Earlier this month we launched the C5 Instances with Local NVMe Storage and I told you that we would be doing the same for additional instance types in the near future!
Today we are introducing M5 instances equipped with local NVMe storage. Available for immediate use in 5 regions, these instances are a great fit for workloads that require a balance of compute and memory resources. Here are the specs:
Instance Name
vCPUs
RAM
Local Storage
EBS-Optimized Bandwidth
Network Bandwidth
m5d.large
2
8 GiB
1 x 75 GB NVMe SSD
Up to 2.120 Gbps
Up to 10 Gbps
m5d.xlarge
4
16 GiB
1 x 150 GB NVMe SSD
Up to 2.120 Gbps
Up to 10 Gbps
m5d.2xlarge
8
32 GiB
1 x 300 GB NVMe SSD
Up to 2.120 Gbps
Up to 10 Gbps
m5d.4xlarge
16
64 GiB
1 x 600 GB NVMe SSD
2.210 Gbps
Up to 10 Gbps
m5d.12xlarge
48
192 GiB
2 x 900 GB NVMe SSD
5.0 Gbps
10 Gbps
m5d.24xlarge
96
384 GiB
4 x 900 GB NVMe SSD
10.0 Gbps
25 Gbps
The M5d instances are powered by Custom Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8175M series processors running at 2.5 GHz, including support for AVX-512.
You can use any AMI that includes drivers for the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and NVMe; this includes the latest Amazon Linux, Microsoft Windows (Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016), Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE, and CentOS AMIs.
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind about the local NVMe storage on the M5d instances:
Naming – You don’t have to specify a block device mapping in your AMI or during the instance launch; the local storage will show up as one or more devices (/dev/nvme*1 on Linux) after the guest operating system has booted.
Encryption – Each local NVMe device is hardware encrypted using the XTS-AES-256 block cipher and a unique key. Each key is destroyed when the instance is stopped or terminated.
Lifetime – Local NVMe devices have the same lifetime as the instance they are attached to, and do not stick around after the instance has been stopped or terminated.
Available Now M5d instances are available in On-Demand, Reserved Instance, and Spot form in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), US East (Ohio), and Canada (Central) Regions. Prices vary by Region, and are just a bit higher than for the equivalent M5 instances.
We have two new resources to help customers address their data protection requirements in Argentina. These resources specifically address the needs outlined under the Personal Data Protection Law No. 25.326, as supplemented by Regulatory Decree No. 1558/2001 (“PDPL”), including Disposition No. 11/2006. For context, the PDPL is an Argentine federal law that applies to the protection of personal data, including during transfer and processing.
A new webpage focused on data privacy in Argentina features FAQs, helpful links, and whitepapers that provide an overview of PDPL considerations, as well as our security assurance frameworks and international certifications, including ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018. You’ll also find details about our Information Request Report and the high bar of security at AWS data centers.
Additionally, we’ve released a new workbook that offers a detailed mapping as to how customers can operate securely under the Shared Responsibility Model while also aligning with Disposition No. 11/2006. The AWS Disposition 11/2006 Workbook can be downloaded from the Argentina Data Privacy page or directly from this link. Both resources are also available in Spanish from the Privacidad de los datos en Argentina page.
Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.
Here’s the press release announcing Microsoft’s agreement to acquire GitHub for a mere $7.5 billion. “GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects — and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud and any device.”
Tom Standage has a great story of the first cyberattack against a telegraph network.
The Blanc brothers traded government bonds at the exchange in the city of Bordeaux, where information about market movements took several days to arrive from Paris by mail coach. Accordingly, traders who could get the information more quickly could make money by anticipating these movements. Some tried using messengers and carrier pigeons, but the Blanc brothers found a way to use the telegraph line instead. They bribed the telegraph operator in the city of Tours to introduce deliberate errors into routine government messages being sent over the network.
The telegraph’s encoding system included a “backspace” symbol that instructed the transcriber to ignore the previous character. The addition of a spurious character indicating the direction of the previous day’s market movement, followed by a backspace, meant the text of the message being sent was unaffected when it was written out for delivery at the end of the line. But this extra character could be seen by another accomplice: a former telegraph operator who observed the telegraph tower outside Bordeaux with a telescope, and then passed on the news to the Blancs. The scam was only uncovered in 1836, when the crooked operator in Tours fell ill and revealed all to a friend, who he hoped would take his place. The Blanc brothers were put on trial, though they could not be convicted because there was no law against misuse of data networks. But the Blancs’ pioneering misuse of the French network qualifies as the world’s first cyber-attack.
Previously, I showed you how to rotate Amazon RDS database credentials automatically with AWS Secrets Manager. In addition to database credentials, AWS Secrets Manager makes it easier to rotate, manage, and retrieve API keys, OAuth tokens, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. You can configure Secrets Manager to rotate these secrets automatically, which can help you meet your compliance needs. You can also use Secrets Manager to rotate secrets on demand, which can help you respond quickly to security events. In this post, I show you how to store an API key in Secrets Manager and use a custom Lambda function to rotate the key automatically. I’ll use a Twitter API key and bearer token as an example; you can reference this example to rotate other types of API keys.
The instructions are divided into four main phases:
Store a Twitter API key and bearer token in Secrets Manager.
Create a custom Lambda function to rotate the bearer token.
Configure your application to retrieve the bearer token from Secrets Manager.
Configure Secrets Manager to use the custom Lambda function to rotate the bearer token automatically.
For the purpose of this post, I use the placeholder Demo/Twitter_Api_Key to denote the API key, the placeholder Demo/Twitter_bearer_token to denote the bearer token, and placeholder Lambda_Rotate_Bearer_Token to denote the custom Lambda function. Be sure to replace these placeholders with the resource names from your account.
Phase 1: Store a Twitter API key and bearer token in Secrets Manager
Twitter enables developers to register their applications and retrieve an API key, which includes a consumer_key and consumer_secret. Developers use these to generate a bearer token that applications can then use to authenticate and retrieve information from Twitter. At any given point of time, you can use an API key to create only one valid bearer token.
Start by storing the API key in Secrets Manager. Here’s how:
Figure 1: The “Store a new secret” button in the AWS Secrets Manager console
Select Other type of secrets (because you’re storing an API key).
Input the consumer_key and consumer_secret, and then select Next.
Figure 2: Select the consumer_key and the consumer_secret
Specify values for Secret Name and Description, then select Next. For this example, I use Demo/Twitter_API_Key.
Figure 3: Set values for “Secret Name” and “Description”
On the next screen, keep the default setting, Disable automatic rotation, because you’ll use the same API key to rotate bearer tokens programmatically and automatically. Applications and employees will not retrieve this API key. Select Next.
Figure 4: Keep the default “Disable automatic rotation” setting
Review the information on the next screen and, if everything looks correct, select Store. You’ve now successfully stored a Twitter API key in Secrets Manager.
Next, store the bearer token in Secrets Manager. Here’s how:
From the Secrets Manager console, select Store a new secret, select Other type of secrets, input details (access_token, token_type, and ARN of the API key) about the bearer token, and then select Next.
Figure 5: Add details about the bearer token
Specify values for Secret Name and Description, and then select Next. For this example, I use Demo/Twitter_bearer_token.
Figure 6: Again set values for “Secret Name” and “Description”
Keep the default rotation setting, Disable automatic rotation, and then select Next. You’ll enable rotation after you’ve updated the application to use Secrets Manager APIs to retrieve secrets.
Review the information and select Store. You’ve now completed storing the bearer token in Secrets Manager. I take note of the sample code provided on the review page. I’ll use this code to update my application to retrieve the bearer token using Secrets Manager APIs.
Figure 7: The sample code you can use in your app
Phase 2: Create a custom Lambda function to rotate the bearer token
While Secrets Manager supports rotating credentials for databases hosted on Amazon RDS natively, it also enables you to meet your unique rotation-related use cases by authoring custom Lambda functions. Now that you’ve stored the API key and bearer token, you’ll create a Lambda function to rotate the bearer token. For this example, I’ll create my Lambda function using Python 3.6.
Figure 8: In the Lambda console, select “Create function”
Select Author from scratch. For this example, I use the name Lambda_Rotate_Bearer_Token for my Lambda function. I also set the Runtime environment as Python 3.6.
Figure 9: Create a new function from scratch
This Lambda function requires permissions to call AWS resources on your behalf. To grant these permissions, select Create a custom role. This opens a console tab.
Select Create a new IAM Role and specify the value for Role Name. For this example, I use Role_Lambda_Rotate_Twitter_Bearer_Token.
Figure 10: For “IAM Role,” select “Create a new IAM role”
Next, to define the IAM permissions, copy and paste the following IAM policy in the View Policy Document text-entry field. Be sure to replace the placeholder ARN-OF-Demo/Twitter_API_Key with the ARN of your secret.
Figure 11: The IAM policy pasted in the “View Policy Document” text-entry field
Now, select Allow. This brings me back to the Lambda console with the appropriate Role selected.
Select Create function.
Figure 12: Select the “Create function” button in the lower-right corner
Copy the following Python code and paste it in the Function code section.
import base64
import json
import logging
import os
import boto3
from botocore.vendored import requests
logger = logging.getLogger()
logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)
def lambda_handler(event, context):
"""Secrets Manager Twitter Bearer Token Handler
This handler uses the master-user rotation scheme to rotate a bearer token of a Twitter app.
The Secret PlaintextString is expected to be a JSON string with the following format:
{
'access_token': ,
'token_type': ,
'masterarn':
}
Args:
event (dict): Lambda dictionary of event parameters. These keys must include the following:
- SecretId: The secret ARN or identifier
- ClientRequestToken: The ClientRequestToken of the secret version
- Step: The rotation step (one of createSecret, setSecret, testSecret, or finishSecret)
context (LambdaContext): The Lambda runtime information
Raises:
ResourceNotFoundException: If the secret with the specified arn and stage does not exist
ValueError: If the secret is not properly configured for rotation
KeyError: If the secret json does not contain the expected keys
"""
arn = event['SecretId']
token = event['ClientRequestToken']
step = event['Step']
# Setup the client and environment variables
service_client = boto3.client('secretsmanager', endpoint_url=os.environ['SECRETS_MANAGER_ENDPOINT'])
oauth2_token_url = os.environ['TWITTER_OAUTH2_TOKEN_URL']
oauth2_invalid_token_url = os.environ['TWITTER_OAUTH2_INVALID_TOKEN_URL']
tweet_search_url = os.environ['TWITTER_SEARCH_URL']
# Make sure the version is staged correctly
metadata = service_client.describe_secret(SecretId=arn)
if not metadata['RotationEnabled']:
logger.error("Secret %s is not enabled for rotation" % arn)
raise ValueError("Secret %s is not enabled for rotation" % arn)
versions = metadata['VersionIdsToStages']
if token not in versions:
logger.error("Secret version %s has no stage for rotation of secret %s." % (token, arn))
raise ValueError("Secret version %s has no stage for rotation of secret %s." % (token, arn))
if "AWSCURRENT" in versions[token]:
logger.info("Secret version %s already set as AWSCURRENT for secret %s." % (token, arn))
return
elif "AWSPENDING" not in versions[token]:
logger.error("Secret version %s not set as AWSPENDING for rotation of secret %s." % (token, arn))
raise ValueError("Secret version %s not set as AWSPENDING for rotation of secret %s." % (token, arn))
# Call the appropriate step
if step == "createSecret":
create_secret(service_client, arn, token, oauth2_token_url, oauth2_invalid_token_url)
elif step == "setSecret":
set_secret(service_client, arn, token, oauth2_token_url)
elif step == "testSecret":
test_secret(service_client, arn, token, tweet_search_url)
elif step == "finishSecret":
finish_secret(service_client, arn, token)
else:
logger.error("lambda_handler: Invalid step parameter %s for secret %s" % (step, arn))
raise ValueError("Invalid step parameter %s for secret %s" % (step, arn))
def create_secret(service_client, arn, token, oauth2_token_url, oauth2_invalid_token_url):
"""Get a new bearer token from Twitter
This method invalidates existing bearer token for the Twitter app and retrieves a new one from Twitter.
If a secret version with AWSPENDING stage exists, updates it with the newly retrieved bearer token and if
the AWSPENDING stage does not exist, creates a new version of the secret with that stage label.
Args:
service_client (client): The secrets manager service client
arn (string): The secret ARN or other identifier
token (string): The ClientRequestToken associated with the secret version
oauth2_token_url (string): The Twitter API endpoint to request a bearer token
oauth2_invalid_token_url (string): The Twitter API endpoint to invalidate a bearer token
Raises:
ValueError: If the current secret is not valid JSON
KeyError: If the secret json does not contain the expected keys
ResourceNotFoundException: If the current secret is not found
"""
# Make sure the current secret exists and try to get the master arn from the secret
try:
current_secret_dict = get_secret_dict(service_client, arn, "AWSCURRENT")
master_arn = current_secret_dict['masterarn']
logger.info("createSecret: Successfully retrieved secret for %s." % arn)
except service_client.exceptions.ResourceNotFoundException:
return
# create bearer token credentials to be passed as authorization string to Twitter
bearer_token_credentials = encode_credentials(service_client, master_arn, "AWSCURRENT")
# get the bearer token from Twitter
bearer_token_from_twitter = get_bearer_token(bearer_token_credentials,oauth2_token_url)
# invalidate the current bearer token
invalidate_bearer_token(oauth2_invalid_token_url,bearer_token_credentials,bearer_token_from_twitter)
# get a new bearer token from Twitter
new_bearer_token = get_bearer_token(bearer_token_credentials, oauth2_token_url)
# if a secret version with AWSPENDING stage exists, update it with the lastest bearer token
# if the AWSPENDING stage does not exist, then create the version with AWSPENDING stage
try:
pending_secret_dict = get_secret_dict(service_client, arn, "AWSPENDING", token)
pending_secret_dict['access_token'] = new_bearer_token
service_client.put_secret_value(SecretId=arn, ClientRequestToken=token, SecretString=json.dumps(pending_secret_dict), VersionStages=['AWSPENDING'])
logger.info("createSecret: Successfully invalidated the bearer token of the secret %s and updated the pending version" % arn)
except service_client.exceptions.ResourceNotFoundException:
current_secret_dict['access_token'] = new_bearer_token
service_client.put_secret_value(SecretId=arn, ClientRequestToken=token, SecretString=json.dumps(current_secret_dict), VersionStages=['AWSPENDING'])
logger.info("createSecret: Successfully invalidated the bearer token of the secret %s and and created the pending version." % arn)
def set_secret(service_client, arn, token, oauth2_token_url):
"""Validate the pending secret with that in Twitter
This method checks wether the bearer token in Twitter is the same as the one in the version with AWSPENDING stage.
Args:
service_client (client): The secrets manager service client
arn (string): The secret ARN or other identifier
token (string): The ClientRequestToken associated with the secret version
oauth2_token_url (string): The Twitter API endopoint to get a bearer token
Raises:
ResourceNotFoundException: If the secret with the specified arn and stage does not exist
ValueError: If the secret is not valid JSON or master credentials could not be used to login to DB
KeyError: If the secret json does not contain the expected keys
"""
# First get the pending version of the bearer token and compare it with that in Twitter
pending_secret_dict = get_secret_dict(service_client, arn, "AWSPENDING")
master_arn = pending_secret_dict['masterarn']
# create bearer token credentials to be passed as authorization string to Twitter
bearer_token_credentials = encode_credentials(service_client, master_arn, "AWSCURRENT")
# get the bearer token from Twitter
bearer_token_from_twitter = get_bearer_token(bearer_token_credentials, oauth2_token_url)
# if the bearer tokens are same, invalidate the bearer token in Twitter
# if not, raise an exception that bearer token in Twitter was changed outside Secrets Manager
if pending_secret_dict['access_token'] == bearer_token_from_twitter:
logger.info("createSecret: Successfully verified the bearer token of arn %s" % arn)
else:
raise ValueError("The bearer token of the Twitter app was changed outside Secrets Manager. Please check.")
def test_secret(service_client, arn, token, tweet_search_url):
"""Test the pending secret by calling a Twitter API
This method tries to use the bearer token in the secret version with AWSPENDING stage and search for tweets
with 'aws secrets manager' string.
Args:
service_client (client): The secrets manager service client
arn (string): The secret ARN or other identifier
token (string): The ClientRequestToken associated with the secret version
Raises:
ResourceNotFoundException: If the secret with the specified arn and stage does not exist
ValueError: If the secret is not valid JSON or pending credentials could not be used to login to the database
KeyError: If the secret json does not contain the expected keys
"""
# First get the pending version of the bearer token and compare it with that in Twitter
pending_secret_dict = get_secret_dict(service_client, arn, "AWSPENDING", token)
# Now verify you can search for tweets using the bearer token
if verify_bearer_token(pending_secret_dict['access_token'], tweet_search_url):
logger.info("testSecret: Successfully authorized with the pending secret in %s." % arn)
return
else:
logger.error("testSecret: Unable to authorize with the pending secret of secret ARN %s" % arn)
raise ValueError("Unable to connect to Twitter with pending secret of secret ARN %s" % arn)
def finish_secret(service_client, arn, token):
"""Finish the rotation by marking the pending secret as current
This method moves the secret from the AWSPENDING stage to the AWSCURRENT stage.
Args:
service_client (client): The secrets manager service client
arn (string): The secret ARN or other identifier
token (string): The ClientRequestToken associated with the secret version
Raises:
ResourceNotFoundException: If the secret with the specified arn and stage does not exist
"""
# First describe the secret to get the current version
metadata = service_client.describe_secret(SecretId=arn)
current_version = None
for version in metadata["VersionIdsToStages"]:
if "AWSCURRENT" in metadata["VersionIdsToStages"][version]:
if version == token:
# The correct version is already marked as current, return
logger.info("finishSecret: Version %s already marked as AWSCURRENT for %s" % (version, arn))
return
current_version = version
break
# Finalize by staging the secret version current
service_client.update_secret_version_stage(SecretId=arn, VersionStage="AWSCURRENT", MoveToVersionId=token, RemoveFromVersionId=current_version)
logger.info("finishSecret: Successfully set AWSCURRENT stage to version %s for secret %s." % (version, arn))
def encode_credentials(service_client, arn, stage):
"""Encodes the Twitter credentials
This helper function encodes the Twitter credentials (consumer_key and consumer_secret)
Args:
service_client (client):The secrets manager service client
arn (string): The secret ARN or other identifier
stage (stage): The stage identifying the secret version
Returns:
encoded_credentials (string): base64 encoded authorization string for Twitter
Raises:
KeyError: If the secret json does not contain the expected keys
"""
required_fields = ['consumer_key','consumer_secret']
master_secret_dict = get_secret_dict(service_client, arn, stage)
for field in required_fields:
if field not in master_secret_dict:
raise KeyError("%s key is missing from the secret JSON" % field)
encoded_credentials = base64.urlsafe_b64encode(
'{}:{}'.format(master_secret_dict['consumer_key'], master_secret_dict['consumer_secret']).encode('ascii')).decode('ascii')
return encoded_credentials
def get_bearer_token(encoded_credentials, oauth2_token_url):
"""Gets a bearer token from Twitter
This helper function retrieves the current bearer token from Twitter, given a set of credentials.
Args:
encoded_credentials (string): Twitter credentials for authentication
oauth2_token_url (string): REST API endpoint to request a bearer token from Twitter
Raises:
KeyError: If the secret json does not contain the expected keys
"""
headers = {
'Authorization': 'Basic {}'.format(encoded_credentials),
'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8',
}
data = 'grant_type=client_credentials'
response = requests.post(oauth2_token_url, headers=headers, data=data)
response_data = response.json()
if response_data['token_type'] == 'bearer':
bearer_token = response_data['access_token']
return bearer_token
else:
raise RuntimeError('unexpected token type: {}'.format(response_data['token_type']))
def invalidate_bearer_token(oauth2_invalid_token_url, bearer_token_credentials, bearer_token):
"""Invalidates a Bearer Token of a Twitter App
This helper function invalidates a bearer token of a Twitter app.
If successful, it returns the invalidated bearer token, else None
Args:
oauth2_invalid_token_url (string): The Twitter API endpoint to invalidate a bearer token
bearer_token_credentials (string): encoded consumer key and consumer secret to authenticate with Twitter
bearer_token (string): The bearer token to be invalidated
Returns:
invalidated_bearer_token: The invalidated bearer token
Raises:
ResourceNotFoundException: If the secret with the specified arn and stage does not exist
ValueError: If the secret is not valid JSON
KeyError: If the secret json does not contain the expected keys
"""
headers = {
'Authorization': 'Basic {}'.format(bearer_token_credentials),
'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8',
}
data = 'access_token=' + bearer_token
invalidate_response = requests.post(oauth2_invalid_token_url, headers=headers, data=data)
invalidate_response_data = invalidate_response.json()
if invalidate_response_data:
return
else:
raise RuntimeError('Invalidate bearer token request failed')
def verify_bearer_token(bearer_token, tweet_search_url):
"""Verifies access to Twitter APIs using a bearer token
This helper function verifies that the bearer token is valid by calling Twitter's search/tweets API endpoint
Args:
bearer_token (string): The current bearer token for the application
Returns:
True or False
Raises:
KeyError: If the response of search tweets API call fails
"""
headers = {
'Authorization' : 'Bearer {}'.format(bearer_token),
'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8',
}
search_results = requests.get(tweet_search_url, headers=headers)
try:
search_results.json()['statuses']
return True
except:
return False
def get_secret_dict(service_client, arn, stage, token=None):
"""Gets the secret dictionary corresponding for the secret arn, stage, and token
This helper function gets credentials for the arn and stage passed in and returns the dictionary by parsing the JSON string
Args:
service_client (client): The secrets manager service client
arn (string): The secret ARN or other identifier
token (string): The ClientRequestToken associated with the secret version, or None if no validation is desired
stage (string): The stage identifying the secret version
Returns:
SecretDictionary: Secret dictionary
Raises:
ResourceNotFoundException: If the secret with the specified arn and stage does not exist
ValueError: If the secret is not valid JSON
"""
# Only do VersionId validation against the stage if a token is passed in
if token:
secret = service_client.get_secret_value(SecretId=arn, VersionId=token, VersionStage=stage)
else:
secret = service_client.get_secret_value(SecretId=arn, VersionStage=stage)
plaintext = secret['SecretString']
# Parse and return the secret JSON string
return json.loads(plaintext)
Here’s what it will look like:
Figure 13: The Python code pasted in the “Function code” section
On the same page, provide the following environment variables:
Note: Resources used in this example are in US East (Ohio) region. If you intend to use another AWS Region, change the SECRETS_MANAGER_ENDPOINT set in the Environment variables to the appropriate region.
You’ve now created a Lambda function that can rotate the bearer token:
Figure 15: The new Lambda function
Before you can configure Secrets Manager to use this Lambda function, you need to update the function policy of the Lambda function. A function policy permits AWS services, such as Secrets Manager, to invoke a Lambda function on behalf of your application. You can attach a Lambda function policy from the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) or SDK. To attach a function policy, call the add-permission Lambda API from the AWS CLI.
Phase 3: Configure your application to retrieve the bearer token from Secrets Manager
Now that you’ve stored the bearer token in Secrets Manager, update the application to retrieve the bearer token from Secrets Manager instead of hard-coding this information in a configuration file or source code. For this example, I show you how to configure a Python application to retrieve this secret from Secrets Manager.
import config
def no_secrets_manager_sample()
# Get the bearer token from a config file.
Bearer_token = config.bearer_token
# Use the bearer token to authenticate requests to Twitter
Use the sample code from section titled Phase 1 and update the application to retrieve the bearer token from Secrets Manager. The following code sets up the client and retrieves and decrypts the secret Demo/Twitter_bearer_token.
# Use this code snippet in your app.
import boto3
from botocore.exceptions import ClientError
def get_secret():
secret_name = "Demo/Twitter_bearer_token"
endpoint_url = "https://secretsmanager.us-east-2.amazonaws.com"
region_name = "us-east-2"
session = boto3.session.Session()
client = session.client(
service_name='secretsmanager',
region_name=region_name,
endpoint_url=endpoint_url
)
try:
get_secret_value_response = client.get_secret_value(
SecretId=secret_name
)
except ClientError as e:
if e.response['Error']['Code'] == 'ResourceNotFoundException':
print("The requested secret " + secret_name + " was not found")
elif e.response['Error']['Code'] == 'InvalidRequestException':
print("The request was invalid due to:", e)
elif e.response['Error']['Code'] == 'InvalidParameterException':
print("The request had invalid params:", e)
else:
# Decrypted secret using the associated KMS CMK
# Depending on whether the secret was a string or binary, one of these fields will be populated
if 'SecretString' in get_secret_value_response:
secret = get_secret_value_response['SecretString']
else:
binary_secret_data = get_secret_value_response['SecretBinary']
# Your code goes here.
Applications require permissions to access Secrets Manager. My application runs on Amazon EC2 and uses an IAM role to get access to AWS services. I’ll attach the following policy to my IAM role, and you should take a similar action with your IAM role. This policy uses the GetSecretValue action to grant my application permissions to read secrets from Secrets Manager. This policy also uses the resource element to limit my application to read only the Demo/Twitter_bearer_token secret from Secrets Manager. Read the AWS Secrets Manager documentation to understand the minimum IAM permissions required to retrieve a secret.
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": {
"Sid": "RetrieveBearerToken",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "secretsmanager:GetSecretValue",
"Resource": Input ARN of the secret Demo/Twitter_bearer_token here
}
}
Note: To improve the resiliency of your applications, associate your application with two API keys/bearer tokens. This is a higher availability option because you can continue to use one bearer token while Secrets Manager rotates the other token. Read the AWS documentation to learn how AWS Secrets Manager rotates your secrets.
Phase 4: Enable and verify rotation
Now that you’ve stored the secret in Secrets Manager and created a Lambda function to rotate this secret, configure Secrets Manager to rotate the secret Demo/Twitter_bearer_token.
From the Secrets Manager console, go to the list of secrets and choose the secret you created in the first step (in my example, this is named Demo/Twitter_bearer_token).
Scroll to Rotation configuration, and then select Edit rotation.
Figure 16: Select the “Edit rotation” button
To enable rotation, select Enable automatic rotation, and then choose how frequently you want Secrets Manager to rotate this secret. For this example, I set the rotation interval to 30 days. I also choose the rotation Lambda function, Lambda_Rotate_Bearer_Token, from the drop-down list.
Figure 17: “Edit rotation configuration” options
The banner on the next screen confirms that I have successfully configured rotation and the first rotation is in progress, which enables you to verify that rotation is functioning as expected. Secrets Manager will rotate this credential automatically every 30 days.
Figure 18: Confirmation notice
Summary
In this post, I showed you how to configure Secrets Manager to manage and rotate an API key and bearer token used by applications to authenticate and retrieve information from Twitter. You can use the steps described in this blog to manage and rotate other API keys, as well.
Secrets Manager helps you protect access to your applications, services, and IT resources without the upfront investment and on-going maintenance costs of operating your own secrets management infrastructure. To get started, open the Secrets Manager console. To learn more, read the Secrets Manager documentation.
If you have comments about this post, submit them in the Comments section below. If you have questions about anything in this post, start a new thread on the Secrets Manager forum or contact AWS Support.
Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.
Backblaze is hiring a Director of Sales. This is a critical role for Backblaze as we continue to grow the team. We need a strong leader who has experience in scaling a sales team and who has an excellent track record for exceeding goals by selling Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. In addition, this leader will need to be highly motivated, as well as able to create and develop a highly-motivated, success oriented sales team that has fun and enjoys what they do.
The History of Backblaze from our CEO In 2007, after a friend’s computer crash caused her some suffering, we realized that with every photo, video, song, and document going digital, everyone would eventually lose all of their information. Five of us quit our jobs to start a company with the goal of making it easy for people to back up their data.
Like many startups, for a while we worked out of a co-founder’s one-bedroom apartment. Unlike most startups, we made an explicit agreement not to raise funding during the first year. We would then touch base every six months and decide whether to raise or not. We wanted to focus on building the company and the product, not on pitching and slide decks. And critically, we wanted to build a culture that understood money comes from customers, not the magical VC giving tree. Over the course of 5 years we built a profitable, multi-million dollar revenue business — and only then did we raise a VC round.
Fast forward 10 years later and our world looks quite different. You’ll have some fantastic assets to work with:
A brand millions recognize for openness, ease-of-use, and affordability.
A computer backup service that stores over 500 petabytes of data, has recovered over 30 billion files for hundreds of thousands of paying customers — most of whom self-identify as being the people that find and recommend technology products to their friends.
Our B2 service that provides the lowest cost cloud storage on the planet at 1/4th the price Amazon, Google or Microsoft charges. While being a newer product on the market, it already has over 100,000 IT and developers signed up as well as an ecosystem building up around it.
A growing, profitable and cash-flow positive company.
And last, but most definitely not least: a great sales team.
You might be saying, “sounds like you’ve got this under control — why do you need me?” Don’t be misled. We need you. Here’s why:
We have a great team, but we are in the process of expanding and we need to develop a structure that will easily scale and provide the most success to drive revenue.
We just launched our outbound sales efforts and we need someone to help develop that into a fully successful program that’s building a strong pipeline and closing business.
We need someone to work with the marketing department and figure out how to generate more inbound opportunities that the sales team can follow up on and close.
We need someone who will work closely in developing the skills of our current sales team and build a path for career growth and advancement.
We want someone to manage our Customer Success program.
So that’s a bit about us. What are we looking for in you?
Experience: As a sales leader, you will strategically build and drive the territory’s sales pipeline by assembling and leading a skilled team of sales professionals. This leader should be familiar with generating, developing and closing software subscription (SaaS) opportunities. We are looking for a self-starter who can manage a team and make an immediate impact of selling our Backup and Cloud Storage solutions. In this role, the sales leader will work closely with the VP of Sales, marketing staff, and service staff to develop and implement specific strategic plans to achieve and exceed revenue targets, including new business acquisition as well as build out our customer success program.
Leadership: We have an experienced team who’s brought us to where we are today. You need to have the people and management skills to get them excited about working with you. You need to be a strong leader and compassionate about developing and supporting your team.
Data driven and creative: The data has to show something makes sense before we scale it up. However, without creativity, it’s easy to say “the data shows it’s impossible” or to find a local maximum. Whether it’s deciding how to scale the team, figuring out what our outbound sales efforts should look like or putting a plan in place to develop the team for career growth, we’ve seen a bit of creativity get us places a few extra dollars couldn’t.
Jive with our culture: Strong leaders affect culture and the person we hire for this role may well shape, not only fit into, ours. But to shape the culture you have to be accepted by the organism, which means a certain set of shared values. We default to openness with our team, our customers, and everyone if possible. We love initiative — without arrogance or dictatorship. We work to create a place people enjoy showing up to work. That doesn’t mean ping pong tables and foosball (though we do try to have perks & fun), but it means people are friendly, non-political, working to build a good service but also a good place to work.
Do the work: Ideas and strategy are critical, but good execution makes them happen. We’re looking for someone who can help the team execute both from the perspective of being capable of guiding and organizing, but also someone who is hands-on themselves.
Additional Responsibilities needed for this role:
Recruit, coach, mentor, manage and lead a team of sales professionals to achieve yearly sales targets. This includes closing new business and expanding upon existing clientele.
Expand the customer success program to provide the best customer experience possible resulting in upsell opportunities and a high retention rate.
Develop effective sales strategies and deliver compelling product demonstrations and sales pitches.
Acquire and develop the appropriate sales tools to make the team efficient in their daily work flow.
Apply a thorough understanding of the marketplace, industry trends, funding developments, and products to all management activities and strategic sales decisions.
Ensure that sales department operations function smoothly, with the goal of facilitating sales and/or closings; operational responsibilities include accurate pipeline reporting and sales forecasts.
This position will report directly to the VP of Sales and will be staffed in our headquarters in San Mateo, CA.
Requirements:
7 – 10+ years of successful sales leadership experience as measured by sales performance against goals. Experience in developing skill sets and providing career growth and opportunities through advancement of team members.
Background in selling SaaS technologies with a strong track record of success.
Strong presentation and communication skills.
Must be able to travel occasionally nationwide.
BA/BS degree required
Think you want to join us on this adventure? Send an email to jobscontact@backblaze.com with the subject “Director of Sales.” (Recruiters and agencies, please don’t email us.) Include a resume and answer these two questions:
How would you approach evaluating the current sales team and what is your process for developing a growth strategy to scale the team?
What are the goals you would set for yourself in the 3 month and 1-year timeframes?
Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that this sounds like the opportunity for which you’ve been waiting.
This post is courtesy of Otavio Ferreira, Manager, Amazon SNS, AWS Messaging.
Amazon SNS message filtering provides a set of string and numeric matching operators that allow each subscription to receive only the messages of interest. Hence, SNS message filtering can simplify your pub/sub messaging architecture by offloading the message filtering logic from your subscriber systems, as well as the message routing logic from your publisher systems.
After you set the subscription attribute that defines a filter policy, the subscribing endpoint receives only the messages that carry attributes matching this filter policy. Other messages published to the topic are filtered out for this subscription. In this way, the native integration between SNS and Amazon CloudWatch provides visibility into the number of messages delivered, as well as the number of messages filtered out.
CloudWatch metrics are captured automatically for you. To get started with SNS message filtering, see Filtering Messages with Amazon SNS.
Message Filtering Metrics
The following six CloudWatch metrics are relevant to understanding your SNS message filtering activity:
NumberOfMessagesPublished – Inbound traffic to SNS. This metric tracks all the messages that have been published to the topic.
NumberOfNotificationsDelivered – Outbound traffic from SNS. This metric tracks all the messages that have been successfully delivered to endpoints subscribed to the topic. A delivery takes place either when the incoming message attributes match a subscription filter policy, or when the subscription has no filter policy at all, which results in a catch-all behavior.
NumberOfNotificationsFilteredOut – This metric tracks all the messages that were filtered out because they carried attributes that didn’t match the subscription filter policy.
NumberOfNotificationsFilteredOut-NoMessageAttributes – This metric tracks all the messages that were filtered out because they didn’t carry any attributes at all and, consequently, didn’t match the subscription filter policy.
NumberOfNotificationsFilteredOut-InvalidAttributes – This metric keeps track of messages that were filtered out because they carried invalid or malformed attributes and, thus, didn’t match the subscription filter policy.
NumberOfNotificationsFailed – This last metric tracks all the messages that failed to be delivered to subscribing endpoints, regardless of whether a filter policy had been set for the endpoint. This metric is emitted after the message delivery retry policy is exhausted, and SNS stops attempting to deliver the message. At that moment, the subscribing endpoint is likely no longer reachable. For example, the subscribing SQS queue or Lambda function has been deleted by its owner. You may want to closely monitor this metric to address message delivery issues quickly.
Message filtering graphs
Through the AWS Management Console, you can compose graphs to display your SNS message filtering activity. The graph shows the number of messages published, delivered, and filtered out within the timeframe you specify (1h, 3h, 12h, 1d, 3d, 1w, or custom).
To compose an SNS message filtering graph with CloudWatch:
Open the CloudWatch console.
Choose Metrics, SNS, All Metrics, and Topic Metrics.
Select all metrics to add to the graph, such as:
NumberOfMessagesPublished
NumberOfNotificationsDelivered
NumberOfNotificationsFilteredOut
Choose Graphed metrics.
In the Statistic column, switch from Average to Sum.
Title your graph with a descriptive name, such as “SNS Message Filtering”
After you have your graph set up, you may want to copy the graph link for bookmarking, emailing, or sharing with co-workers. You may also want to add your graph to a CloudWatch dashboard for easy access in the future. Both actions are available to you on the Actions menu, which is found above the graph.
Summary
SNS message filtering defines how SNS topics behave in terms of message delivery. By using CloudWatch metrics, you gain visibility into the number of messages published, delivered, and filtered out. This enables you to validate the operation of filter policies and more easily troubleshoot during development phases.
SNS message filtering can be implemented easily with existing AWS SDKs by applying message and subscription attributes across all SNS supported protocols (Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, HTTP, SMS, email, and mobile push). CloudWatch metrics for SNS message filtering is available now, in all AWS Regions.
What do I do with a Mac that still has personal data on it? Do I take out the disk drive and smash it? Do I sweep it with a really strong magnet? Is there a difference in how I handle a hard drive (HDD) versus a solid-state drive (SSD)? Well, taking a sledgehammer or projectile weapon to your old machine is certainly one way to make the data irretrievable, and it can be enormously cathartic as long as you follow appropriate safety and disposal protocols. But there are far less destructive ways to make sure your data is gone for good. Let me introduce you to secure erasing.
Which Type of Drive Do You Have?
Before we start, you need to know whether you have a HDD or a SSD. To find out, or at least to make sure, you click on the Apple menu and select “About this Mac.” Once there, select the “Storage” tab to see which type of drive is in your system.
The first example, below, shows a SATA Disk (HDD) in the system.
In the next case, we see we have a Solid State SATA Drive (SSD), plus a Mac SuperDrive.
The third screen shot shows an SSD, as well. In this case it’s called “Flash Storage.”
Make Sure You Have a Backup
Before you get started, you’ll want to make sure that any important data on your hard drive has moved somewhere else. OS X’s built-in Time Machine backup software is a good start, especially when paired with Backblaze. You can learn more about using Time Machine in our Mac Backup Guide.
With a local backup copy in hand and secure cloud storage, you know your data is always safe no matter what happens.
Once you’ve verified your data is backed up, roll up your sleeves and get to work. The key is OS X Recovery — a special part of the Mac operating system since OS X 10.7 “Lion.”
How to Wipe a Mac Hard Disk Drive (HDD)
NOTE: If you’re interested in wiping an SSD, see below.
Make sure your Mac is turned off.
Press the power button.
Immediately hold down the command and R keys.
Wait until the Apple logo appears.
Select “Disk Utility” from the OS X Utilities list. Click Continue.
Select the disk you’d like to erase by clicking on it in the sidebar.
Click the Erase button.
Click the Security Options button.
The Security Options window includes a slider that enables you to determine how thoroughly you want to erase your hard drive.
There are four notches to that Security Options slider. “Fastest” is quick but insecure — data could potentially be rebuilt using a file recovery app. Moving that slider to the right introduces progressively more secure erasing. Disk Utility’s most secure level erases the information used to access the files on your disk, then writes zeroes across the disk surface seven times to help remove any trace of what was there. This setting conforms to the DoD 5220.22-M specification.
Once you’ve selected the level of secure erasing you’re comfortable with, click the OK button.
Click the Erase button to begin. Bear in mind that the more secure method you select, the longer it will take. The most secure methods can add hours to the process.
Once it’s done, the Mac’s hard drive will be clean as a whistle and ready for its next adventure: a fresh installation of OS X, being donated to a relative or a local charity, or just sent to an e-waste facility. Of course you can still drill a hole in your disk or smash it with a sledgehammer if it makes you happy, but now you know how to wipe the data from your old computer with much less ruckus.
The above instructions apply to older Macintoshes with HDDs. What do you do if you have an SSD?
Securely Erasing SSDs, and Why Not To
Most new Macs ship with solid state drives (SSDs). Only the iMac and Mac mini ship with regular hard drives anymore, and even those are available in pure SSD variants if you want.
If your Mac comes equipped with an SSD, Apple’s Disk Utility software won’t actually let you zero the hard drive.
Wait, what?
In a tech note posted to Apple’s own online knowledgebase, Apple explains that you don’t need to securely erase your Mac’s SSD:
With an SSD drive, Secure Erase and Erasing Free Space are not available in Disk Utility. These options are not needed for an SSD drive because a standard erase makes it difficult to recover data from an SSD.
In fact, some folks will tell you not to zero out the data on an SSD, since it can cause wear and tear on the memory cells that, over time, can affect its reliability. I don’t think that’s nearly as big an issue as it used to be — SSD reliability and longevity has improved.
If “Standard Erase” doesn’t quite make you feel comfortable that your data can’t be recovered, there are a couple of options.
FileVault Keeps Your Data Safe
One way to make sure that your SSD’s data remains secure is to use FileVault. FileVault is whole-disk encryption for the Mac. With FileVault engaged, you need a password to access the information on your hard drive. Without it, that data is encrypted.
There’s one potential downside of FileVault — if you lose your password or the encryption key, you’re screwed: You’re not getting your data back any time soon. Based on my experience working at a Mac repair shop, losing a FileVault key happens more frequently than it should.
When you first set up a new Mac, you’re given the option of turning FileVault on. If you don’t do it then, you can turn on FileVault at any time by clicking on your Mac’s System Preferences, clicking on Security & Privacy, and clicking on the FileVault tab. Be warned, however, that the initial encryption process can take hours, as will decryption if you ever need to turn FileVault off.
With FileVault turned on, you can restart your Mac into its Recovery System (by restarting the Mac while holding down the command and R keys) and erase the hard drive using Disk Utility, once you’ve unlocked it (by selecting the disk, clicking the File menu, and clicking Unlock). That deletes the FileVault key, which means any data on the drive is useless.
FileVault doesn’t impact the performance of most modern Macs, though I’d suggest only using it if your Mac has an SSD, not a conventional hard disk drive.
Securely Erasing Free Space on Your SSD
If you don’t want to take Apple’s word for it, if you’re not using FileVault, or if you just want to, there is a way to securely erase free space on your SSD. It’s a little more involved but it works.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let me state for the record that this really isn’t necessary to do, which is why Apple’s made it so hard to do. But if you’re set on it, you’ll need to use Apple’s Terminal app. Terminal provides you with command line interface access to the OS X operating system. Terminal lives in the Utilities folder, but you can access Terminal from the Mac’s Recovery System, as well. Once your Mac has booted into the Recovery partition, click the Utilities menu and select Terminal to launch it.
From a Terminal command line, type:
diskutil secureErase freespace VALUE /Volumes/DRIVE
That tells your Mac to securely erase the free space on your SSD. You’ll need to change VALUE to a number between 0 and 4. 0 is a single-pass run of zeroes; 1 is a single-pass run of random numbers; 2 is a 7-pass erase; 3 is a 35-pass erase; and 4 is a 3-pass erase. DRIVE should be changed to the name of your hard drive. To run a 7-pass erase of your SSD drive in “JohnB-Macbook”, you would enter the following:
And remember, if you used a space in the name of your Mac’s hard drive, you need to insert a leading backslash before the space. For example, to run a 35-pass erase on a hard drive called “Macintosh HD” you enter the following:
diskutil secureErase freespace 3 /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD
Something to remember is that the more extensive the erase procedure, the longer it will take.
When Erasing is Not Enough — How to Destroy a Drive
If you absolutely, positively need to be sure that all the data on a drive is irretrievable, see this Scientific American article (with contributions by Gleb Budman, Backblaze CEO), How to Destroy a Hard Drive — Permanently.
This post courtesy of Thiago Morais, AWS Solutions Architect
When you build web applications or expose any data externally, you probably look for a platform where you can build highly scalable, secure, and robust REST APIs. As APIs are publicly exposed, there are a number of best practices for providing a secure mechanism to consumers using your API.
Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.
In this post, I show you how to take advantage of the regional API endpoint feature in API Gateway, so that you can create your own Amazon CloudFront distribution and secure your API using AWS WAF.
AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.
As you make your APIs publicly available, you are exposed to attackers trying to exploit your services in several ways. The AWS security team published a whitepaper solution using AWS WAF, How to Mitigate OWASP’s Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities.
Regional API endpoints
Edge-optimized APIs are endpoints that are accessed through a CloudFront distribution created and managed by API Gateway. Before the launch of regional API endpoints, this was the default option when creating APIs using API Gateway. It primarily helped to reduce latency for API consumers that were located in different geographical locations than your API.
When API requests predominantly originate from an Amazon EC2 instance or other services within the same AWS Region as the API is deployed, a regional API endpoint typically lowers the latency of connections. It is recommended for such scenarios.
For better control around caching strategies, customers can use their own CloudFront distribution for regional APIs. They also have the ability to use AWS WAF protection, as I describe in this post.
Edge-optimized API endpoint
The following diagram is an illustrated example of the edge-optimized API endpoint where your API clients access your API through a CloudFront distribution created and managed by API Gateway.
Regional API endpoint
For the regional API endpoint, your customers access your API from the same Region in which your REST API is deployed. This helps you to reduce request latency and particularly allows you to add your own content delivery network, as needed.
Walkthrough
In this section, you implement the following steps:
Attach the web ACL to the CloudFront distribution.
Test AWS WAF protection.
Create the regional API
For this walkthrough, use an existing PetStore API. All new APIs launch by default as the regional endpoint type. To change the endpoint type for your existing API, choose the cog icon on the top right corner:
After you have created the PetStore API on your account, deploy a stage called “prod” for the PetStore API.
On the API Gateway console, select the PetStore API and choose Actions, Deploy API.
For Stage name, type prod and add a stage description.
Choose Deploy and the new API stage is created.
Use the following AWS CLI command to update your API from edge-optimized to regional:
{
"description": "Your first API with Amazon API Gateway. This is a sample API that integrates via HTTP with your demo Pet Store endpoints",
"createdDate": 1511525626,
"endpointConfiguration": {
"types": [
"REGIONAL"
]
},
"id": "{api-id}",
"name": "PetStore"
}
After you change your API endpoint to regional, you can now assign your own CloudFront distribution to this API.
Create a CloudFront distribution
To make things easier, I have provided an AWS CloudFormation template to deploy a CloudFront distribution pointing to the API that you just created. Click the button to deploy the template in the us-east-1 Region.
For Stack name, enter RegionalAPI. For APIGWEndpoint, enter your API FQDN in the following format:
{api-id}.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
After you fill out the parameters, choose Next to continue the stack deployment. It takes a couple of minutes to finish the deployment. After it finishes, the Output tab lists the following items:
A CloudFront domain URL
An S3 bucket for CloudFront access logs
Output from CloudFormation
Test the CloudFront distribution
To see if the CloudFront distribution was configured correctly, use a web browser and enter the URL from your distribution, with the following parameters:
With the new CloudFront distribution in place, you can now start setting up AWS WAF to protect your API.
For this demo, you deploy the AWS WAF Security Automations solution, which provides fine-grained control over the requests attempting to access your API.
For more information about deployment, see Automated Deployment. If you prefer, you can launch the solution directly into your account using the following button.
For CloudFront Access Log Bucket Name, add the name of the bucket created during the deployment of the CloudFormation stack for your CloudFront distribution.
The solution allows you to adjust thresholds and also choose which automations to enable to protect your API. After you finish configuring these settings, choose Next.
To start the deployment process in your account, follow the creation wizard and choose Create. It takes a few minutes do finish the deployment. You can follow the creation process through the CloudFormation console.
After the deployment finishes, you can see the new web ACL deployed on the AWS WAF console, AWSWAFSecurityAutomations.
Attach the AWS WAF web ACL to the CloudFront distribution
With the solution deployed, you can now attach the AWS WAF web ACL to the CloudFront distribution that you created earlier.
To assign the newly created AWS WAF web ACL, go back to your CloudFront distribution. After you open your distribution for editing, choose General, Edit.
Select the new AWS WAF web ACL that you created earlier, AWSWAFSecurityAutomations.
Save the changes to your CloudFront distribution and wait for the deployment to finish.
Test AWS WAF protection
To validate the AWS WAF Web ACL setup, use Artillery to load test your API and see AWS WAF in action.
To install Artillery on your machine, run the following command:
$ npm install -g artillery
After the installation completes, you can check if Artillery installed successfully by running the following command:
$ artillery -V
$ 1.6.0-12
As the time of publication, Artillery is on version 1.6.0-12.
One of the WAF web ACL rules that you have set up is a rate-based rule. By default, it is set up to block any requesters that exceed 2000 requests under 5 minutes. Try this out.
First, use cURL to query your distribution and see the API output:
What you are doing is firing 2000 requests to your API from 10 concurrent users. For brevity, I am not posting the Artillery output here.
After Artillery finishes its execution, try to run the cURL request again and see what happens:
$ curl -s https://{distribution-name}.cloudfront.net/prod/pets
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<HTML><HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<TITLE>ERROR: The request could not be satisfied</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>ERROR</H1>
<H2>The request could not be satisfied.</H2>
<HR noshade size="1px">
Request blocked.
<BR clear="all">
<HR noshade size="1px">
<PRE>
Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)
Request ID: [removed]
</PRE>
<ADDRESS>
</ADDRESS>
</BODY></HTML>
As you can see from the output above, the request was blocked by AWS WAF. Your IP address is removed from the blocked list after it falls below the request limit rate.
Conclusion
In this first part, you saw how to use the new API Gateway regional API endpoint together with Amazon CloudFront and AWS WAF to secure your API from a series of attacks.
In the second part, I will demonstrate some other techniques to protect your API using API keys and Amazon CloudFront custom headers.
The second Operating-System-Directed Power-Management (OSPM18) Summit took place at the ReTiS Lab of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa between April 16 and April 18, 2018. Like last year, the summit was organized as a collection of collaborative sessions focused on trying to improve how operating-system-directed power management and the kernel’s task scheduler work together to achieve the goal of reducing energy consumption while still meeting performance and latency requirements. Read on for an extensive set of notes collected by a number of the participants to the summit.
Businesses and organizations that rely on macOS server for essential office and data services are facing some decisions about the future of their IT services.
Apple recently announced that it is deprecating a significant portion of essential network services in macOS Server, as they described in a support statement posted on April 24, 2018, “Prepare for changes to macOS Server.” Apple’s note includes:
macOS Server is changing to focus more on management of computers, devices, and storage on your network. As a result, some changes are coming in how Server works. A number of services will be deprecated, and will be hidden on new installations of an update to macOS Server coming in spring 2018.
The note lists the services that will be removed in a future release of macOS Server, including calendar and contact support, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Domain Name Services (DNS), mail, instant messages, virtual private networking (VPN), NetInstall, Web server, and the Wiki.
Apple assures users who have already configured any of the listed services that they will be able to use them in the spring 2018 macOS Server update, but the statement ends with links to a number of alternative services, including hosted services, that macOS Server users should consider as viable replacements to the features it is removing. These alternative services are all FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software).
As difficult as this could be for organizations that use macOS server, this is not unexpected. Apple left the server hardware space back in 2010, when Steve Jobs announced the company was ending its line of Xserve rackmount servers, which were introduced in May, 2002. Since then, macOS Server has hardly been a prominent part of Apple’s product lineup. It’s not just the product itself that has lost some luster, but the entire category of SMB office and business servers, which has been undergoing a gradual change in recent years.
Some might wonder how important the news about macOS Server is, given that macOS Server represents a pretty small share of the server market. macOS Server has been important to design shops, agencies, education users, and small businesses that likely have been on Macs for ages, but it’s not a significant part of the IT infrastructure of larger organizations and businesses.
What Comes After macOS Server?
Lovers of macOS Server don’t have to fear having their Mac minis pried from their cold, dead hands quite yet. Installed services will continue to be available. In the fall of 2018, new installations and upgrades of macOS Server will require users to migrate most services to other software. Since many of the services of macOS Server were already open-source, this means that a change in software might not be required. It does mean more configuration and management required from those who continue with macOS Server, however.
Users can continue with macOS Server if they wish, but many will see the writing on the wall and look for a suitable substitute.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
For many people working in organizations, what is significant about this announcement is how it reflects the move away from the once ubiquitous server-based IT infrastructure. Services that used to be centrally managed and office-based, such as storage, file sharing, communications, and computing, have moved to the cloud.
In selecting the next office IT platforms, there’s an opportunity to move to solutions that reflect and support how people are working and the applications they are using both in the office and remotely. For many, this means including cloud-based services in office automation, backup, and business continuity/disaster recovery planning. This includes Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service (Saas, PaaS, IaaS) options.
IT solutions that integrate well with the cloud are worth strong consideration for what comes after a macOS Server-based environment.
Synology NAS as a macOS Server Alternative
One solution that is becoming popular is to replace macOS Server with a device that has the ability to provide important office services, but also bridges the office and cloud environments. Using Network-Attached Storage (NAS) to take up the server slack makes a lot of sense. Many customers are already using NAS for file sharing, local data backup, automatic cloud backup, and other uses. In the case of Synology, their operating system, Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM), is Linux based, and integrates the basic functions of file sharing, centralized backup, RAID storage, multimedia streaming, virtual storage, and other common functions.
Synology NAS
Since DSM is based on Linux, there are numerous server applications available, including many of the same ones that are available for macOS Server, which shares conceptual roots with Linux as it comes from BSD Unix.
Synology DiskStation Manager Package Center
According to Ed Lukacs, COO at 2FIFTEEN Systems Management in Salt Lake City, their customers have found the move from macOS Server to Synology NAS not only painless, but positive. DSM works seamlessly with macOS and has been faster for their customers, as well. Many of their customers are running Adobe Creative Suite and Google G Suite applications, so a workflow that combines local storage, remote access, and the cloud, is already well known to them. Remote users are supported by Synology’s QuickConnect or VPN.
Business continuity and backup are simplified by the flexible storage capacity of the NAS. Synology has built-in backup to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage with Synology’s Cloud Sync, as well as a choice of a number of other B2-compatible applications, such as Cloudberry, Comet, and Arq.
Customers have been able to get up and running quickly, with only initial data transfers requiring some time to complete. After that, management of the NAS can be handled in-house or with the support of a Managed Service Provider (MSP).
Are You Sticking with macOS Server or Moving to Another Platform?
If you’re affected by this change in macOS Server, please let us know in the comments how you’re planning to cope. Are you using Synology NAS for server services? Please tell us how that’s working for you.
In a filesystem-track session at the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM), Ronnie Sahlberg talked about some changes he has made to add support for compounding to the SMB/CIFS implementation in Linux. Compounding is a way to combine multiple operations into a single request that can help reduce network round-trips.
Intel has, finally, disclosed two more Spectre variants, called 3a and 4. The first (“rogue system register read”) allows system-configuration registers to be read speculatively, while the second (“speculative store bypass”) could enable speculative reads to data after a store operation has been speculatively ignored. Some more information on variant 4 can be found in the Project Zero bug tracker. The fix is to install microcode updates, which are not yet available.
The Intercept has a long article on Japan’s equivalent of the NSA: the Directorate for Signals Intelligence. Interesting, but nothing really surprising.
The directorate has a history that dates back to the 1950s; its role is to eavesdrop on communications. But its operations remain so highly classified that the Japanese government has disclosed little about its work even the location of its headquarters. Most Japanese officials, except for a select few of the prime minister’s inner circle, are kept in the dark about the directorate’s activities, which are regulated by a limited legal framework and not subject to any independent oversight.
Now, a new investigation by the Japanese broadcaster NHK — produced in collaboration with The Intercept — reveals for the first time details about the inner workings of Japan’s opaque spy community. Based on classified documents and interviews with current and former officials familiar with the agency’s intelligence work, the investigation shines light on a previously undisclosed internet surveillance program and a spy hub in the south of Japan that is used to monitor phone calls and emails passing across communications satellites.
The article includes some new documents from the Snowden archive.
One of the more useful features of masscan is the “–banners” check, which connects to the TCP port, sends some request, and gets a basic response back. However, since masscan has it’s own TCP stack, it’ll interfere with the operating system’s TCP stack if they are sharing the same IPv4 address. The operating system will reply with a RST packet before the TCP connection can be established.
The way to fix this is to use the built-in packet-filtering firewall to block those packets in the operating-system TCP/IP stack. The masscan program still sees everything before the packet-filter, but the operating system can’t see anything after the packet-filter.
Note that we are talking about the “packet-filter” firewall feature here. Remember that macOS, like most operating systems these days, has two separate firewalls: an application firewall and a packet-filter firewall. The application firewall is the one you see in System Settings labeled “Firewall”, and it controls things based upon the application’s identity rather than by which ports it uses. This is normally “on” by default. The packet-filter is normally “off” by default and is of little use to normal users.
Also note that macOS changed packet-filters around version 10.10.5 (“Yosemite”, October 2014). The older one is known as “ipfw“, which was the default firewall for FreeBSD (much of macOS is based on FreeBSD). The replacement is known as PF, which comes from OpenBSD. Whereas you used to use the old “ipfw” command on the command line, you now use the “pfctl” command, as well as the “/etc/pf.conf” configuration file.
What we need to filter is the source port of the packets that masscan will send, so that when replies are received, they won’t reach the operating-system stack, and just go to masscan instead. To do this, we need find a range of ports that won’t conflict with the operating system. Namely, when the operating system creates outgoing connections, it randomly chooses a source port within a certain range. We want to use masscan to use source ports in a different range.
To figure out the range macOS uses, we run the following command:
On my laptop, which is probably the default for macOS, I get the following range. Sniffing with Wireshark confirms this is the range used for source ports for outgoing connections.
So this means I shouldn’t use source ports anywhere in the range 49152 to 65535. On my laptop, I’ve decided to use for masscan the ports 40000 to 41023. The range masscan uses must be a power of 2, so here I’m using 1024 (two to the tenth power).
To configure masscan, I can either type the parameter “–source-port 40000-41023” every time I run the program, or I can add the following line to /etc/masscan/masscan.conf. Remember that by default, masscan will look in that configuration file for any configuration parameters, so you don’t have to keep retyping them on the command line.
source-port = 40000-41023
Next, I need to add the following firewall rule to the bottom of /etc/pf.conf:
block in proto tcp from any to any port 40000 >< 41024
However, we aren’t done yet. By default, the packet-filter firewall is off on some versions of macOS. Therefore, every time you reboot your computer, you need to enable it. The simple way to do this is on the command line run:
pfctl -e
Or, if that doesn’t work, try:
pfctl -E
If the firewall is already running, then you’ll need to load the file explicitly (or reboot):
As you can see from my EC2 Instance History post, we add new instance types on a regular and frequent basis. Driven by increasingly powerful processors and designed to address an ever-widening set of use cases, the size and diversity of this list reflects the equally diverse group of EC2 customers!
Near the bottom of that list you will find the new compute-intensive C5 instances. With a 25% to 50% improvement in price-performance over the C4 instances, the C5 instances are designed for applications like batch and log processing, distributed and or real-time analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding. Some of these applications can benefit from access to high-speed, ultra-low latency local storage. For example, video encoding, image manipulation, and other forms of media processing often necessitates large amounts of I/O to temporary storage. While the input and output files are valuable assets and are typically stored as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) objects, the intermediate files are expendable. Similarly, batch and log processing runs in a race-to-idle model, flushing volatile data to disk as fast as possible in order to make full use of compute resources.
New C5d Instances with Local Storage In order to meet this need, we are introducing C5 instances equipped with local NVMe storage. Available for immediate use in 5 regions, these instances are a great fit for the applications that I described above, as well as others that you will undoubtedly dream up! Here are the specs:
Instance Name
vCPUs
RAM
Local Storage
EBS Bandwidth
Network Bandwidth
c5d.large
2
4 GiB
1 x 50 GB NVMe SSD
Up to 2.25 Gbps
Up to 10 Gbps
c5d.xlarge
4
8 GiB
1 x 100 GB NVMe SSD
Up to 2.25 Gbps
Up to 10 Gbps
c5d.2xlarge
8
16 GiB
1 x 225 GB NVMe SSD
Up to 2.25 Gbps
Up to 10 Gbps
c5d.4xlarge
16
32 GiB
1 x 450 GB NVMe SSD
2.25 Gbps
Up to 10 Gbps
c5d.9xlarge
36
72 GiB
1 x 900 GB NVMe SSD
4.5 Gbps
10 Gbps
c5d.18xlarge
72
144 GiB
2 x 900 GB NVMe SSD
9 Gbps
25 Gbps
Other than the addition of local storage, the C5 and C5d share the same specs. Both are powered by 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Platinum 8000-series processors, optimized for EC2 and with full control over C-states on the two largest sizes, giving you the ability to run two cores at up to 3.5 GHz using Intel Turbo Boost Technology.
You can use any AMI that includes drivers for the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and NVMe; this includes the latest Amazon Linux, Microsoft Windows (Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016), Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE, and CentOS AMIs.
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind about the local NVMe storage:
Naming – You don’t have to specify a block device mapping in your AMI or during the instance launch; the local storage will show up as one or more devices (/dev/nvme*1 on Linux) after the guest operating system has booted.
Encryption – Each local NVMe device is hardware encrypted using the XTS-AES-256 block cipher and a unique key. Each key is destroyed when the instance is stopped or terminated.
Lifetime – Local NVMe devices have the same lifetime as the instance they are attached to, and do not stick around after the instance has been stopped or terminated.
Available Now C5d instances are available in On-Demand, Reserved Instance, and Spot form in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), US East (Ohio), and Canada (Central) Regions. Prices vary by Region, and are just a bit higher than for the equivalent C5 instances.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now makes it easier for you to control access to your AWS resources by using the AWS organization of IAM principals (users and roles). For some services, you grant permissions using resource-based policies to specify the accounts and principals that can access the resource and what actions they can perform on it. Now, you can use a new condition key, aws:PrincipalOrgID, in these policies to require all principals accessing the resource to be from an account in the organization. For example, let’s say you have an Amazon S3 bucket policy and you want to restrict access to only principals from AWS accounts inside of your organization. To accomplish this, you can define the aws:PrincipalOrgID condition and set the value to your organization ID in the bucket policy. Your organization ID is what sets the access control on the S3 bucket. Additionally, when you use this condition, policy permissions apply when you add new accounts to this organization without requiring an update to the policy.
In this post, I walk through the details of the new condition and show you how to restrict access to only principals in your organization using S3.
Condition concepts
Before I introduce the new condition, let’s review the condition element of an IAM policy. A condition is an optional IAM policy element you can use to specify special circumstances under which the policy grants or denies permission. A condition includes a condition key, operator, and value for the condition. There are two types of conditions: service-specific conditions and global conditions. Service-specific conditions are specific to certain actions in an AWS service. For example, the condition key ec2:InstanceType supports specific EC2 actions. Global conditions support all actions across all AWS services.
Now that I’ve reviewed the condition element in an IAM policy, let me introduce the new condition.
AWS:PrincipalOrgID Condition Key
You can use this condition key to apply a filter to the Principal element of a resource-based policy. You can use any string operator, such as StringLike, with this condition and specify the AWS organization ID for as its value.
Condition key
Description
Operator(s)
Value
aws:PrincipalOrgID
Validates if the principal accessing the resource belongs to an account in your organization.
Example: Restrict access to only principals from my organization
Let’s consider an example where I want to give specific IAM principals in my organization direct access to my S3 bucket, 2018-Financial-Data, that contains sensitive financial information. I have two accounts in my AWS organization with multiple account IDs, and only some IAM users from these accounts need access to this financial report.
To grant this access, I author a resource-based policy for my S3 bucket as shown below. In this policy, I list the individuals who I want to grant access. For the sake of this example, let’s say that while doing so, I accidentally specify an incorrect account ID. This means a user named Steve, who is not in an account in my organization, can now access my financial report. To require the principal account to be in my organization, I add a condition to my policy using the global condition key aws:PrincipalOrgID. This condition requires that only principals from accounts in my organization can access the S3 bucket. This means that although Steve is one of the principals in the policy, he can’t access the financial report because the account that he is a member of doesn’t belong to my organization.
In the policy above, I specify the principals that I grant access to using the principal element of the statement. Next, I add s3:GetObject as the action and 2018-Financial-Data/* as the resource to grant read access to my S3 bucket. Finally, I add the new condition key aws:PrincipalOrgID and specify my organization ID in the condition element of the statement to make sure only the principals from the accounts in my organization can access this bucket.
Summary
You can now use the aws:PrincipalOrgID condition key in your resource-based policies to more easily restrict access to IAM principals from accounts in your AWS organization. For more information about this global condition key and policy examples using aws:PrincipalOrgID, read the IAM documentation.
If you have comments about this post, submit them in the Comments section below. If you have questions about or suggestions for this solution, start a new thread on the IAM forum or contact AWS Support.
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We announced a preview of AWS IoT 1-Click at AWS re:Invent 2017 and have been refining it ever since, focusing on simplicity and a clean out-of-box experience. Designed to make IoT available and accessible to a broad audience, AWS IoT 1-Click is now generally available, along with new IoT buttons from AWS and AT&T.
I sat down with the dev team a month or two ago to learn about the service so that I could start thinking about my blog post. During the meeting they gave me a pair of IoT buttons and I started to think about some creative ways to put them to use. Here are a few that I came up with:
Help Request – Earlier this month I spent a very pleasant weekend at the HackTillDawn hackathon in Los Angeles. As the participants were hacking away, they occasionally had questions about AWS, machine learning, Amazon SageMaker, and AWS DeepLens. While we had plenty of AWS Solution Architects on hand (decked out in fashionable & distinctive AWS shirts for easy identification), I imagined an IoT button for each team. Pressing the button would alert the SA crew via SMS and direct them to the proper table.
Camera Control – Tim Bray and I were in the AWS video studio, prepping for the first episode of Tim’s series on AWS Messaging. Minutes before we opened the Twitch stream I realized that we did not have a clean, unobtrusive way to ask the camera operator to switch to a closeup view. Again, I imagined that a couple of IoT buttons would allow us to make the request.
Remote Dog Treat Dispenser – My dog barks every time a stranger opens the gate in front of our house. While it is great to have confirmation that my Ring doorbell is working, I would like to be able to press a button and dispense a treat so that Luna stops barking!
Homes, offices, factories, schools, vehicles, and health care facilities can all benefit from IoT buttons and other simple IoT devices, all managed using AWS IoT 1-Click.
All About AWS IoT 1-Click As I said earlier, we have been focusing on simplicity and a clean out-of-box experience. Here’s what that means:
Architects can dream up applications for inexpensive, low-powered devices.
Developers don’t need to write any device-level code. They can make use of pre-built actions, which send email or SMS messages, or write their own custom actions using AWS Lambda functions.
Installers don’t have to install certificates or configure cloud endpoints on newly acquired devices, and don’t have to worry about firmware updates.
Administrators can monitor the overall status and health of each device, and can arrange to receive alerts when a device nears the end of its useful life and needs to be replaced, using a single interface that spans device types and manufacturers.
I’ll show you how easy this is in just a moment. But first, let’s talk about the current set of devices that are supported by AWS IoT 1-Click.
Who’s Got the Button? We’re launching with support for two types of buttons (both pictured above). Both types of buttons are pre-configured with X.509 certificates, communicate to the cloud over secure connections, and are ready to use.
The AWS IoT Enterprise Button communicates via Wi-Fi. It has a 2000-click lifetime, encrypts outbound data using TLS, and can be configured using BLE and our mobile app. It retails for $19.99 (shipping and handling not included) and can be used in the United States, Europe, and Japan.
The AT&T LTE-M Button communicates via the LTE-M cellular network. It has a 1500-click lifetime, and also encrypts outbound data using TLS. The device and the bundled data plan is available an an introductory price of $29.99 (shipping and handling not included), and can be used in the United States.
We are very interested in working with device manufacturers in order to make even more shapes, sizes, and types of devices (badge readers, asset trackers, motion detectors, and industrial sensors, to name a few) available to our customers. Our team will be happy to tell you about our provisioning tools and our facility for pushing OTA (over the air) updates to large fleets of devices; you can contact them at [email protected].
AWS IoT 1-Click Concepts I’m eager to show you how to use AWS IoT 1-Click and the buttons, but need to introduce a few concepts first.
Device – A button or other item that can send messages. Each device is uniquely identified by a serial number.
Placement Template – Describes a like-minded collection of devices to be deployed. Specifies the action to be performed and lists the names of custom attributes for each device.
Placement – A device that has been deployed. Referring to placements instead of devices gives you the freedom to replace and upgrade devices with minimal disruption. Each placement can include values for custom attributes such as a location (“Building 8, 3rd Floor, Room 1337”) or a purpose (“Coffee Request Button”).
Action – The AWS Lambda function to invoke when the button is pressed. You can write a function from scratch, or you can make use of a pair of predefined functions that send an email or an SMS message. The actions have access to the attributes; you can, for example, send an SMS message with the text “Urgent need for coffee in Building 8, 3rd Floor, Room 1337.”
Getting Started with AWS IoT 1-Click Let’s set up an IoT button using the AWS IoT 1-Click Console:
If I didn’t have any buttons I could click Buy devices to get some. But, I do have some, so I click Claim devices to move ahead. I enter the device ID or claim code for my AT&T button and click Claim (I can enter multiple claim codes or device IDs if I want):
The AWS buttons can be claimed using the console or the mobile app; the first step is to use the mobile app to configure the button to use my Wi-Fi:
Then I scan the barcode on the box and click the button to complete the process of claiming the device. Both of my buttons are now visible in the console:
I am now ready to put them to use. I click on Projects, and then Create a project:
I name and describe my project, and click Next to proceed:
Now I define a device template, along with names and default values for the placement attributes. Here’s how I set up a device template (projects can contain several, but I just need one):
The action has two mandatory parameters (phone number and SMS message) built in; I add three more (Building, Room, and Floor) and click Create project:
I’m almost ready to ask for some coffee! The next step is to associate my buttons with this project by creating a placement for each one. I click Create placements to proceed. I name each placement, select the device to associate with it, and then enter values for the attributes that I established for the project. I can also add additional attributes that are peculiar to this placement:
I can inspect my project and see that everything looks good:
I click on the buttons and the SMS messages appear:
I can monitor device activity in the AWS IoT 1-Click Console:
And also in the Lambda Console:
The Lambda function itself is also accessible, and can be used as-is or customized:
As you can see, this is the code that lets me use {{*}}include all of the placement attributes in the message and {{Building}} (for example) to include a specific placement attribute.
Now Available I’ve barely scratched the surface of this cool new service and I encourage you to give it a try (or a click) yourself. Buy a button or two, build something cool, and let me know all about it!
Pricing is based on the number of enabled devices in your account, measured monthly and pro-rated for partial months. Devices can be enabled or disabled at any time. See the AWS IoT 1-Click Pricing page for more info.
In a combined filesystem and storage session at the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM), Tim Walker asked for help in designing the interface to some new storage hardware. He wanted some feedback on how a multi-actuator drive should present itself to the system. These drives have two (or, eventually, more) sets of read/write heads and other hardware that can all operate in parallel.
This post courtesy of Jeff Levine Solutions Architect for Amazon Web Services
Amazon Linux 2 is the next generation of Amazon Linux, a Linux server operating system from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon Linux 2 offers a high-performance Linux environment suitable for organizations of all sizes. It supports applications ranging from small websites to enterprise-class, mission-critical platforms.
Amazon Linux 2 includes support for the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MariaDB/PHP) stack, one of the most popular platforms for deploying websites. To secure the transmission of data-in-transit to such websites and prevent eavesdropping, organizations commonly leverage Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) services which leverage certificates to provide encryption. The LAMP stack provided by Amazon Linux 2 includes a self-signed SSL/TLS certificate. Such certificates may be fine for internal usage but are not acceptable when attestation by a certificate authority is required.
In this post, I discuss how to extend the capabilities of Amazon Linux 2 by installing Let’s Encrypt, a certificate authority provided by the Internet Security Research Group. Let’s Encrypt offers basic SSL/TLS certificates for DNS hosts at no charge that you can use to add encryption-in-transit to a single web server. For commercial or multi-server configurations, you should consider AWS Certificate Manager and Elastic Load Balancing.
Let’s Encrypt also requires the certbot package, which you install from EPEL, the Extra Packaged for Enterprise Linux collection. Although EPEL is not included with Amazon Linux 2, I show how you can install it from the Fedora Project.
Walkthrough
At a high level, you perform the following tasks for this walkthrough:
Provision a VPC, Amazon Linux 2 instance, and LAMP stack.
Install and enable the EPEL repository.
Install and configure Let’s Encrypt.
Validate the installation.
Clean up.
Prerequisites and costs
To follow along with this walkthrough, you need the following:
Accept all other default values including with regard to storage.
Create a new security group and accept the default rule that allows TCP port 22 (SSH) from everywhere (0.0.0.0/0 in IPv4). For the purposes of this walkthrough, permitting access from all IP addresses is reasonable. In a production environment, you may restrict access to different addresses.
Allocate and associate an Elastic IP address to the server when it enters the running state.
Respond “Y” to all requests for approval to install the software.
Step 3: Install and configure Let’s Encrypt
If you are no longer connected to the Amazon Linux 2 instance, connect to it at the Elastic IP address that you just created.
Install certbot, the Let’s Encrypt client to be used to obtain an SSL/TLS certificate and install it into Apache.
sudo yum install python2-certbot-apache.noarch
Respond “Y” to all requests for approval to install the software. If you see a message appear about SELinux, you can safely ignore it. This is a known issue with the latest version of certbot.
Create a DNS “A record” that maps a host name to the Elastic IP address. For this post, assume that the name of the host is lamp.example.com. If you are hosting your DNS in Amazon Route 53, do this by creating the appropriate record set.
After the “A record” has propagated, browse to lamp.example.com. The Apache test page should appear. If the page does not appear, use a tool such as nslookup on your workstation to confirm that the DNS record has been properly configured.
You are now ready to install Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt does the following:
Confirms that you have control over the DNS domain being used, by having you create a DNS TXT record using the value that it provides.
Obtains an SSL/TLS certificate.
Modifies the Apache-related scripts to use the SSL/TLS certificate and redirects users browsing the site in HTTP mode to HTTPS mode.
Use the following command to install certbot:
sudo certbot -i apache -a manual \
--preferred-challenges dns -d lamp.example.com
The options have the following meanings:
-i apache Use the Apache installer.
-a manual Authenticate domain ownership manually.
--preferred-challenges dns Use DNS TXT records for authentication challenge.
-d lamp.example.com Specify the domain for the SSL/TLS certificate.
You are prompted for the following information: E-mail address for renewals? Enter an email address for certificate renewals. Accept the terms of services? Respond as appropriate. Send your e-mail address to the EFF? Respond as appropriate. Log your current IP address? Respond as appropriate.
You are prompted to deploy a DNS TXT record with the name “_acme-challenge.lamp.example.com” with the supplied value, as shown below.
After you enter the record, wait until the TXT record propagates. To look up the TXT record to confirm the deployment, use the nslookup command in a separate command window, as shown below. Remember to use the set ty=txt command before entering the TXT record. You are prompted to select a virtual host. There is only one, so choose 1. The final prompt asks whether to redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS. To perform the redirection, choose 2. That completes the configuration of Let’s Encrypt.
Browse to the http:// lamp.example.com site. You are redirected to the SSL/TLS page https://lamp.example.com.
To look at the encryption information, use the appropriate actions within your browser. For example, in Firefox, you can open the padlock and traverse the menus. In the encryption technical details, you can see from the “Connection Encrypted” line that traffic to the website is now encrypted using TLS 1.2.
Security note: As of the time of publication, this website also supports TLS 1.0. I recommend that you disable this protocol because of some known vulnerabilities associated with it. To do this:
Edit the file /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf.
Look for the line beginning with SSLProtocol and change it to the following:
SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3 -TLSv1
Save the file. After you make changes to this file, Let’s Encrypt no longer automatically updates it. Periodically check your log files for recommended updates to this file.
Restart the httpd server with the following command:
sudo service httpd restart
Step 5: Cleanup
Use the following steps to avoid incurring any further costs.
Terminate the Amazon Linux 2 instance that you created.
Release the Elastic IP address that you allocated.
Revert any DNS changes that you made, including the A and TXT records.
Conclusion
Amazon Linux 2 is an excellent option for hosting websites through the LAMP stack provided by the Amazon-Linux-Extras feature. You can then enhance the security of the Apache web server by installing EPEL and Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt provisions an SSL/TLS certificate, optionally installs it for you on the Apache server, and enables data-in-transit encryption. You can get started with Amazon Linux 2 in just a few clicks.
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