cybersecurity, innovation, and enterprise transformation. She spent 15 years at the MITRE Corporation, developing cutting-edge solutions for complex security challenges across government and industry. She also held leadership roles at Pivotal Software, VMware and Travelers Insurance, and co-founded two startups focused on technology-driven business transformation. Amy holds a BA in Mathematics from Pomona College and an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. She is also the author of several publications and holds two patents.

How AWS improves active defense to empower customers

Post Syndicated from Stephen Goodman original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-aws-improves-active-defense-to-empower-customers/

At AWS, security is the top priority, and today we’re excited to share work we’ve been doing towards our goal to make AWS the safest place to run any workload. In earlier posts on this blog, we shared details of our internal active defense systems, like MadPot (global honeypots), Mithra (domain graph neural network), and Sonaris (network mitigations). We’re still inventing new ways to improve the effectiveness of threat intelligence and automated response to detect and help prevent attacks. Today we’ll share advancements in active defense related to malware, software vulnerabilities, and AWS resource misconfigurations. Like the other posts we linked to, these are constantly improving capabilities that our customers get just for being on the AWS network. We’ll discuss these topics in more depth at re:inforce 2025 during Innovation Talk SEC302.

Stopping malware from spreading

Financially motivated threat actors try to gain access to a wide array of networked assets. The more resources they control, the more places they can hide, and the longer they can profit from their abusive operations. As such, threat actor malware often contains modules to scan for new targets, replicate binaries over the network, and then repeat. If left unchecked, such rapidly spreading behavior can lead to network congestion, service availability loss, and data destruction. We want to help prevent this behavior to the greatest degree possible.

One effective strategy we employ is identifying the threat actor’s key infrastructure where malware is centrally controlled. We use a variety of techniques to identify, verify, track, and disrupt threat infrastructure. Using network traffic logs, honeypot interactions, and malware samples from an array of sensor positions, we mitigate botnets, abusive proxies, and peer-to-peer malware. Over the past 12 months, AWS helped prevent over 4 million malware infection attempts across 315 thousand distinct Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. By protecting workloads from these malware infections, we not only protect our network and our customers, but also the broader internet from further malware expansion.

Advancements in threat hunting and mitigating software vulnerabilities

At Amazon, we’re proud to support software vulnerability research with programs for bug bounty, vulnerability disclosure, and open source contribution. We’ve also become a more active participant in the CVE process by becoming a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) for the software and services provided by Amazon. Thanks to the public CVE database, we see vulnerability research accelerating as reported CVEs have grown by 21 percent year-over-year since 2013, with over 40 thousand CVEs published in 2024. This virtuous cycle of finding and resolving vulnerabilities improves cyber security over time, but AWS sees threat actors searching for unresolved vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to resources.

We’ve expanded MadPot and Sonaris to identify and stop a broader range of malicious vulnerability scanning and exploitation activity, protecting every AWS customer from vulnerability exposure. We’ve added hundreds of new detections and MadPot service emulations to identify real attacks. As we’ve expanded our visibility, we’ve continued blocking hundreds of millions of CVE exploit attempts daily across the AWS network.

As we’ve made these active defense systems better at stopping CVE exploit attacks, the total number of attacks has gone down by over 55 percent in the last 12 months, as shown in Figure 1. There are many factors outside our control in this observation, but we’re happy to see fewer CVE exploit attacks. This trend coincides with the detection, regionalization, latency, and guardrail improvements we’ve made in 2025. No system can block everything, so fewer exploit attempts mean less risk across a wide range of workloads.

Figure 1: Chart showing the decrease in global malicious vulnerability exploit attempts

Figure 1: Chart showing the decrease in global malicious vulnerability exploit attempts

This work to identify known exploits in the wild directly benefits users of vulnerability intelligence in Amazon Inspector, which provides an Amazon Inspector score for customers to prioritize where to spend security hardening resources. This includes the most recent date of observed exploitation attempts, the MITRE ATT&CK techniques associated with the exploit activity, and the industries targeted.

Protecting architectures built on AWS

AWS actively defends compute and network resources for our customers; we also defend the distinct AWS-native resources that customers rely on. AWS access key credentials are a critical resource that allow access to customer accounts. The AWS Identity and Access Management best practices share proven techniques for customers to keep their credentials from being abused. Through active defense, we do even more to help customers who haven’t yet adopted these best practices.

Each day, AWS helps prevent an average of 167 million malicious scanning connections seeking unintentionally exposed AWS access key pairs. In case access keys are discovered through other means, we’ve expanded our protection of customer-managed IAM credentials. When our threat intelligence analytics show that a customer-managed credential is known by a threat actor, we put mitigations in place to restrict access to highly privileged operations. We also send customized notifications to help customers identify how the credential was exposed. These efforts are paying off for our customers every day; the following response is a good example of what we hear regularly:

This is a key that we already rotated a few weeks ago based on another alarm from you. It turned out that the new rotated key happened to be in your second alarm to us. So it meant that the app that the key was linked to was still leaking it.

So on Monday we sat down with the dev team, found where the app was leaking some secrets from, we patched it, I rotated all the exposed secrets (it was more than the IAM key) and we plugged in the extra security in the app.

So thanks again for those alerts, they are very precious.
– AWS Customer

In a specific case of threat activity in November and December of 2024, customers reported ransomware activity against their objects in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) storage. We saw that these ransom threats were highly correlated with exposed customer-managed IAM keys. We applied quarantines to the exposed keys, taking care to make sure that normal customer operations could continue safely. We re-sent our proactive notifications to customers about keys that were likely exposed, because the risk of an attack was elevated. During this period, we worked together with customers to deactivate over 30 thousand exposed credentials. Since this threat activity began, AWS has helped prevent over 943 million malicious attempts to encrypt customer Amazon S3 objects.

These credential exposure detections flow into Amazon GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection, simplifying threat detection and response operations for modern cloud environments.

Better together

The approach AWS takes to active defense shows how security can be improved by layering protections across the infrastructure stack and using threat intelligence to drive risk reduction. By building active defense into our services at no extra cost, AWS helps our customers stay protected from a wide range of threats.

While we continue to constantly improve our protections for our customers, some of our work is by nature probabilistic, because we never see inside customer workloads. We don’t apply active defense in situations where the detection is ambiguous, because that might impact our customers’ production systems. To stay secure, customers should never let down their own defenses. AWS security services like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Shield Advanced, AWS WAF, AWS Network Firewall, Amazon GuardDuty, and Amazon Inspector provide prevention, detection, and response that customers can configure for their unique needs. The good news is that by working together, we’re making the internet safer for everyone.

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

Stephen Goodman

Stephen Goodman

As a senior manager for Amazon active defense, Stephen leads data-driven programs to protect AWS customers and the internet from threat actors.

Tom Scholl

Tom Scholl

AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer, Tom collaborates with networks across the globe to stop cyberattacks by tracking traffic from bad actors at its source.

AI security strategies from Amazon and the CIA: Insights from AWS Summit Washington, DC

Post Syndicated from Danielle Ruderman original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/ai-security-strategies-from-amazon-and-the-cia-insights-from-aws-summit-washington-dc/

Speakers during AWS Summit Washington, DC 2025 on June 10, 2025.

At this year’s AWS Summit in Washington, DC, I had the privilege of moderating a fireside chat with Steve Schmidt, Amazon’s Chief Security Officer, and Lakshmi Raman, the CIA’s Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer. Our discussion explored how AI is transforming cybersecurity, threat response, and innovation across the public and private sectors. The conversation highlighted several key themes: how organizations can leverage AI to improve security outcomes, the rise of agentic AI and its impact on security, the importance of maintaining human oversight in AI systems, workforce development strategies, and practical approaches to implementing AI securely in enterprise environments. Below are a few excerpts from our conversation.

On leveraging AI to improve security outcomes

Steve Schmidt: “We’ve applied AI internally at Amazon in a couple of places that led to some significant benefits, including in the application security review process. By training our large language models internally on prior security reviews that we’ve done, it has allowed us to apply the knowledge and learning that our more senior staff have embodied in the documents that the LLM was trained on and expose that to our more junior staff. It really raises the bar on the absolute level of security that we can offer.”

Lakshmi Raman: “In the cybersecurity realm, we’re thinking about how AI helps us in our accreditation and authorization process, helping us ensure that the process to get systems accredited is going as quickly as possible, because the industry is moving so fast. Another area that we’re applying AI and machine learning is triaging data. We have vast amounts of data that comes in at an exponential rate, so we need to be able to go through it quickly so that we can surface insights. You can imagine a cybersecurity analyst who traditionally has gone through network data manually in order to think about blocking suspicious IP addresses or connections. Now there’s an opportunity to do all of that really efficiently and let the security analysts make the decision.”

On the rise of agentic AI and its implications for security

Steve Schmidt: “The biggest change we’re seeing right now in AI is the rise of agentic AI. The reason agentic AI is particularly interesting is that it brings with it a set of challenges about ensuring the software is taking actions within the context of the person who’s asking it…Think about that in the context of a government organization, where you have sets of information that are restricted to certain populations, there are classification decisions, access control limitations, and reasons that you can access certain data that have to be present before you can do so. Agentic AI brings opportunities—you can take actions using software automatically—but also challenges: how do we make sure that the software is doing exactly the right thing every single time, and more importantly, that we can prove what it did to stakeholders and regulators?”

Lakshmi Raman: “AI agents definitely have an opportunity to transform enterprise automation. Leveraging them to do complex multi-step workflows—to do tool calling across a variety of databases and other foundational tools—has tremendous potential, with a human as a crucial step to review what’s going on.”

On the importance of maintaining human oversight with AI

Lakshmi Raman: “In my world, I spend a lot of time thinking about how AI is impacting the workforce. One of the areas we’re looking at is the intersection between AI and our people. AI is able to speed up the processing and do automation, but at the end of the day, it’s really about who is taking on the risk, or deciding the intents and making the decisions. Whatever the machine output happens to be, really it’s about the human who’s deciding the level of oversight, the risk to take, and even whether to intervene.”

Steve Schmidt: “One thing that many people don’t realize about AI systems is that they’re nondeterministic. What nondeterminism means is you can ask an AI model the same question 100 times, and you will not get the same answer every time. So, having a human who can make a judgment about what the AI comes up with is critically important. We look at it this way: if you’re just asking a question and getting an answer, that may be one set of scrutiny that you have to get assistance. But if you’re going to take an action, you’ve got to be really sure the AI is correct. There has to be that skilled person that Lakshmi spoke about, at the end of the AI use process saying, ‘Yes, this is the right thing to do at this point in time with this context.’”

On building an AI-savvy security workforce

Steve Schmidt: “There’s a real problem in our industry: we don’t have enough security people. We simply can’t hire enough people with the right skills to do this job. What we’ve we found is that AI allows us to do a lot of the heavy lifting for the security staff, using tooling that used to have to be done by humans. Our staff is actually materially happier with their jobs if we remove a lot of that grunt work from them, which is super important. You want to keep the employees you have, so you give them tooling that helps them get the job done more efficiently, and they enjoy their job.”

Lakshmi Raman: “We’re looking for people who can live between the intersection of technology and social intelligence, people who can understand how those two areas can potentially interact around human behavior and how to think about future activities. When we’re thinking about analysts, for example, we’re thinking about people who have critical thinking skills, who can demonstrate analytic rigor, who can think multiple steps ahead with incomplete information. We’re also looking for people who have digital acumen with an understanding of cloud and cyber and AI, so that we have those technical skills in house. And finally, people who are interested in lifelong learning and curiosity, because threats change over the years. We need people who understand and are willing to learn about that.”

On advice for security leaders as AI accelerates

Steve Schmidt: “When you’re looking at making a decision, ask the person who’s bringing the information to you: ‘Why can’t AI do this?’ And if they don’t have an answer, ask ‘When will it be able to and under what condition?’ Move it into the now, the probable, the possible, and make it real for all of your staff all the time. If they’re not intentionally making that decision, they’re missing an opportunity.”

Lakshmi Raman: “You’ve got to get training out there for your users. We think of it at three different levels. First is our general workforce—which might be the most important user base—people who are sitting side by side with our AI practitioners and can help describe the workflows that need automation. Then we think about it for our practitioners, so they are keeping up with the latest. And then finally, our senior executives, who can think about how they can transform their organization with AI and generate that buy-in from the top level.”

AI is not just changing what we can do, but how we work. As Steve and Lakshmi emphasized, the most successful AI implementations will be those that thoughtfully balance automation with human oversight, focusing on use cases that deliver tangible value while managing risks appropriately. For security professionals, understanding both the technical and human dimensions of AI will be critical as we navigate this changing space.

Danielle Ruderman

Danielle Ruderman

Danielle is a Senior Manager for the AWS Worldwide Security Specialist Organization, where she leads a team that enables global CISOs and security leaders to better secure their cloud environments. Danielle is passionate about improving security by building company security culture that starts with employee engagement.

AWS completes Police-Assured Secure Facilities (PASF) audit in Europe (London) AWS Region

Post Syndicated from Vishal Pabari original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-completes-police-assured-secure-facilities-pasf-audit-in-europe-london-aws-region/

We’re excited to announce that our Europe (London) AWS Region has renewed its accreditation for United Kingdom (UK) Police-Assured Secure Facilities (PASF) for Official-Sensitive data. Since 2017, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Europe (London) Region has been accredited under the PASF program. This demonstrates our continuous commitment to adhere to the heightened expectations of customers with UK law enforcement workloads. Our UK law enforcement customers who require PASF can continue to run their applications in the PASF-accredited Europe (London) Region in confidence.

The PASF is a long-established assurance process, used by UK law enforcement, as a method for assuring the security of facilities such as data centers or other locations that house critical business applications that process or hold police data. PASF consists of a control set of security requirements, an on-site inspection, and an audit interview with representatives of the facility.

The Police Digital Service (PDS) confirmed the accreditation renewal for AWS on May 27, 2025. A confirmation letter can be found on AWS Artifact. The UK police force and law enforcement organizations can also obtain confirmation of the compliance status of AWS through the Police Digital Service.

To learn more about our compliance and security programs, see AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.

Reach out to your AWS account team if you have questions or feedback about PASF compliance.

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

Vishal Pabari

Vishal Pabari

Vishal is a Security Assurance Program Manager at AWS, based in London, UK. Vishal is responsible for third-party and customer audits, attestations, certifications, and assessments across EMEA. Vishal previously worked in risk and control, and technology in the financial services industry.

Tea Jioshvili

Tea Jioshvili

Tea is a Manager in AWS Security Assurance based in Berlin, Germany. She leads various third-party audit programs across Europe. She previously worked in security assurance and compliance, business continuity, and operational risk management in the financial industry for multiple years.

Building identity-first security: A guide to the Identity and Access Management track at AWS re:Inforce 2025

Post Syndicated from Rahul Sahni original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/building-identity-first-security-a-guide-to-the-identity-and-access-management-track-at-aws-reinforce-2025/

AWS re:Inforce 2025: June 16-18 in Philadelphia, PA
Join us at AWS re:Inforce 2025 from June 16 to 18 as we dive deep into identity and access management, where we’ll explore how organizations are securing identities at scale. As the traditional security perimeter continues to dissolve in our hybrid and multi-cloud world, this year’s sessions showcase how AWS customers are building comprehensive identity-centric security strategies that span workforce and customer identities. From authenticating and authorizing human and machine identities to implementing least privilege access controls and securing identities that help drive AI adoption, you’ll discover practical approaches to modernizing your identity architecture.

Whether you’re managing enterprise workforce identities across complex organizational structures or building customer-facing applications that require seamless and secure authentication experiences, the Identity and Access Management track offers insights for every security professional. We’ve carefully curated sessions that address today’s most pressing identity challenges, including zero trust implementation patterns, unified workforce identity management across cloud and on-premises environments, and scalable customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions. Through technical deep-dives, hands-on workshops, and customer case studies, you’ll learn how to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS IAM Identity Center, AWS Directory Services, Amazon Cognito, and other AWS services to build robust identity foundations that support both security and business agility.

In this post, we highlight some of the key sessions. With over 30 sessions dedicated to identity management, we feature valuable learnings for executives and practitioners alike. Let AWS experts and partners share practical challenges and solutions with you. Let’s explore what you can expect at this year’s conference.

Zero trust and principle of least privilege

IAM304 | Breakout session | Empowering developers to implement least-privilege IAM permissions
Wolters Kluwer, a global provider of professional information, software solutions, and services and GoTo Technologies (formerly LogMeIn Inc.), a U.S.-based software company that provides cloud-based remote work tools for collaboration and IT management use AWS IAM Access Analyzer to simplify and accelerate their journey to least privilege. Join this session to learn more about their use cases and their journey to empower their builders to refine IAM policies to remove excessive permissions. Gain insights into their strategies, best practices, and lessons learned for continuously monitoring unused permissions across their organization and building processes to streamline remediations.

IAM343 | Code talk | Scale Beyond RBAC: Transform App Access Control using AVP & Cedar
This session focuses on transforming an existing application from role-based access control (RBAC) to policy-based access control (PBAC) using Amazon Verified Permissions (AVP) and Cedar policy. The drive for least privilege has led to role explosion in RBAC model and necessitates a shift towards PBAC, augmenting RBAC with attribute-based access control (ABAC). You will learn how to move authorization logic out of application code and implementing a centralized PBAC model. Attendees will also learn to define permissions as policies using Cedar and seamlessly migrate from RBAC to PBAC with minimal application logic changes, enabling more granular and scalable access control.

Securing Identities in the AI era

IAM373 | Workshop | Identity without barriers: user-aware access for AWS analytics services
This hands-on workshop explores AWS IAM Identity Center’s Trusted Identity Propagation, teaching participants how to enable secure identity propagation across integrated applications. Through practical exercises, attendees will learn to configure identity propagation and use it with services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon Q Business, and more. Participants will gain experience with cross-account scenarios, audit logging configuration, and troubleshooting common integration challenges. You must bring your laptop to participate.

IAM321 | Lightning talk | Building trust in Agentic AI through authentication and access control
AI agents execute tasks for humans, operating independently with or without human presence, while collaborating seamlessly across on-premise and multi-cloud environments. This dynamic setup poses unique challenges in human/agent authentication, identity propagation/delegation, and resource authorization. Leverage Amazon Cognito, Verified Permissions, and Bedrock to master effective Identity and Access Management (IAM) for your AI agents. Through real-world examples using OAuth2-based identity management, machine-to-machine authentication, and policy-based access control, you’ll unlock the ability to scale complex agent interactions securely, empowering you to build robust, scalable Agentic AI solutions.

IAM441 | Code Talk | The Right Way to Secure AI Agents with Code Examples
GenAI agents run tasks on behalf of human users with or without users being present, and often interact with each other across on-premise and different cloud providers. This brings new challenges in identity authentication, propagation, delegation, and resource authorization in the overall agentic AI solution. Learn how Amazon Cognito’s OAuth2-based identity management, machine-to-machine authentication, combined with Amazon Verified Permission’s fine-grained authorization can enable secure delegation patterns for AI agents, while preserving human identity and consent, agent machine identity, and other request context throughout the agent chain. We’ll walk through real-world examples with agents built on Amazon Bedrock or other frameworks.

Workforce identity management

IAM302 | Breakout session | Workforce identity for gen AI and analytics
Managing secure, consistent workforce access for generative AI and analytics is critical for unlocking innovation while protecting sensitive data. In this demo-filled session, you’ll see how centralized identity management and trusted identity propagation can deliver a user-centric data access experience. You’ll also learn how AWS IAM Identity Center simplifies access to AWS services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, and AWS Lake Formation, while enabling fine-grained access to data based on user identity to help meet your security and compliance needs.

IAM341 | Code Talk | Visualizing Workforce Identity: Graph-Based Analysis for Access Rights
Discover how to gain deep insights into workforce identity relationships and resource access patterns by visualizing AWS IAM Identity Center data using graph databases. Learn how you can explore complex identity relationships, permission inheritance and resource access across your organization; get practical approaches to ingestion of identity data, creating graph queries for security analysis, and building visualization dashboards to help identify potential resource access risks. We’ll explore real-world scenarios for detecting excessive permissions, analyzing group memberships and resource access, and tracking resource access rights changes over time to strengthen your identity security posture.

Customer and Machine identity management

IAM332 | Chalk Talk | Securing and monitoring machine identities with Amazon Cognito
Unlock the power of secure machine-to-machine (M2M) authorization using Amazon Cognito’s OAuth2 client credentials flow. This session dives deep into implementing M2M authorization, featuring real-world optimization strategies for both security and cost. Learn essential security best practices, multi-tenant reference architectures, and monitoring techniques that ensure your M2M usage remains efficient and secure. Whether you’re building microservices, handling API authorization, or scaling your distributed systems, this session will equip you with actionable insights and patterns for successful M2M implementations. Bring your challenges and questions for an interactive discussion on Cognito-powered M2M authorization.

IAM372 | Workshop | Building CIAM Solutions with Amazon Cognito
Learn how to use Amazon Cognito for your solutions’ CIAM needs. Use hands on examples to build fully functional solutions and see some of the new features in action like the new Managed Login UI, Passwordless logins now supported natively and more.

AWS identity foundation

IAM305 | Breakout session | Establishing a data perimeter on AWS, featuring Block, Inc.
Organizations are storing an unprecedented and increasing amount of data on AWS for a range of use cases including data lakes, analytics, machine learning, and enterprise applications. They want to make sure that sensitive non-public data is protected from unintended access. In this session, dive deep into the controls that you can use to create a data perimeter to help ensure that only your trusted identities are accessing trusted resources from expected networks. Hear from Block, Inc. a leading fintech company about how they use data perimeter controls in their AWS environment to meet their security objectives.

IAM451 | Builders session | Securing GenAI Apps: Fine-Grained Access Control for Amazon Bedrock Agents
Want to secure GenAI applications accessing your organizational data? Learn how to implement intelligent access controls for Amazon Bedrock-powered applications accessing your organizational data. In this builder’s session, you’ll build a defense-in-depth approach that combines authentication using Amazon Cognito and fine-grained authorization with Amazon Verified Permissions to secure access for Bedrock AI Agents. Implement layered permissions that protect sensitive data without limiting your GenAI capabilities.

Conclusion

As organizations continue to navigate the complexities of modern identity architecture, implementing a robust IAM framework remains critical for maintaining security posture while enabling seamless access across hybrid environments. The disappearance of the identity perimeter and the shift towards identity-first security demands a more sophisticated approach to authentication and authorization workflows, making continuous validation and adaptive access policies paramount. The community at re:inforce, strives to provide you with solutions, tactics, and strategies that you can use to propel your business forward.

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

Rahul Sahni

Rahul Sahni

Rahul is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at AWS Security. An avid Amazonian, Rahul embodies the company’s principle of Learn and Be Curious in both his professional and personal life. With a passion for continuous learning, he thrives on new experiences and adventures. Outside of his professional work, he enjoys experimenting with new dishes from around the world.

Apruva More

Apruva More

Apurva is a part of the AWS Security, Identity, and Compliance team, with 14 years of experience in global product marketing across both startups and large enterprises. Known for her expertise in market positioning, competitive analysis, and customer insights, she has launched products that resonate with target audiences and drive revenue growth, while collaborating cross-functionally to align product vision with market needs and business goals.

Building secure foundations: A guide to network and infrastructure security at AWS re:Inforce 2025

Post Syndicated from Brandon Carroll original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/building-secure-foundations-a-guide-to-network-and-infrastructure-security-at-aws-reinforce-2025/

AWS re:Inforce 2025: June 16-18 in Philadelphia, PA

A full conference pass is $1,099. Register today with the code flashsale150 to receive a limited time $150 discount, while supplies last.

Securing cloud infrastructure has never been more critical as organizations continue to expand their digital footprint and embrace modern architectures. At AWS re:Inforce 2025, the Network and Infrastructure Security track brings together security experts, practitioners, and industry leaders to share insights on building and maintaining secure, automated, and observable cloud foundations.This year’s track focuses on several key themes that are shaping the future of cloud security. Learn how to implement comprehensive defense-in-depth strategies through multiple layers of controls, from perimeter to workload protection. Discover the latest approaches to network visibility and inspection, including tools and architectures for deep packet inspection and enhanced traffic analysis across cloud environments.As organizations scale their cloud presence, automated policy management becomes crucial. This track showcases solutions and approaches for scaling security policy deployment, management, and compliance validation through automation and infrastructure as code (IaC). You’ll also dive deep into zero trust infrastructure implementations, exploring frameworks for identity-based network segmentation and access controls aligned with zero trust principles.With the growing complexity of distributed applications, protecting workloads across cloud, edge, and hybrid environments requires integrated security architectures. Sessions in this track demonstrate how to build comprehensive protection strategies that secure your entire infrastructure footprint while maintaining operational excellence.

Whether you’re just beginning your cloud security journey or leading mature enterprise security initiatives, the Network and Infrastructure Security track at re:Inforce 2025 will equip you with practical guidance and actionable insights to advance your organization’s security posture. Join in on the fun, and register for re:Inforce 2025!

Breakout sessions, chalk talks, and lightning talks

Breakout sessions are lecture-style, 1-hour sessions delivered by AWS experts, customers, and partners—perfect for deepening your knowledge on important topics, gaining actionable insights, and connecting with industry leaders.

Chalk talks are 1-hour long, highly interactive sessions with a small audience. This format is ideal for diving deep into specific topics, engaging directly with AWS experts, and getting your questions answered in real time.

Lightning talks are short (20 minutes) theater presentations dedicated to a specific customer story, service demo, or AWS Partner offering.

NIS301 | Breakout session | Egress control deployments made easy
Speakers: Sofía Aluma (AWS), Jesse Lepich (AWS)
Discover the latest AWS Network Firewall features that simplify implementation and enhance your security posture. In this hands-on workshop, learn how recent updates to AWS Network Firewall and Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall streamline deployment, reduce threat exposure, and strengthen security policies. We’ll share practical recommendations for configuring firewall rules that match your specific use cases and help verify that your security controls meet intended objectives.

NIS302 | Breakout session | How Itaú Bank leverages AWS Shield Advanced to combat DDoS events
Speakers: Douglas Lopes (AWS), Guilherme Greco (AWS), Ricardo Donadel (Itaú Bank)
Learn how Itaú, Latin America’s largest bank, uses AWS Shield Advanced to protect their critical financial infrastructure from sophisticated DDoS events. In this session, Itaú’s security team shares how they architected their defense strategy by integrating Shield Advanced with existing security operations and collaborating with the AWS DDoS Response Team. Discover how they maintain robust protection while meeting financial regulatory requirements and examine the business value of their implementation. Whether you work in financial services or other regulated industries, you’ll gain actionable insights for enterprise-grade DDoS protection.

NIS303 | Breakout session | Thinking beyond traditional firewalling architectures
Speakers: Tom Adamski (AWS), Ankit Chadha (AWS)
In this session, we’ll discuss a brave new world where we think beyond traditional firewalling architectures. We’ll explore the use-cases that require firewalls including workload-to-workload, client-to-workload, and workload-to-internet traffic flows. After defining the use cases, we’ll discuss AWS services that allow customers to retain their desired security posture without inserting inline firewalls. We’ll wrap with specific considerations on when firewalling is a good option. For example, for scenarios when customers require AppId-like functionality, or for creating data loss prevention (DLP) deployments for egress traffic.

NIS304 | Breakout session | Integrate Zero Trust into your cloud network
Speakers: Dave DeRicco (AWS)
In this session, learn how to adopt Zero Trust alongside traditional network security functions such as firewalls and VPNs. Explore how services like Amazon VPC Lattice and AWS Verified Access complement your existing network security posture by leveraging identity and network controls to continuously authenticate and monitor access. and how these services can integrate into your existing network architecture. Learn about common adoption approaches and migration patterns and hear best practices for building Zero Trust mechanisms into a secure, modern network architecture.

NIS305 | Breakout session | Advanced network defense: From basics to global scale with AWS Cloud WAN
Speakers: Sidhartha Chauhan (AWS)
Starting with core security principles, this session demonstrates how to build robust network security architectures in AWS. Learn to establish effective network isolation boundaries using AWS Cloud WAN and AWS PrivateLink, followed by implementing traffic filtering through strategic firewall deployments. We’ll compare centralized versus distributed inspection architectures, culminating in how AWS Cloud WAN’s service insertion and policy-based approach enables global-scale centralized inspection flows. Through practical scenarios, attendees will master designing scalable network security architectures that maintain security posture across complex cloud environments. Ideal for security engineers and architects managing enterprise-scale AWS deployments.

DAP332 | Chalk talk | Executive perspective: Risk management for generative AI workloads
Speakers: Jason Garman (AWS) & Mark Ryland (AWS)
Don’t let the perceived complexity of responsible AI keep you from deploying generative AI applications on AWS. In this chalk talk, we will present a framework for breaking down AI safety and security risks, introduce AWS best practices for keeping enterprise data secure in generative AI applications using zero trust principles, and mitigate safety risks using technologies such as Amazon Bedrock Guardrails. Discover as a group with fellow security leaders how to identify safety and security risks relevant to your workload, implement appropriate mitigation strategies, and measure efficacy over time.

NIS306 | Breakout session | Securing AWS networks: Observability meets defense-in-depth
Speakers: Anandprasanna Gaitonde (AWS), Ankush Goyal (AWS), Amish Shah (AWS)
AWS customers use multiple security services to build strong network defenses, but visibility into threats, misconfigurations, and vulnerabilities across multi-VPC and multi-account environments can remain a challenge. This session covers AWS network security fundamentals – Security Groups, NACLs, AWS Network Firewall, DNS Firewall, and Gateway Load Balancer—for a layered defense strategy. We will also highlight observability tools like VPC Flow Logs, Reachability Analyzer, and Network Access Analyzer to detect security gaps and troubleshoot access issues. By integrating these tools, organizations can proactively enhance network security, detect vulnerabilities, and ensure secure, scalable architectures across AWS accounts and environments.

NIS231 | Chalk talk | High noon duel: Live events tamed by AWS WAF
Speakers: Tzoori Tamam (AWS), Harith Gaddamanugu (AWS)
In this thrilling session, we’ll build a robust protection setup using AWS WAF and Amazon CloudFront, demonstrating how to fend off increasingly sophisticated live events. Learn to leverage Amazon CloudFront, configure rate-based rules, implement AWS WAF Managed Rule groups, bot control, and create custom defenses. As we construct our digital fortress, our resident “black hat” will launch progressively complex events, showcasing how each layer of defense performs under pressure. Suitable for both newcomers and experienced AWS security professionals.

NIS331 | Chalk talk | Enhance your cloud security infrastructure using Zero Trust techniques
Speakers: Pablo Sánchez Carmona (AWS), Adam Palmer (AWS)
Traditional perimeter-based security and network segmentation often fall short in today’s dynamic microservices environments, creating operational overhead and potential security gaps. Join us in this session to discuss how to evolve beyond conventional security models by implementing Zero Trust architecture in AWS. We will cover different services and techniques such as AWS Verified Access in the human-to-application connectivity, Amazon VPC Lattice for service-to-service communication, and the use of AWS Verified Permissions for fine-grained application authorization. We’ll explore how these services can work together to enable continuous authentication.

NIS332 | Chalk talk | Build secure connectivity with Amazon VPC Lattice and AWS PrivateLink
Speakers: Alexandra Huides (AWS), Jordan Rojas Garcia (AWS)
In this chalk talk, we review the best practices and reference architectures for building secure connectivity with Amazon VPC Lattice and AWS PrivateLink. We focus on service and resource oriented connectivity as we dive into the new VPC Lattice capabilities, such as support for VPC Resources and service network endpoints, and cross-region support for AWS PrivateLink.

NIS333 | Chalk talk | Build defense-in-depth network designs to safeguard apps and data
Speakers: Raghavarao Sodabathina (AWS), Brian Soper (AWS)
Strong adherence to architecture best practices and proactive controls are the foundation of web application security. These techniques allow developers to build applications that are more resilient. In this chalk talk, learn how to build a layered network security approach to achieve defense-in-depth; to protect, detect, and respond to issues faster; and to accelerate your secure migrations to AWS. Discover key considerations, best practices, and reference architectures that include Amazon VPC, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, AWS Shield, Application Load Balancer, and AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to achieve your defense-in-depth objectives.

NIS431 | Chalk talk | Cloud network defense: Advanced visibility and analysis on AWS
Speakers: Kyle Hanrahan (AWS), Anand Kumar Mandilwar (AWS)
Organizations struggle to maintain comprehensive network visibility in complex cloud environments. This session demonstrates how to implement advanced network monitoring and analysis using AWS’s native services. Learn to leverage VPC Flow Logs, AWS Network Firewall Logs, Route 53 Resolver Logs, AWS WAF Logs and other data sources for traffic analysis. Discover practical implementation of tools for enhanced security and real-time monitoring. Walk away with reference architectures and best practices for building robust network visibility solutions that scale across your AWS environment while maintaining performance. Perfect for security teams modernizing their network defense strategy.

NIS321 | Lightning talk | How Meta enabled secure egress patterns using AWS Network Firewall
Speakers: Syed Shareef (AWS), Robin Rodriguez (AWS)
Meta envisions 2025 as the breakthrough year for its leading AI assistant, aiming to reach over 1 billion people with highly intelligent and personalized interactions. Partnering with AWS, Meta has made substantial investments in AI infrastructure, providing its developers with specialized compute resources for AI training. To secure this ambitious initiative, Meta has had to evolve not just their cloud security but also culture and mindset to secure a growing AWS footprint/infrastructure. Meta leverages AWS Network Firewall (ANF) to centrally inspect and filter VPC traffic before reaching external destinations, using rule-based filtering to control domain access, block malicious IPs, and prevent data exfiltration.

NIS322 | Lightning talk | I didn’t know Network Firewall could do that!
Speakers: Brandon Carroll (AWS), Mary Kay Sondecker (AWS)
This lightning talk will uncover powerful yet often overlooked capabilities that can transform your network security game. In just 20 minutes, we’ll speed through eye-opening features including flow capture and flush operations, advanced Suricata rule capabilities, dynamic packet filtering tricks, and lesser-known integration patterns that even experienced practitioners might have missed. From stateful traffic manipulation to sophisticated protocol inspection and real-world architectural patterns, you’ll discover practical techniques to leverage AWS Network Firewall’s full potential. Whether you’re managing complex multi-account deployments or hunting for advanced threats, this rapid-fire session will equip you with new tools for your security arsenal.

NIS323 | Lightning talk | WAF logs to security gold: A 20-minute dashboard revolution
Speakers: Emmanuel Isimah (AWS), Victor Babasanmi (AWS)
Drowning in AWS WAF logs? Transform raw security data into actionable insights with Amazon CloudWatch dashboards. In this high-energy session, discover how to build powerful visualizations that expose threats in real-time. We’ll cut through the complexity to show you battle-tested patterns for threat detection and alerting that security teams love. Twenty minutes to level up your WAF monitoring game – no fluff, just results.

NIS421 | Lightning talk | VPN-less access to AWS private services with AWS Verified Access
Speakers: John Sol (AWS), Mike Cornstubble (AWS)
In hybrid environments where employees need to access a file server outside their corporate network, they typically use a VPN. This session demonstrates how to establish secure, VPN-free connectivity to an Amazon FSx for Windows File Server using the new TCP protocol support of AWS Verified Access (AVA). Learn how AVA provides fine-grained access controls using AWS.

Interactive sessions (builders’ sessions, code talks, and workshops)

Interact with small groups led by an AWS expert providing interactive learning about how to build on AWS. Each builders’ session begins with a short explanation or demonstration of what attendees are building, then it’s your turn to build! The expert guides you end-to-end through this hands-on experience. Or join code talks, our code-focused interactive sessions where AWS experts lead a discussion featuring live coding or code samples as they illuminate the why behind AWS solutions. Attendees are encouraged to ask questions and follow along.

Workshops are 2-hour interactive sessions where you collaborate in teams or work individually to solve real-world challenges by using AWS services, making them perfect for hands-on learning. Each workshop begins with a brief lecture, followed by dedicated time to work through the problem.

Note: Don’t forget to bring your laptop to build alongside AWS experts.

NIS251 | Builders’ session | Build dashboards to gain visibility into your network perimeter
Speakers: Victor Babasanmi (AWS), Tom Adamski (AWS), Todd Pula (AWS), Vamsi Manthapuram (AWS)
Effective network security requires comprehensive visibility into your security posture and traffic patterns. This hands-on session demonstrates how to build and customize Amazon CloudWatch dashboards for real-time insights into AWS Network Firewall operations. Learn to visualize critical metrics including dropped packets, traffic patterns, and potential threats. We’ll explore creating dynamic widgets to track stateful rule matches, analyze top talkers, and identify suspicious patterns. Through step-by-step guidance, discover how to monitor bandwidth utilization, track rule effectiveness, and create custom alarms. Leave with ready-to-implement templates for enhancing your security operations. You must bring your laptop to participate.

NIS252 | Builders’ session | Mastering Amazon VPC Block Public Access for secure cloud networks
Speakers: Ankush Goyal (AWS), Salman Ahmed (AWS), Kunj Thacker (AWS)>, Ravi Kumar (AWS)
Join this interactive workshop to explore Amazon VPC Block Public Access, a feature designed for secure, scalable cloud environments. Learn to block ingress and egress traffic, enforce compliance, and configure granular exclusions for public and private subnets, with a focus on both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. Through practical labs, you’ll enable Block Public Access, create exclusions, and use Reachability Analyzer to test connectivity before and after enabling the feature. By the end, you’ll be equipped to secure VPCs effectively while maintaining flexibility for modern workloads. You must bring your laptop to participate.

NIS351 | Builders’ session | Streamlining DNS resource sharing across multiple VPCs and accounts
Speakers: Aanchal Agrawal (AWS), Anushree Shetty (AWS), Mike Torro (AWS), Tyler Pack (AWS)
Amazon Route 53 Profiles is an innovative feature of Route 53 that enables the effortless sharing of hosted zones, resolver rules, and DNS firewall rules across multiple VPCs. This builders’ session will guide you through the process of creating Route 53 profiles and demonstrate how to restrict access using various features tailored to your specific needs, such as different environments. You must bring your laptop to participate.

NIS352 | Builders’ session | Accessing private VPC resources using CloudFront VPC origin
Speakers: Anushree Shetty (AWS), Ramya Mikkilineni (AWS), Aanchal Agrawal (AWS), Anjana Krishnan (AWS)
You can now privately access Amazon VPC resources, including load balancers and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloude (Amazon EC2) instances, and restrict these resources to be only accessed via Amazon CloudFront distribution through a new feature in CloudFront. In this builders’ session, we will set up a website located in a private subnet and access it via a CloudFront distribution. You must bring your laptop to participate.

NIS353 | Builders’ session | Scaling threat prevention on AWS with Suricata
Speakers: Ivo Pinto (AWS), Jesse Lepich (AWS), Michael Leighty (AWS), Miguel Silva (AWS)
Suricata is an open-source network intrusion prevention system (IPS) that includes a standard rule-based language for stateful network traffic inspection. AWS Network Firewall lets you define rules to inspect and control traffic to and from your VPC using IP, port, protocol, domain names, and general pattern matches. Building rules, in this format, for your security needs can be challenging but rewarding. During this session you will learn how you can utilize Suricata-compatible rules in AWS Network Firewall and build rulesets for common use cases as well as complex scenarios. You must bring your laptop to participate.

NIS354 | Builders’ session | Use AWS PrivateLink to set up private access to Amazon Bedrock
Speakers: Akshay Karanth (AWS), Du’An Lightfoot (AWS), Mike Gillespie (AWS), Salman Ahmed (AWS)
When building generative AI applications using Large Language Models on Amazon Bedrock, customers want to generate responses without going over the public internet or without exposing your proprietary data. This builders’ session introduces the Amazon Bedrock VPC endpoint, powered by AWS PrivateLink, as a solution for establishing secure and private connections between customer VPCs and Amazon Bedrock services. You’ll learn how this technology enables communication without public IP addresses, mitigating potential threat vectors from internet exposure. We’ll cover security challenges in generative AI, the architecture of VPC endpoint solution, and hands-on labs for implementation. You must bring your laptop to participate.

NIS451 | Builders’ session | Troubleshooting real-world perimeter protection scenarios
Speakers: Tzoori Tamam (AWS), Manuel Pata (AWS), Kaustubh Phatak (AWS)
Suspicious of an activity spike? Seeing odd traffic patterns? Introduced a new AWS WAF rule and want to make sure it is operating as it should? Join this session for a walkthrough of a day in the life of a security engineer operating AWS WAF, reviewing dashboards, exploring data in the logs, and building new dashboard widgets to make your life easier. You must bring your laptop to participate.

NIS341 | Code talk | A deep dive into Amazon VPC Lattice granular security
Speakers: Pablo Sánchez Carmona (AWS), Cristobal Lopez Callejon (AWS)
Join us for a session exploring Amazon VPC Lattice’s security capabilities and fine-grained access controls. We’ll explore authentication mechanisms, authorization policies, and service-level permissions that enable precise control over network traffic between services. You’ll learn how to leverage authorization policies in VPC Lattice to create layered security controls, and see practical examples of implementing Zero Trust principles within your application network. The session will cover best practices for auditing and monitoring service-to-service communications, managing cross-account access, and implementing security patterns for microservices architectures.

NIS342 | Code talk | Sticky situations: Building advanced AWS WAF honeypots for better security
Speakers: Harith Gaddamanugu (AWS), Manuel Pata (AWS)
Discover how to transform AWS WAF into a powerful threat intelligence platform by building sophisticated honeypots that attract, analyze, and adapt to emerging threats. In this code talk, we’ll demonstrate how to combine AWS WAF with AWS Lambda functions to create intelligent traps that not only capture malicious activity but also generate actionable security insights. Through live coding demonstrations, you’ll learn to implement advanced honeypot techniques including dynamic bait generation, automated attacker profiling, and real-time threat pattern analysis.

NIS231 | Chalk talk | High noon duel: Live events tamed by AWS WAF
Speakers: Tzoori Tamam (AWS), Harith Gaddamanugu (AWS)
In this thrilling session, we’ll build a robust protection setup using AWS WAF and Amazon CloudFront, demonstrating how to fend off increasingly sophisticated live attacks. Learn to leverage CloudFront, configure rate-based rules, implement WAF-managed rules and bot control, and create custom defenses. As we construct our digital fortress, our resident “black hat” will launch progressively complex attacks, showcasing how each layer of defense performs under pressure. Suitable for both newcomers and experienced AWS security professionals.

NIS331 | Chalk talk | Enhance your cloud security infrastructure using Zero Trust techniques
Speakers: Pablo Sánchez Carmona (AWS), Adam Palmer (AWS)
Traditional perimeter-based security and network segmentation often fall short in today’s dynamic microservices environments, creating operational overhead and potential security gaps. Join us in this session to discuss how to evolve beyond conventional security models by implementing Zero Trust architecture in AWS. We will cover different services and techniques such as AWS Verified Access in the human-to-application connectivity, Amazon VPC Lattice for service-to-service communication, and the use of AWS Verified Permissions for fine-grained application authorization. We’ll explore how these services can work together to enable continuous authentication.

NIS332 | Chalk talk | Build secure connectivity with Amazon VPC Lattice and AWS PrivateLink
Speakers: Alexandra Huides (AWS), Jordan Rojas Garcia (AWS)
In this chalk talk, we review the best practices and reference architectures for building secure connectivity with Amazon VPC Lattice and AWS PrivateLink. We focus on service and resource oriented connectivity as we dive into the new VPC Lattice capabilities, such as support for VPC Resources and service network endpoints, and cross-Region support for AWS PrivateLink.

NIS333 | Chalk talk | Build defense-in-depth network designs to safeguard apps and data
Speakers: Raghavarao Sodabathina (AWS), Brian Soper (AWS)
Strong adherence to architecture best practices and proactive controls are the foundation of web application security. These techniques allow developers to build applications that are more resilient. In this chalk talk, learn how to build a layered network security approach to achieve defense-in-depth; to protect, detect, and respond to issues faster; and to accelerate your secure migrations to AWS. Discover key considerations, best practices, and reference architectures that include Amazon VPC, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, AWS Shield, Application Load Balancer, and AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to achieve your defense-in-depth objectives.

NIS431 | Chalk talk | Cloud network defense: Advanced visibility and analysis on AWS
Speakers: Kyle Hanrahan (AWS), Anand Kumar Mandilwar (AWS)
Organizations struggle to maintain comprehensive network visibility in complex cloud environments. This session demonstrates how to implement advanced network monitoring and analysis using AWS’s native services. Learn to leverage VPC Flow Logs, AWS Network Firewall Logs, Route 53 Resolver Logs, WAF Logs and other data sources for traffic analysis. Discover practical implementation of tools for enhanced security and real-time monitoring. Walk away with reference architectures and best practices for building robust network visibility solutions that scale across your AWS environment while maintaining performance. Perfect for security teams modernizing their network defense strategy.

Register Now

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from industry experts and AWS leaders about building secure, automated, and observable cloud foundations. Register for AWS re:Inforce 2025 today to reserve your spot in these Network and Infrastructure Security sessions covering everything from Zero Trust implementations to advanced DDoS protection, network visibility, and defense-in-depth strategies. Browse the full re:Inforce catalog to explore additional tracks, partner sessions, and code talks that can complement your network security journey.

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

Brandon Carroll

Brandon Carroll

Brandon is a Senior Product Marketing Manager with AWS who helps customers understand and implement robust cloud security solutions. At AWS, Brandon translates complex security concepts into actionable guidance, helping organizations successfully implement AWS security services while providing clear paths for getting started with cloud security.

2025 ISO and CSA STAR certificates now available with three new Regions

Post Syndicated from Chinmaee Parulekar original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/2025-iso-and-csa-star-certificates-now-available-with-three-new-regions/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) successfully completed an onboarding audit with no findings for ISO 9001:2015, 27001:2022, 27017:2015, 27018:2019, 27701:2019, 20000-1:2018, and 22301:2019, and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) STAR Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) v4.0. EY CertifyPoint auditors conducted the audit and reissued the certificates on May 26, 2025. The objective of the audit was to assess the level of compliance with the requirements of the applicable international standards.

During this onboarding audit, we onboarded three new AWS Regions [Asia Pacific (Thailand), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Mexico (Central)] to the scope since the last certification issued on February 19, 2025.

For a full list of AWS services that are certified under ISO and CSA Star, see the AWS ISO and CSA STAR Certified page. Customers can also access the certifications in the AWS Management Console through AWS Artifact.

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

Chinmaee Parulekar

Chinmaee Parulekar

Chinmaee is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. She has 5 years of experience in information security. Chinmaee holds a Master of Science degree in Management Information Systems and professional certifications such as CISA.

Many voices, one community: Three themes from RSA Conference 2025

Post Syndicated from Anne Grahn original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/many-voices-one-community-three-themes-from-rsa-conference-2025/

RSA Conference (RSAC) 2025 drew 730 speakers, 650 exhibitors, and 44,000 attendees from across the globe to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California from April 28 through May 1.

The keynote lineup was eclectic, with 37 presentations featuring speakers ranging from NBA Hall of Famer Earvin “Magic” Johnson to public and private-sector luminaries such as former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and cryptography experts Tal Rabin, Whitfield Diffie, and Adi Shamir.

Topics aligned with this year’s conference theme, “Many Voices. One Community,” and focused on the security industry’s shared drive to foresee risks, counter threats, and embrace new challenges.

Three themes caught our attention: agentic AI, cryptography, and public-private collaboration.

Agentic AI

The potential of agentic AI to augment human decision-making was a common thread among conversations at the conference. Numerous sessions touched on the topic, and the desire of attendees to understand the technology and learn how to balance its risks and opportunities was clear.

Separating hype from reality

An AI agent is a software program that can interact with its environment (as detailed in Figure 1), collect data, and use the data to perform self-determined tasks to meet predetermined goals.

Figure 1: Generative AI agents

Figure 1: Generative AI agents

Agentic systems offer a fundamentally different approach compared to traditional software, particularly in their ability to handle complex, dynamic, and domain-specific challenges. While traditional systems rely on rule-based automation and structured data, agentic systems use large language models (LLMs)—a subset of generative AI—to operate autonomously. Agents can learn from interactions with users, and make nuanced, context-aware decisions while keeping human analysts in the loop.

Numerous RSAC speakers alluded to AI agents as the next frontier in enterprise transformation. Gartner® predicts that: “By 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024,” and “at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI, up from zero percent in 2024.”

However, as organizations build AI agents, understanding the concerns that come with them is critical.

“Agentic AI presents tremendous opportunities to deliver business value and innovative security outcomes. Production deployments require a balance between its capabilities, and robust security and trust mechanisms.”
—Hart Rossman, Global Services Security Vice President at AWS

In the RSAC keynote session The Five Most Dangerous New Attack Techniques…and What to Do for Each, Rob Lee, Chief of Research and Head of Faculty at SANS Institute noted that while security teams are embracing AI to amplify productivity, threat actors are doing the same. He pointed to MIT research that shows adversarial agent systems executing attack sequences are 47 times faster than human operators, with a 93 percent success rate in privilege escalation paths.

Safeguarding GenAI & Agentic Apps, Top 10 Risks in 2025, a half-day Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) event, focused on helping attendees distinguish real threats from hype. OWASP Gen AI Security Project team members and industry experts reviewed the 2025 OWASP Top 10 List for LLM and GenAI (shown in Figure 2), and introduced Agentic AI—Threats and Mitigations—the first in a series of guides from the OWASP Agentic Security Initiative (ASI) to provide a threat-model-based reference of emerging agentic threats and mitigations. Content feedback can be submitted to ASI in advance of the guide’s next release.

Figure 2: 2025 OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications

Figure 2: 2025 OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications

Agentic AI wins Cybersecurity Startup Accelerator

The second annual AWS and CrowdStrike Cybersecurity Startup Accelerator, in collaboration with the NVIDIA Inception program, took place during RSAC. A panel of judges—including George Kurtz, Founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, CJ Moses, Chief Information Security Officer at Amazon, and David Reber Jr., Chief Security Officer at NVIDIA—evaluated startups on innovation, market relevance, and go-to-market potential. Terra Security, a provider of agentic AI-powered, continuous web application penetration testing, was selected from a group of 10 finalists who pitched live. Two runners-up, Kenzo Security and Rig Security, were also recognized for their standout approaches to agentic AI-driven security.

Addressing AI risks

The need to consider your security posture when assessing overall AI readiness was emphasized throughout the conference. A defense-in-depth architecture can help mitigate risks with multiple layers of protection across both traditional and AI software components. Innovative solutions such as AI red teaming, AI behavioral sandboxing, and advanced tracing and evaluation of generative AI agents can enhance your security strategy with a proactive approach to securing AI.

Visit the following resources to help design, build, and operate AI systems: DevsecOps Revolution: Unleashing Generative AI for Automated Excellence, AWS generative AI security, responsible AI, and the Amazon AGI Labs Blog.

Cryptography

Encryption was another key topic. The FIDO Alliance hosted a half-day seminar that focused on developments in the global movement to passwordless technology such as passkeys—cryptographic keys designed to replace passwords by combining the power of public key cryptography with biometric authentication.

In Dude, Where’s My Password? The Challenges of Getting to Passwordless, Andy Ozment, Chief Technology Risk Officer and Executive Vice President at Capital One noted that 88 percent of data compromised in basic web application attacks reported in 2024 involved stolen credentials. Ozment pointed out that “going passwordless” through a combination of X.509 device certificates and FIDO2 passkeys presented Capital One with an opportunity to nearly eliminate entire classes of threats (as detailed in Figure 3), while increasing the quality of user experience.

Figure 3: Using passkeys to reduce risk while advancing user experience

Figure 3: Using passkeys to reduce risk while advancing user experience

Along the way, Ozment said, Capital One’s journey to passwordless was enabled by its transition from on-premises technology to going “all-in” on the public cloud. Watch the recording of his session or view the slides to learn more.

Post-quantum encryption

The state of post-quantum encryption was detailed in the popular Cryptographer’s Panel, moderated by Tal Rabin, Senior Principal Applied Scientist at AWS.

Panelist Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Professor at MIT underscored the impact of the quantum-resistant algorithm standardization process (Figure 4) started by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2016. “We now have two public key encryption algorithms, and three new digital signature algorithms that are standardized,” he pointed out.

Figure 4: Post-quantum encryption algorithms

Figure 4: Post-quantum encryption algorithms

The panelists agreed that even though quantum computers aren’t here yet, the time to deploy these algorithms is now. NIST recommends phasing out existing encryption methods by 2030 in its Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards report. However, Vaikuntanathan and Adi Shamir, the “s” in the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) public-key cryptosystem, advise organizations to take a hybrid approach that combines classic encryption algorithms such as RSA or Elliptic-curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) with post-quantum algorithms such as Module-Lattice-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM). This approach, which is used by AWS and recommended by The European Commission, offers protection against both current and future threats.

RSAC Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics

Dr. Shai Halevi, Senior Principal Applied Scientist at AWS, was presented with the Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics for remarkable contributions to many areas of cryptography, including fundamental theory, advanced cryptographic primitives, secure multi-party computations, homomorphic encryption, and cryptographic code obfuscation.

Figure 5: Dr. Shai Halevi receives RSAC award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics

Figure 5: Dr. Shai Halevi receives RSAC Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics

End-to-end encryption

Concerns about the recent US government group chat leak were also raised during the discussion. Public-key cryptography pioneer Whitfield Diffie noted that the use of an encrypted consumer messaging app to communicate classified information broke archiving laws. Because some commercial tools use 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption, which is “good enough” to protect communications, he predicted an increase in the use of consumer applications to protect sensitive information in unapproved ways.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently advised individuals and organizations to start using encrypted messaging apps. However, as the role of these applications in business communication expands, it’s important not to lose sight of recordkeeping and compliance obligations. Organizations should consider solutions that offer administrative controls and data retention capabilities along with encryption.

AWS Wickr, for example, is a messaging and collaboration service that protects messaging, calling, file sharing, screen sharing, and location sharing with 256-bit end-to-end encryption. The data retention and administrative controls that it provides help customers meet regulatory requirements and manage user and device data remotely.

Wickr is Department of Defense Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide Impact Level 5 (DoD CC SRG IL5) and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High authorized in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. It also meets compliance programs and standards such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) eligibility, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001, and System and Organization Controls (SOC) 1, 2, and 3.

Visit the AWS News Blog and the AWS Security Blog to learn about AWS passkey multi-factor authentication, how AWS is migrating to post quantum cryptography (PQC), and how we can help you implement a layered encryption strategy for your organization.

Public-private collaboration

Numerous sessions underlined the importance of collaboration to strengthening security. In his keynote, Johnson called attention to a lesson he learned on the basketball court—his peers made him stronger. “Larry Bird made me a better basketball player,” he said, relating his experience to the need for security teams to assist and learn from each other.

In Making America Safe Again Through Cyber Defense, Kristi Noem, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security equated cybersecurity with national security, and insisted that building on public-private partnerships is “incredibly important.” “Our goal,” she said, “is to use our maximum effect of cooperation to make sure that we’re going after bad actors.”

After assuring attendees that CISA will continue to be America’s cyber defense agency, she urged congress to reauthorize the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015. The law, which is set to expire in September, incentivizes businesses to share threat indicators with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and helps make sure that both the federal government and companies can take collaborative steps to address threats.

Panelists at an offsite threat intelligence discussion reiterated the ability of private industry to supplement government security capabilities. Adam Meyers, Senior VP, Counter Adversary Operations at CrowdStrike pointed out that technology companies often have more data and signals than governments. The CrowdStrike Falcon solution, he said, processes over 6 trillion events per day, and 55 million events per second at peak. This volume facilitates the detection of threat patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Similarly, Moses noted that the size and scale of AWS infrastructure gives us unique visibility into internet traffic. Our global network of sensors and associated disruption tools observe over 700 million threat interactions every day, out of which 450 million can be classified as malicious. Internal threat intelligence tools such as MadPot, our sophisticated global honeypot system, produce high-fidelity findings (pieces of relevant information) that can be used to drive proactive intelligence sharing, and reduce investigative workloads.

“We’ll work together in order to be able to put a bow on a case and hand it to the FBI and DOJ, such that they don’t have to expend a great amount of resources in order to go forward and try to figure things out that we already know.” —CJ Moses, Chief Information Security Officer and VP of Security Engineering at Amazon

An example of this is the disruption of the cybercriminal group known as Anonymous Sudan. The group was responsible for tens of thousands of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against critical infrastructure, corporate networks, and government agencies. With the help of tools like MadPot, AWS experts were able to identify the hosting provider infrastructure that the group used to launch the DDos attacks, and work with providers to disrupt them. Akamai SIRT, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, DigitalOcean, Flashpoint, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, SpyCloud, and other private sector entities also assisted law enforcement, leading to the indictment of two Anonymous Sudan leaders.

The value of combined perspectives

RSA Conference 2025 might be over, but the learning continues. Additional highlights that include the west stage keynotes, the Innovation Sandbox, and dozens of insightful sessions on topics such as the changing role of the CISO, women in cyber, and of course—cloud security—are available on demand.

If there’s one key takeaway, it’s a collective sense of transition. As we explore the benefits and risks of emerging AI technologies, encryption strategies, and information sharing, it’s important to remember that we cannot effectively combat threats in isolation. Security is a collective endeavor; only by working together can we adapt to evolving challenges and build cyber resilience.

For more information about cloud security, register to join AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft online at the SANS 2025 Cloud Security Exchange on August 21.

Anne Grahn

Anne Grahn

Anne is a Senior Worldwide Security GTM Specialist at AWS, based in Chicago. She has 15 years of experience in the security industry and focuses on effectively communicating cybersecurity risk. She maintains a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.

A deep dive into data protection sessions at AWS re:Inforce 2025

Post Syndicated from Rahul Sahni original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/a-deep-dive-into-data-protection-sessions-at-aws-reinforce-2025/

AWS re:Inforce 2025: June 16-18 in Philadelphia, PA

A full conference pass is $1,099. Register today with the code flashsale150 to receive a limited time $150 discount, while supplies last.

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), security is our top priority. We’re excited to announce the Data Protection track at AWS re:Inforce 2025, happening June 16–18, where we’ll explore how customers use AWS to push their innovation boundaries while protecting data in the age of quantum, AI, and digital sovereignty. This year’s sessions will spotlight innovative approaches to next-generation cryptography, trusted AI, privacy-enhancing technologies, and emerging best practices for safeguarding information across the entire data lifecycle.

The Data Protection track offers insights and practical guidance for organizations of all sizes, whether you’re new to AWS or an experienced security professional. We’ve carefully curated sessions that address today’s most pressing challenges, including regulatory compliance, cross-border data transfers, and protecting data in multi-cloud environments. From hands-on workshops about implementing encryption and data classification at scale to deep-dive technical sessions on the latest AWS data protection services, you’ll find content designed to help you build and maintain a robust data protection strategy.

In this post, we highlight key sessions that feature lecture-style presentations with real-world customer use cases, along with interactive small-group sessions led by AWS experts who will guide you through practical problems and solutions. Let’s explore what you can expect at this year’s conference.

Data access and management

DAP471-R1 | Workshop | Defend against ransomware with data defense, recovery, and response
Ransomware and malware can disrupt business applications. In this expert-level workshop, you will learn how to apply AWS Backup locking mechanisms, logically air-gapped vaults, and restore testing to help strengthen your cyber recovery posture. Experience hands-on configuration of air-gapped, immutable vaults and automated recovery point testing to meet your enterprise’s objectives. Explore how these features can be combined to build a comprehensive, recovery-focused data protection strategy to withstand evolving cyber threats. You must bring your laptop to participate.

Cryptography and post-quantum

DAP472 | Workshop | Examining hybrid post-quantum TLS key exchanges
This workshop provides a practical exploration of post-quantum cryptography, comparing its performance against classical algorithms and demonstrating real-world implementation using AWS services. You will learn how to establish quantum-safe tunnels using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and AWS SDK for Java v2, implementing hybrid post-quantum TLS for secure data transfer. The session covers critical aspects including CPU and bandwidth performance metrics of post-quantum key exchange algorithms, modifications to TLS handshake protocols, and integration with AWS Transfer Family. Hands-on demonstrations will illustrate how to protect sensitive communications against both current and future quantum computing threats through hybrid classical/quantum-resistant approaches. You must bring your laptop to participate.

DAP452 | Builders’ session | Cryptographic controls with AWS CloudHSM
Gain hands-on experience implementing strong cryptographic controls using AWS CloudHSM. Learn to deploy TLS offload with Nginx, integrate Windows code signing, and create custom key stores. Explore monitoring cryptographic key usage within FIPS 140-3 level 3 hardware security modules (HSMs), using the latest high-performance hsm2m.medium HSM types. This session shows how these advancements help you strengthen your security posture, meet stringent compliance requirements, simplify operational management, and scale your cryptographic operations to support growing workloads—all while maintaining the performance your applications demand. You must bring your laptop to participate.

Data migration and modernization

DAP302 | Breakout session | Fannie Mae’s practical path to modern PKI and certificate management
Explore Fannie Mae’s transformation of their public key infrastructure (PKI) from a legacy system to a cloud-native solution on AWS. This session details their phased migration strategy, addressing challenges such as decentralized trust store updates and securing buy-in from application teams. Learn how Fannie Mae overcame migration hurdles, including legacy dependencies and compliance requirements, to achieve 100 percent adoption while maintaining security and reducing certificate-related overhead. Gain insights into cost optimization, risk mitigation, and architectural best practices for enterprise-scale certificate management in the cloud. This presentation offers actionable strategies for organizations undertaking similar PKI modernization efforts. Finally, we share the latest in enterprise-scale certificate management in the cloud.

DAP322 | Lightning talk | How Monzo Bank protects critical workloads using AWS Nitro Enclaves
Monzo Bank deploys security-critical applications requiring a high level of assurance around code integrity, system hardening, and limited attack surface. They achieved this using reproducible builds and the cryptographic attestation and isolated compute environment provided by AWS Nitro Enclaves. In this talk, we describe the challenges they overcame in building and deploying production workloads using this approach and share what they learned along the way.

Data protection for AI

DAP201 | Breakout session | Veradigm’s security-first approach to amplifying potential with GenAI
How can organizations empower teams with generative AI capabilities while maintaining rigorous data security standards responsibly? Veradigm initially hesitated to adopt generative AI because of data privacy, security, and regulatory compliance concerns. Join Veradigm’s principal developer for internal AI solutions to discover how they implemented practical security measures to build and deploy a compliant generative AI assistant using Amazon Bedrock that enhanced their team capabilities while strengthening their security posture. Learn about essential security controls, architectural decisions, and valuable lessons learned from successfully implementing AI for employees operating in a highly regulated environment.

DAP332 | Chalk talk | Executive perspective: Risk management for generative AI workloads
Don’t let the perceived complexity of responsible AI keep you from deploying generative AI applications on AWS. In this chalk talk, we present a framework for breaking down AI safety and security risks, introduce AWS best practices for keeping enterprise data secure in generative AI applications using zero trust principles, and mitigate safety risks using technologies such as Amazon Bedrock Guardrails. Discover as a group with fellow security leaders how to identify safety and security risks relevant to your workload, implement appropriate mitigation strategies, and measure efficacy over time.

DAP371 | Workshop | Defend your AI: Mitigate prompt injection with Amazon Bedrock
Master the art of identifying and mitigating prompt injection vulnerabilities in generative AI systems through this hands-on workshop. Using Amazon Bedrock, you will explore both offensive and defensive prompt engineering techniques to understand the security implications of large language models in production environments. In this session, you learn how prompt injection attacks work, complete an interactive capture the flag style challenge attempting to exploit a simulated AI environment, and learn how to implement defensive controls using Amazon Bedrock Guardrails. You must bring your laptop to participate.

Data protection and compliance at scale

DAP331-R | Chalk talk | Architecting a secrets management strategy that scales
Dive deep into architectural patterns for enterprise secrets management in cloud-native environments. In this session, we dissect the implementation complexities of centralized versus decentralized secrets management and discuss the trade-offs between these patterns, including their impact on developer velocity, security, and operational overhead. You will learn how to use AWS services to implement a flexible secrets management strategy and manage secrets lifecycle that balances the needs of developers and security teams. We also cover best practices for centralized compliance and auditing regardless of your chosen architecture.

DAP202 | Breakout session | Navigating sovereignty requirements: Architectures and solutions on AWS
Evolving data protection regulations and digital sovereignty requirements mean that organizations are facing increasingly complex compliance requirements when using cloud capabilities. This breakout session explores practical architectural approaches for meeting sovereignty requirements on AWS, with a focus on European and global regulatory frameworks. We examine key architectural patterns that enable data residency control, operational transparency, and sovereign workload isolation. The session covers the AWS Sovereignty Pledge, including sovereign design best practices, as well as the upcoming AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

Advanced seat reservation

If you’re a registered attendee, you can secure your spot in sessions through reserved seating. To reserve your seat, sign in to the attendee portal, go to Event, and then select Sessions. Act quickly to make sure you get a place in your preferred sessions.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a security architect seeking to modernize your defenses or a security executive aiming to elevate your organization’s security posture to drive faster business growth, re:Inforce is your essential destination. With a roster of carefully vetted and certified AWS speakers, you can be confident that every moment at the conference will provide valuable insights and actionable strategies. Join us at re:Inforce to empower your team, protect your assets, and propel your business forward in the digital age.

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

Rahul Sahni

Rahul Sahni

Rahul is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at AWS Security. An avid Amazonian, Rahul embodies the company’s principle of Learn and Be Curious in both his professional and personal life. With a passion for continuous learning, he thrives on new experiences and adventures. Outside of his professional work, he enjoys experimenting with new dishes from around the world.