Tag Archives: Re:Invent 2022

Three key security themes from AWS re:Invent 2022

Post Syndicated from Anne Grahn original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/three-key-security-themes-from-aws-reinvent-2022/

AWS re:Invent returned to Las Vegas, Nevada, November 28 to December 2, 2022. After a virtual event in 2020 and a hybrid 2021 edition, spirits were high as over 51,000 in-person attendees returned to network and learn about the latest AWS innovations.

Now in its 11th year, the conference featured 5 keynotes, 22 leadership sessions, and more than 2,200 breakout sessions and hands-on labs at 6 venues over 5 days.

With well over 100 service and feature announcements—and innumerable best practices shared by AWS executives, customers, and partners—distilling highlights is a challenge. From a security perspective, three key themes emerged.

Turn data into actionable insights

Security teams are always looking for ways to increase visibility into their security posture and uncover patterns to make more informed decisions. However, as AWS Vice President of Data and Machine Learning, Swami Sivasubramanian, pointed out during his keynote, data often exists in silos; it isn’t always easy to analyze or visualize, which can make it hard to identify correlations that spark new ideas.

“Data is the genesis for modern invention.” – Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP of Data and Machine Learning

At AWS re:Invent, we launched new features and services that make it simpler for security teams to store and act on data. One such service is Amazon Security Lake, which brings together security data from cloud, on-premises, and custom sources in a purpose-built data lake stored in your account. The service, which is now in preview, automates the sourcing, aggregation, normalization, enrichment, and management of security-related data across an entire organization for more efficient storage and query performance. It empowers you to use the security analytics solutions of your choice, while retaining control and ownership of your security data.

Amazon Security Lake has adopted the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), which AWS cofounded with a number of organizations in the cybersecurity industry. The OCSF helps standardize and combine security data from a wide range of security products and services, so that it can be shared and ingested by analytics tools. More than 37 AWS security partners have announced integrations with Amazon Security Lake, enhancing its ability to transform security data into a powerful engine that helps drive business decisions and reduce risk. With Amazon Security Lake, analysts and engineers can gain actionable insights from a broad range of security data and improve threat detection, investigation, and incident response processes.

Strengthen security programs

According to Gartner, by 2026, at least 50% of C-Level executives will have performance requirements related to cybersecurity risk built into their employment contracts. Security is top of mind for organizations across the globe, and as AWS CISO CJ Moses emphasized during his leadership session, we are continuously building new capabilities to help our customers meet security, risk, and compliance goals.

In addition to Amazon Security Lake, several new AWS services announced during the conference are designed to make it simpler for builders and security teams to improve their security posture in multiple areas.

Identity and networking

Authorization is a key component of applications. Amazon Verified Permissions is a scalable, fine-grained permissions management and authorization service for custom applications that simplifies policy-based access for developers and centralizes access governance. The new service gives developers a simple-to-use policy and schema management system to define and manage authorization models. The policy-based authorization system that Amazon Verified Permissions offers can shorten development cycles by months, provide a consistent user experience across applications, and facilitate integrated auditing to support stringent compliance and regulatory requirements.

Additional services that make it simpler to define authorization and service communication include Amazon VPC Lattice, an application-layer service that consistently connects, monitors, and secures communications between your services, and AWS Verified Access, which provides secure access to corporate applications without a virtual private network (VPN).

Threat detection and monitoring

Monitoring for malicious activity and anomalous behavior just got simpler. Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection expands the threat detection capabilities of GuardDuty by using tailored machine learning (ML) models to detect suspicious logins to Amazon Aurora databases. You can enable the feature with a single click in the GuardDuty console, with no agents to manually deploy, no data sources to enable, and no permissions to configure. When RDS Protection detects a potentially suspicious or anomalous login attempt that indicates a threat to your database instance, GuardDuty generates a new finding with details about the potentially compromised database instance. You can view GuardDuty findings in AWS Security Hub, Amazon Detective (if enabled), and Amazon EventBridge, allowing for integration with existing security event management or workflow systems.

To bolster vulnerability management processes, Amazon Inspector now supports AWS Lambda functions, adding automated vulnerability assessments for serverless compute workloads. With this expanded capability, Amazon Inspector automatically discovers eligible Lambda functions and identifies software vulnerabilities in application package dependencies used in the Lambda function code. Actionable security findings are aggregated in the Amazon Inspector console, and pushed to Security Hub and EventBridge to automate workflows.

Data protection and privacy

The first step to protecting data is to find it. Amazon Macie now automatically discovers sensitive data, providing continual, cost-effective, organization-wide visibility into where sensitive data resides across your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) estate. With this new capability, Macie automatically and intelligently samples and analyzes objects across your S3 buckets, inspecting them for sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, and AWS credentials. Macie then builds and maintains an interactive data map of your sensitive data in S3 across your accounts and Regions, and provides a sensitivity score for each bucket. This helps you identify and remediate data security risks without manual configuration and reduce monitoring and remediation costs.

Encryption is a critical tool for protecting data and building customer trust. The launch of the end-to-end encrypted enterprise communication service AWS Wickr offers advanced security and administrative controls that can help you protect sensitive messages and files from unauthorized access, while working to meet data retention requirements.

Management and governance

Maintaining compliance with regulatory, security, and operational best practices as you provision cloud resources is key. AWS Config rules, which evaluate the configuration of your resources, have now been extended to support proactive mode, so that they can be incorporated into infrastructure-as-code continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to help identify noncompliant resources prior to provisioning. This can significantly reduce time spent on remediation.

Managing the controls needed to meet your security objectives and comply with frameworks and standards can be challenging. To make it simpler, we launched comprehensive controls management with AWS Control Tower. You can use it to apply managed preventative, detective, and proactive controls to accounts and organizational units (OUs) by service, control objective, or compliance framework. You can also use AWS Control Tower to turn on Security Hub detective controls across accounts in an OU. This new set of features reduces the time that it takes to define and manage the controls required to meet specific objectives, such as supporting the principle of least privilege, restricting network access, and enforcing data encryption.

Do more with less

As we work through macroeconomic conditions, security leaders are facing increased budgetary pressures. In his opening keynote, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky emphasized the effects of the pandemic, inflation, supply chain disruption, energy prices, and geopolitical events that continue to impact organizations.

Now more than ever, it is important to maintain your security posture despite resource constraints. Citing specific customer examples, Selipsky underscored how the AWS Cloud can help organizations move faster and more securely. By moving to the cloud, agricultural machinery manufacturer Agco reduced costs by 78% while increasing data retrieval speed, and multinational HVAC provider Carrier Global experienced a 40% reduction in the cost of running mission-critical ERP systems.

“If you’re looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it.” – Adam Selipsky, AWS CEO

Security teams can do more with less by maximizing the value of existing controls, and bolstering security monitoring and analytics capabilities. Services and features announced during AWS re:Invent—including Amazon Security Lake, sensitive data discovery with Amazon Macie, support for Lambda functions in Amazon Inspector, Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection, and more—can help you get more out of the cloud and address evolving challenges, no matter the economic climate.

Security is our top priority

AWS re:Invent featured many more highlights on a variety of topics, such as Amazon EventBridge Pipes and the pre-announcement of GuardDuty EKS Runtime protection, as well as Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels’ keynote, and the security partnerships showcased on the Expo floor. It was a whirlwind week, but one thing is clear: AWS is working harder than ever to make our services better and to collaborate on solutions that ease the path to proactive security, so that you can focus on what matters most—your business.

For more security-related announcements and on-demand sessions, see A recap for security, identity, and compliance sessions at AWS re:Invent 2022 and the AWS re:Invent Security, Identity, and Compliance playlist on YouTube.

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

Anne Grahn

Anne Grahn

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

Author

Paul Hawkins

Paul helps customers of all sizes understand how to think about cloud security so they can build the technology and culture where security is a business enabler. He takes an optimistic approach to security and believes that getting the foundations right is the key to improving your security posture.

Recap to security, identity, and compliance sessions at AWS re:Invent 2022

Post Syndicated from Katie Collins original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/recap-to-security-identity-and-compliance-sessions-at-aws-reinvent-2022/

AWS re:Invent returned to Las Vegas, NV, in November 2022. The conference featured over 2,200 sessions and hands-on labs and more than 51,000 attendees over 5 days. If you weren’t able to join us in person, or just want to revisit some of the security, identity, and compliance announcements and on-demand sessions, this blog post is for you.

re:Invent 2022

Key announcements

Here are some of the security announcements that we made at AWS re:Invent 2022.

  • We announced the preview of a new service, Amazon Security Lake. Amazon Security Lake automatically centralizes security data from cloud, on-premises, and custom sources into a purpose-built data lake stored in your AWS account. Security Lake makes it simpler to analyze security data so that you can get a more complete understanding of security across your entire organization. You can also improve the protection of your workloads, applications, and data. Security Lake automatically gathers and manages your security data across accounts and AWS Regions.
  • We introduced the AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge—our commitment to offering the most advanced set of sovereignty controls and features available in the cloud. As part of this pledge, we launched a new feature of AWS Key Management Service, External Key Store (XKS), where you can use your own encryption keys stored outside of the AWS Cloud to protect data on AWS.
  • To help you with the building blocks for zero trust, we introduced two new services:
    • AWS Verified Access provides secure access to corporate applications without a VPN. Verified Access verifies each access request in real time and only connects users to the applications that they are allowed to access, removing broad access to corporate applications and reducing the associated risks.
    • Amazon Verified Permissions is a scalable, fine-grained permissions management and authorization service for custom applications. Using the Cedar policy language, Amazon Verified Permissions centralizes fine-grained permissions for custom applications and helps developers authorize user actions in applications.
  • We announced Automated sensitive data discovery for Amazon Macie. This new capability helps you gain visibility into where your sensitive data resides on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) at a fraction of the cost of running a full data inspection across all your S3 buckets. Automated sensitive data discovery automates the continual discovery of sensitive data and potential data security risks across your S3 storage aggregated at the AWS Organizations level.
  • Amazon Inspector now supports AWS Lambda functions, adding continual, automated vulnerability assessments for serverless compute workloads. Amazon Inspector automatically discovers eligible AWS Lambda functions and identifies software vulnerabilities in application package dependencies used in the Lambda function code. The functions are initially assessed upon deployment to Lambda and continually monitored and reassessed, informed by updates to the function and newly published vulnerabilities. When vulnerabilities are identified, actionable security findings are generated, aggregated in Amazon Inspector, and pushed to Security Hub and Amazon EventBridge to automate workflows.
  • Amazon GuardDuty now offers threat detection for Amazon Aurora to identify potential threats to data stored in Aurora databases. Currently in preview, Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection profiles and monitors access activity to existing and new databases in your account, and uses tailored machine learning models to detect suspicious logins to Aurora databases. When a potential threat is detected, GuardDuty generates a security finding that includes database details and contextual information on the suspicious activity. GuardDuty is integrated with Aurora for direct access to database events without requiring you to modify your databases.
  • AWS Security Hub is now integrated with AWS Control Tower, allowing you to pair Security Hub detective controls with AWS Control Tower proactive or preventive controls and manage them together using AWS Control Tower. Security Hub controls are mapped to related control objectives in the AWS Control Tower control library, providing you with a holistic view of the controls required to meet a specific control objective. This combination of over 160 detective controls from Security Hub, with the AWS Control Tower built-in automations for multi-account environments, gives you a strong baseline of governance and off-the-shelf controls to scale your business using new AWS workloads and services. This combination of controls also helps you monitor whether your multi-account AWS environment is secure and managed in accordance with best practices, such as the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard.
  • We launched our Cloud Audit Academy (CAA) course for Federal and DoD Workloads (FDW) on AWS. This new course is a 12-hour interactive training based on NIST SP 800-171, with mappings to NIST SP 800-53 and the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) and covers AWS services relevant to each NIST control family. This virtual instructor-led training is industry- and framework-specific for our U.S. Federal and DoD customers.
  • AWS Wickr allows businesses and public sector organizations to collaborate more securely, while retaining data to help meet requirements such as e-discovery and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. AWS Wickr is an end-to-end encrypted enterprise communications service that facilitates one-to-one chats, group messaging, voice and video calling, file sharing, screen sharing, and more.
  • We introduced the Post-Quantum Cryptography hub that aggregates resources and showcases AWS research and engineering efforts focused on providing cryptographic security for our customers, and how AWS interfaces with the global cryptographic community.

Watch on demand

Were you unable to join the event in person? See the following for on-demand sessions.

Keynotes and leadership sessions

Watch the AWS re:Invent 2022 keynote where AWS Chief Executive Officer Adam Selipsky shares best practices for managing security, compliance, identity, and privacy in the cloud. You can also replay the other AWS re:Invent 2022 keynotes.

To learn about the latest innovations in cloud security from AWS and what you can do to foster a culture of security in your business, watch AWS Chief Information Security Officer CJ Moses’s leadership session with guest Deneen DeFiore, Chief Information Security Officer at United Airlines.

Breakout sessions and new launch talks

You can watch talks and learning sessions on demand to learn about the following topics:

  • See how AWS, customers, and partners work together to raise their security posture with AWS infrastructure and services. Learn about trends in identity and access management, threat detection and incident response, network and infrastructure security, data protection and privacy, and governance, risk, and compliance.
  • Dive into our launches! Hear from security experts on recent announcements. Learn how new services and solutions can help you meet core security and compliance requirements.

Consider joining us for more in-person security learning opportunities by saving the date for AWS re:Inforce 2023, which will be held June 13-14 in Anaheim, California. We look forward to seeing you there!

If you’d like to discuss how these new announcements can help your organization improve its security posture, AWS is here to help. Contact your AWS account team today.

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

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Katie Collins

Katie Collins

Katie is a Product Marketing Manager in AWS Security, where she brings her enthusiastic curiosity to deliver products that drive value for customers. Her experience also includes product management at both startups and large companies. With a love for travel, Katie is always eager to visit new places while enjoying a great cup of coffee.

Author

Himanshu Verma

Himanshu is a Worldwide Specialist for AWS Security Services. In this role, he leads the go-to-market creation and execution for AWS Security Services, field enablement, and strategic customer advisement. Prior to AWS, he held several leadership roles in Product Management, engineering and development, working on various identity, information security and data protection technologies. He obsesses brainstorming disruptive ideas, venturing outdoors, photography and trying various “hole in the wall” food and drinking establishments around the globe.

AWS Security Profile: Sarah Currey, Delivery Practice Manager

Post Syndicated from Maddie Bacon original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-security-profile-sarah-currey-delivery-practice-manager/

In the weeks leading up to AWS re:invent 2022, I’ll share conversations I’ve had with some of the humans who work in AWS Security who will be presenting at the conference, and get a sneak peek at their work and sessions. In this profile, I interviewed Sarah Currey, Delivery Practice Manager in World Wide Professional Services (ProServe).

How long have you been at AWS and what do you do in your current role?

I’ve been at AWS since 2019, and I’m a Security Practice Manager who leads a Security Transformation practice dedicated to helping customers build on AWS. I’m responsible for leading enterprise customers through a variety of transformative projects that involve adopting AWS services to help achieve and accelerate secure business outcomes.

In this capacity, I lead a team of awesome security builders, work directly with the security leadership of our customers, and—one of my favorite aspects of the job—collaborate with internal security teams to create enterprise security solutions.

How did you get started in security?

I come from a non-traditional background, but I’ve always had an affinity for security and technology. I started off learning HTML back in 2006 for my Myspace page (blast from the past, I know) and in college, I learned about offensive security by dabbling in penetration testing. I took an Information Systems class my senior year, but otherwise I wasn’t exposed to security as a career option. I’m from Nashville, TN, so the majority of people I knew were in the music or healthcare industries, and I took the healthcare industry path.

I started my career working at a government affairs firm in Washington, D.C. and then moved on to a healthcare practice at a law firm. I researched federal regulations and collaborated closely with staffers on Capitol Hill to educate them about controls to protect personal health information (PHI), and helped them to determine strategies to adhere to security, risk, and compliance frameworks such as HIPAA and (NIST) SP 800-53. Government regulations can lag behind technology, which creates interesting problems to solve. But in 2015, I was assigned to a project that was planned to last 20 years, and I decided I wanted to move into an industry that operated as a faster pace—and there was no better place than tech. 

From there, I moved to a startup where I worked as a Project Manager responsible for securely migrating customers’ data to the software as a service (SaaS) environment they used and accelerating internal adoption of the environment. I often worked with software engineers and asked, “why is this breaking?” so they started teaching me about different aspects of the service. I interacted regularly with a female software engineer who inspired me to start teaching myself to code. After two years of self-directed learning, I took the leap and quit my job to do a software engineering bootcamp. After the course, I worked as a software engineer where I transformed my security assurance skills into the ability to automate security. The cloud kept coming up in conversations around migrations, so I was curious and achieved software engineering and AWS certifications, eventually moving to AWS. Here, I work closely with highly regulated customers, such as those in healthcare, to advise them on using AWS to operate securely in the cloud, and work on implementing security controls to help them meet frameworks like NIST and HIPAA, so I’ve come full circle.

How do you explain your job to non-technical friends and family?

The general public isn’t sure how to define the cloud, and that’s no different with my friends and family. I get questions all the time like “what exactly is the cloud?” Since I love storytelling, I use real-world examples to relate it to their profession or hobbies. I might talk about the predictive analytics used by the NFL or, for my friends in healthcare, I talk about securing PHI.

However, my favorite general example is describing the AWS Shared Responsibility Model as a house. Imagine a house—AWS is responsible for security of the house. We’re responsible for the physical security of the house, and we build a fence, we make sure there is a strong foundation and secure infrastructure. The customer is the tenant—they can pay as they go, leave when they need to—and they’re responsible for running the house and managing the items, or data, in the house. So it’s my job to help the customer implement new ideas or technologies in the house to help them live more efficiently and securely. I advise them on how to best lock the doors, where to store their keys, how to keep track of who is coming in and out of the house with access to certain rooms, and how to protect their items in the house from other risks.

And for my friends that love Harry Potter, I just say that I work in the Defense Against the Dark Arts.

What are you currently working on that you’re excited about?

There are a lot of things in different spaces that I’m excited about.

One is that I’m part of a ransomware working group to provide an offering that customers can use to prepare for a ransomware event. Many customers want to know what AWS services and features they can use to help them protect their environments from ransomware, and we take real solutions that we’ve used with customers and scale them out. Something that’s really cool about Professional Services is that we’re on the frontlines with customers, and we get to see the different challenges and how we can relate those back to AWS service teams and implement them in our products. These efforts are exciting because they give customers tangible ways to secure their environments and workloads. I’m also excited because we’re focusing not just on the technology but also on the people and processes, which sometimes get forgotten in the technology space.

I’m a huge fan of cross-functional collaboration, and I love working with all the different security teams that we have within AWS and in our customer security teams. I work closely with the Amazon Managed Services (AMS) security team, and we have some very interesting initiatives with them to help our customers operate more securely in the cloud, but more to come on that.

Another exciting project that’s close to my heart is the Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (ID&E) workstream for the U.S. It’s really important to me to not only have diversity but also inclusion, and I’m leading a team that is helping to amplify diverse voices. I created an Amplification Flywheel to help our employees understand how they can better amplify diverse voices in different settings, such as meetings or brainstorming sessions. The flywheel helps illustrate a process in which 1) an idea is voiced by an underrepresented individual, 2) an ally then amplifies the idea by repeating it and giving credit to the author, 3) others acknowledge the contribution, 4) this creates a more equitable workplace, and 5) the flywheel continues where individuals feel more comfortable sharing ideas in the future.

Within this workstream, I’m also thrilled about helping underrepresented people who already have experience speaking but who may be having a hard time getting started with speaking engagements at conferences. I do mentorship sessions with them so they can get their foot in the door and amplify their own voice and ideas at conferences.

You’re presenting at re:Invent this year. Can you give us a sneak peek of your session?

I’m partnering with Johnny Ray, who is an AMS Senior Security Engineer, to present a session called SEC203: Revitalize your security with the AWS Security Reference Architecture. We’ll be discussing how the AWS SRA can be used as a holistic guide for deploying the full complement of AWS security services in a multi-account environment. The AWS SRA is a living document that we continuously update to help customers revitalize their security best practices as they grow, scale, and innovate.

What do you hope attendees take away from your session?

Technology is constantly evolving, and the security space is no exception. As organizations adopt AWS services and features, it’s important to understand how AWS security services work together to improve your security posture. Attendees will be able to take away tangible ways to:

  • Define the target state of your security architecture
  • Review the capabilities that you’ve already designed and revitalize them with the latest services and features
  • Bootstrap the implementation of your security architecture
  • Start a discussion about organizational governance and responsibilities for security

Johnny and I will also provide attendees with a roadmap at the end of the session that gives customers a plan for the first week after the session, one to three months after the session, and six months after the session, so they have different action items to implement within their organization.

You’ve written about the importance of ID&E in the workplace. In your opinion, what’s the most effective way leaders can foster an inclusive work environment?

I’m super passionate about ID&E, because it’s really important and it makes businesses more effective and a better place to work as a whole. My favorite Amazon Leadership Principle is Earn Trust. It doesn’t matter if you Deliver Results or Insist on the Highest Standards if no one is willing to listen to you because you don’t have trust built up. When it comes to building an inclusive work environment, a lot of earning trust comes from the ability to have empathy, vulnerability, and humility—being able to admit when you made a mistake—with your teammates as well as with your customers. I think we have a unique opportunity at AWS to work closely with customers and learn about what they’re doing and their best practices with ID&E, and share our best practices.

We all make mistakes, we’re all learning, and that’s okay, but having the ability to admit when you’ve made a mistake, apologize, and learn from it makes a much better place to work. When it comes to intent versus impact, I love to give the example—going back to storytelling—of walking down the street and accidentally bumping into someone, causing them to drop their coffee. You didn’t intend to hurt them or spill their coffee; your intent was to keep walking down the street. However, the impact that you had was maybe they’re burnt now, maybe their coffee is all down their clothes, and you had a negative impact on them. Now, you want to apologize and maybe look up more while you’re walking and be more observant of your surroundings. I think this is a good example because sometimes when it comes to ID&E, it can become a culture of blame and that’s not what we want to do—we want to call people in instead of calling them out. I think that’s a great way to build an inclusive team.

You can have a diverse workforce, but if you don’t have inclusion and you’re not listening to people who are underrepresented, that’s not going to help. You need to make sure you’re practicing transformative leadership and truly wanting to change how people behave and think when it comes to ID&E. You want to make sure people are more kind to each other, rather than only checking the box on arbitrary diversity goals. It’s important to be authentic and curious about how you learn from others and their experiences, and to respect them and implement that into different ideas and processes. This is important to make a more equitable workplace.

I love learning from different ID&E leaders like Camille Leak, Aiko Bethea, and Brené Brown. They are inspirational to me because they all approach ID&E with vulnerability and tackle the uncomfortable.

What’s the thing you’re most proud of in your career?

I have two different things—one from a technology standpoint and one from a personal impact perspective.

On the technology side, one of the coolest projects I’ve been on is Change Healthcare, which is an independent healthcare technology company that connects payers, providers, and patients across the United States. They have an important job of protecting a lot of PHI and personally identifiable information (PII) for American citizens. Change Healthcare needed to quickly migrate its ClaimsXten claims processing application to the cloud to meet the needs of a large customer, and it sought to move an internal demo and training application environment to the cloud to enable self-service and agility for developers. During this process, they reached out to AWS, and I took the lead role in advising Change Healthcare on security and how they were implementing their different security controls and technical documentation. I led information security meetings on AWS services, because the processes were new to a lot of the employees who were previously working in data centers. Through working with them, I was able to cut down their migration hours by 58% by using security automation and reduce the cost of resources, as well. I oversaw security for 94 migration cutovers where no security events occurred. It was amazing to see that process and build a great relationship with the company. I still meet with Change Healthcare employees for lunch even though I’m no longer on their projects. For this work, I was awarded the “Above and Beyond the Call of Duty” award, which only three Amazonians get a year, so that was an honor.

From a personal impact perspective, it was terrifying to quit my job and completely change careers, and I dealt with a lot of imposter syndrome—which I still have every day, but I work through it. Something impactful that resulted from this move was that it inspired a lot of people in my network from non-technical backgrounds, especially underrepresented individuals, to dive into coding and pursue a career in tech. Since completing my bootcamp, I’ve had more than 100 people reach out to me to ask about my experience, and about 30 of them quit their job to do a bootcamp and are now software engineers in various fields. So, it’s really amazing to see the life-changing impact of mentoring others.

You do a lot of volunteer work. Can you tell us about the work you do and why you’re so passionate about it?

Absolutely! The importance of giving back to the community cannot be understated.

Over the last 13 years, I have fundraised, volunteered, and advocated in building over 40 different homes throughout the country with Habitat for Humanity. One of my most impactful volunteer experiences was in 2013. I volunteered with a nonprofit called Bike & Build, where we cycled across the United States to raise awareness and money for affordable housing efforts. From Charleston, South Carolina to Santa Cruz, California, the team raised over $158,000, volunteered 3,584 hours, and biked 4,256 miles over the course of three months. This was such an incredible experience to meet hundreds of people across the country and help empower them to learn about affordable housing and improve their lives. It also tested me so much emotionally, mentally, and physically that I learned a lot about myself in the process. Additionally, I was selected by Gap, Inc. to participate in an international Habitat build in Antigua, Guatemala in October of 2014.

I’m currently on the Associate Board of Gilda’s Club, which provides free cancer support to anyone in need. Corporate social responsibility is a passion of mine, and so I helped organize AWS Birthday Boxes and Back to School Bags volunteer events with Gilda’s Club of Middle Tennessee. We purchased and assembled birthday and back-to-school boxes for children whose caregiver was experiencing cancer, so their caregiver would have one less thing to worry about and make sure the child feels special during this tough time. During other AWS team offsites, I’ve organized volunteering through Nashville Second Harvest food bank and created 60 shower and winter kits for individuals experiencing homelessness through ShowerUp.

I also mentor young adult women and non-binary individuals with BuiltByGirls to help them navigate potential career paths in STEM, and I recently joined the Cyversity organization, so I’m excited to give back to the security community.

If you had to pick an industry outside of security, what would you want to do?

History is one of my favorite topics, and I’ve always gotten to know people by having an inquisitive mind. I love listening and asking curious questions to learn more about people’s experiences and ideas. Since I’m drawn to the art of storytelling, I would pick a career as a podcast host where I bring on different guests to ask compelling questions and feature different, rarely heard stories throughout history.

 
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Author

Maddie Bacon

Maddie (she/her) is a technical writer for Amazon Security with a passion for creating meaningful content that focuses on the human side of security and encourages a security-first mindset. She previously worked as a reporter and editor, and has a BA in Mathematics. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, traveling, and staunchly defending the Oxford comma.

Sarah Curry

Sarah Currey

Sarah (she/her) is a Security Practice Manager with AWS Professional Services, who is focused on accelerating customers’ business outcomes through security. She leads a team of expert security builders who deliver a variety of transformative projects that involve adopting AWS services and implementing security solutions. Sarah is an advocate of mentorship and passionate about building an inclusive, equitable workplace for all.

AWS Security Profile: Jonathan “Koz” Kozolchyk, GM of Certificate Services

Post Syndicated from Roger Park original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-security-profile-jonathan-koz-kozolchyk-gm-of-certificate-services/

In the AWS Security Profile series, we interview AWS thought leaders who help keep our customers safe and secure. This interview features Jonathan “Koz” Kozolchyk, GM of Certificate Services, PKI Systems. Koz shares his insights on the current certificate landscape, his career at Amazon and within the security space, what he’s excited about for the upcoming AWS re:Invent 2022, his passion for home roasting coffee, and more.

How long have you been at AWS and what do you do in your current role?
I’ve been with Amazon for 21 years and in AWS for 6. I run our Certificate Services organization. This includes managing services such as AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA), AWS Signer, and managing certificates and trust stores at scale for Amazon. I’ve been in charge of the internal PKI (public key infrastructure, our mix of public and private certs) for Amazon for nearly 10 years. This has given me lots of insight into how certificates work at scale, and I’ve enjoyed applying those learnings to our customer offerings.

How did you get started in the certificate space? What about it piqued your interest?
Certificates were designed to solve two key problems: provide a secure identity and enable encryption in transit. These are both critical needs that are foundational to the operation of the internet. They also come with a lot of sharp edges. When a certificate expires, systems tend to fail. This can cause problems for Amazon and our customers. It’s a hard problem when you’re managing over a million certificates, and I enjoy the challenge that comes with that. I like turning hard problems into a delightful experience. I love the feedback we get from customers on how hands-free ACM is and how it just solves their problems.

How do you explain your job to your non-tech friends?
I tell them I do two things. I run the equivalent of a department of motor vehicles for the internet, where I validate the identity of websites and issue secure documentation to prove the websites’ validity to others (the certificate). I’m also a librarian. I keep track of all of the certificates we issue and ensure that they never expire and that the private keys are always safe.

What are you currently working on that you’re excited about?
I’m really excited about our AWS Private CA offering and the places we’re planning to grow the service. Running a certificate authority is hard—it requires careful planning and tight security controls. I love that AWS Private CA has turned this into a simple-to-use and secure system for customers. We’ve seen the number of customers expand over time as we’ve added more versatility for customers to customize certificates to meet a wide range of applications—including Kubernetes, Internet of Things, IAM Roles Anywhere (which provides a secure way for on-premises servers to obtain temporary AWS credentials and removes the need to create and manage long-term AWS credentials), and Matter, a new industry standard for connecting smart home devices. We’re also working on code signing and software supply chain security. Finally, we have some exciting features coming to ACM in the coming year that I think customers will really appreciate.

What’s been the most dramatic change you’ve seen in the industry?
The biggest change has been the way that certificate pricing and infrastructure as code has changed the way we think about certificates. It used to be that a company would have a handful of certificates that they tracked in spreadsheets and calendar invites. Issuance processes could take days and it was okay. Now, every individual host, every run of an integration test may be provisioning a new certificate. Certificate validity used to last three years, and now customers want one-day certificates. This brings a new element of scale to not only our underlying architecture, but also the ways that we have to interact with our customers in terms of management controls and visibility. We’re also at the beginning of a new push for increased PKI agility. In the old days, PKI was brittle and slow to change. We’re seeing the industry move towards the ability to rapidly change roots and intermediates. You can see we’re pushing some of this now with our dynamic intermediate certificate authorities.

What would you say is the coolest AWS service or feature in the PKI space?
Our customers love the way AWS Certificate Manager makes certificate management a hands-off automated affair. If you request a certificate with DNS validation, we’ll renew and deploy that certificate on AWS for as long as you’re using it and you’ll never lose sleep about that certificate.

Is there something you wish customers would ask you about more often?
I’m always happy to talk about PKI design and how to best plan your private CAs and design. We like to say that PKI is the land of one-way doors. It’s easy to make a decision that you can’t reverse, and it could be years before you realize you’ve made a mistake. Helping customers avoid those mistakes is something we like to do.

I understand you’ll be at re:Invent 2022. What are you most looking forward to?
Hands down it’s the customer meetings; we take customer feedback very seriously, and hearing what their needs are helps us define our solutions. We also have several talks in this space, including CON316 – Container Image Signing on AWS, SEC212 – Data Protection Grand Tour: Locks, Keys, Certs, and Sigs, and SEC213 – Understanding the evolution of cloud-based PKI. I encourage folks to check out these sessions as well as the re:Invent 2022 session catalog.

Do you have any tips for first-time re:Invent attendees?
Wear comfortable shoes! It’s amazing how many steps you’ll put in.

How about outside of work, any hobbies? I understand you’re passionate about home coffee roasting. How did you get started?
I do roast my own coffee—it’s a challenging hobby because you always have to be thinking 30 to 60 seconds ahead of what your data is showing you. You’re working off of sight and sound, listening to the beans and checking their color. When you make an adjustment to the roaster, you have to do it thinking where the beans will be in the future and not where they are now. I love the challenge that comes with it, and it gives me access to interesting coffee beans you wouldn’t normally see on store shelves. I got started with a used small home roaster because I thought I would enjoy it. I’ve since upgraded to a commercial “sample” roaster that lets me do larger batches.

 
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Roger Park

Roger Park

Roger is a Senior Security Content Specialist at AWS Security focusing on data protection. He has worked in cybersecurity for almost ten years as a writer and content producer. In his spare time, he enjoys trying new cuisines, gardening, and collecting records.

Jonathan Kozolchyk

Jonathan Kozolchyk

Jonathan is GM, Certificate Services , PKI Systems at AWS.

AWS Security Profile: Reef D’Souza, Principal Solutions Architect

Post Syndicated from Maddie Bacon original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-security-profile-reef-dsouza-principal-solutions-architect/

In the weeks leading up to AWS re:invent 2022, I’ll share conversations I’ve had with some of the humans who work in AWS Security who will be presenting at the conference, and get a sneak peek at their work and sessions. In this profile, I interviewed Reef D’Souza, Principal Solutions Architect.

How long have you been at AWS and what do you do in your current role?

I’ve been at AWS for about six and a half years. During my time here, I’ve worked in AWS Professional Services as a security consultant in New York and Los Angeles. I worked with customers in Financial Services, Healthcare, Telco, and Media & Entertainment to build security controls that align with the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework Security Epics (now Security Perspective) so that these customers could run highly regulated workloads on AWS. In the last two years, I’ve switched to a dual role of being a Solution Architect for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Digital Native Businesses (DNBs) in Canada while helping them with their security and privacy.

How did you get started in security?

I started out trying to make it as a software developer but realized I enjoy breaking things apart with my skepticism of security claims. While I was getting my master’s degree in Information Systems, I started to specialize in applying machine learning (ML) to anomaly detection systems and then went on to application security vulnerability management and testing while working at different security startups in New York. My customers were mostly in financial services, looking to threat model their apps, prioritize their risks, and take action.

How do you explain your job to non-technical friends and family?

I tell them that I work with companies who tell me what they’re worried about, which includes stolen credit card data or healthcare data, and then help those customers put technology in place to prevent or detect a security event. This often goes down the path of comparing me to the television show Mr. Robot or fictional espionage scenarios. When I say I work for Amazon, I often get asked whether I can track packages down for Thanksgiving and the holiday season.

What are you currently working on that you’re excited about?

I’ve been diving deep into the world of privacy engineering. As an SA for software companies in Canada, many of whom want to launch in Europe and other parts of the world that have strict privacy regulations, it’s a frequent topic. However, privacy discussions are often steeped in legal-speak. My customers’ technical stakeholders say that it all sounds like English but doesn’t make any sense. So my goal is to help them understand privacy risks and translate these risks to mechanisms that can be implemented in customers’ workloads. The last cool thing I worked on with AWS Privacy specialists on the ProServe SAS team was a workshop for AWS re:Inforce 2022 this past July.

You’re presenting at re:Invent this year. Can you give us a sneak peek of your session?

My session is Securing serverless workloads on AWS. It’s a chalk talk that walks the attendee through the shared responsibility model for serverless applications built with AWS Lambda. We then dive deeper into how to threat model for security risks and use AWS services to secure the application and test for vulnerabilities in the CI/CD pipeline. I cover classic risks like the OWASP Top 10 and how customers must think about verifying trusted third-party libraries with AWS CodeArtifact, deploying trusted code by using AWS Signer, and identifying vulnerabilities in their code with Amazon CodeGuru.

What do you hope attendees take away from your session?

Customers with vulnerability management programs must grasp a paradigm shift that there are no servers to scan anymore. Here is where the lines are blurred between traditional vulnerability management and application security. I hope attendees of my sessions leave with a better understanding of their responsibilities in terms of risks and where AWS services can help them build secure applications and do so earlier in the development lifecycle.

What’s your favorite Amazon Leadership Principle and why?

Insist on the Highest Standards. Shoddy craftsmanship based on planning for short-term wins, inefficiency, and wasteful spending are massive pet peeves of mine. This principle ties so closely with Customer Obsession, because the quality of our work impacts the long-term trust that others place in us. When there is an issue, it motivates us to find the root cause and shows up in our focus on operational excellence.

What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?

After I got out of graduate school, I entered the world thinking I knew everything. My first manager gave me the advice to keep asking questions, though. Knowing things doesn’t necessarily mean that your knowledge applies to a problem. You have to think beyond just a technical solution. When I joined Amazon, this felt natural as part of our Working Backwards process.

What’s the thing you’re most proud of in your career?

I worked on a COVID contact-tracing data lake project in the early stages of the pandemic. With some of the best security and data engineers on the team, we were able to threat model for the various components of the analytics environment, which housed data subject to HIPAA, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the E.U. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and many other healthcare and general privacy regulations. We released a working analytics solution within five or so months after March 2020. At the time, building these types of environments usually took over a year.

If you had to pick an industry outside of security, what would you want to do?

Motorcycle travel writing. It combines my favorite activities of meeting new people, learning new languages and cultures, trying new cuisines (cooking and eating), and sharing the experience with others.

 
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Author

Maddie Bacon

Maddie (she/her) is a technical writer for Amazon Security with a passion for creating meaningful content that focuses on the human side of security and encourages a security-first mindset. She previously worked as a reporter and editor, and has a BA in Mathematics. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, traveling, and staunchly defending the Oxford comma.

Reef D’Souza

Reef D’Souza

Reef is a Principal Solutions Architect focused on secrets management, privacy, threat modeling and web application security for companies across financial services, healthcare, media & entertainment and technology vendors.

AWS Security Profile: Param Sharma, Principal Software Engineer

Post Syndicated from Maddie Bacon original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-security-profile-param-sharma/

In the weeks leading up to AWS re:Invent 2022, I’m interviewing some of the humans who work in AWS Security, help keep our customers safe and secure, and also happen to be speaking at re:Invent. This interview is with Param Sharma, principal software engineer for AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA). AWS Private CA enables you to create private certificate authority (CA) hierarchies, including root and subordinate CAs, without the investment and maintenance costs of operating an on-premises CA.

How long have you been at AWS and what do you do in your current role?

I’ve been here for more than eight years—I joined AWS in July 2014, working in AWS Security. These days, I work on public key infrastructure (PKI) and cryptography, focusing on products like AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) and AWS Private CA.

How did you get started in the world of security, specifically cryptography?

I had a very short stint with crypto during my university days—I presented a paper on steganography and cryptography back in 2002 or 2003. Security has been an integral part of developing and deploying large-scale web applications, which I’ve done throughout my career. But security took center stage in 2014 when I heard from an AWS recruiter about a new service being built that would make certificates easier. I had no clue what that service was, since it was confidential and hadn’t been launched yet, but it brought cryptography back into my life. I started working on this brand-new service, AWS Certificate Manager. I designed the operational security aspect of it and worked to make sure it could be used by millions of our customers and could be available and secure at the same time. I was the second person hired on the ACM team, and since then the team has grown significantly.

What was the most surprising or interesting thing you’ve worked on in your time at AWS?

It might not be surprising, but certainly interesting to me: I was the first engineer to be hired on the AWS Private CA team and I started studying the problem of how certificate authorities would work in the cloud. I had to think about how the customer experience would look, the service architecture design, the operational side of things like availability and security of customer data. Doing a 360-degree review of the service and writing the design document for a service that was eventually deployed in a multitude of AWS Regions was one of the most interesting things I have worked on at AWS. It continues to be an interesting challenge as we add new features—which tend to be like smaller AWS services in their own right even though they are features of AWS Private CA.

How do you explain to customers how to use AWS Private CA?

I start by explaining what a private certificate is. A private certificate provides a flexible way to identify almost anything in an organization without disclosing the name publicly. With AWS Private CA, AWS takes care of the undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in operating a private CA. We provide security configuration, management, and monitoring of highly available private CAs. The service also helps organizations avoid spending money on servers, hardware security modules (HSMs), operations, personnel, infrastructure, software training, and maintenance. Maintaining PKI administrators, for example, can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per year. AWS Private CA simplifies the process of creating and managing these private CAs and certificates that are used to identify resources and provide a basis for trusted identity in communications.

In your opinion, what is the coolest feature of AWS Private CA?

That’s going to be really hard to pick! To me, the coolest feature is root CA, which gives customers the ability to create and manage root CAs in the cloud. Root CAs are used to create subordinate CAs for issuing identity certificates. And these private CAs can be used to identify resources in a private network within an organization. You can use these private certs on application services, devices, or even for identifying users for identity certificates.

AWS Private CA has evolved since its launch in 2018. What are some of the new ways you see customers using the service?

When AWS Private CA was launched in 2018, the primary feature was to create and manage subordinate CAs, which were signed offline outside of AWS Private CA. The secondary feature was to issue certificates for identifying endpoints for TLS/SSL communication. Over the last four or five years, I’ve seen use cases become more diversified, and the service has evolved as the customers’ needs have evolved. The biggest paradigm shift that I’ve seen is that customers are customizing certificates and using them to identify IoT devices or customer-managed Kubernetes clusters. The certificates can even be used on-premises for your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or your on-premises servers, where you can use these services to encrypt the traffic in transit or at rest in certain cases. The other more recent use case I’ve started to see is customers using AWS Private CA with AWS Identity and Access Management Roles Anywhere, which launched in July 2022. Customers are using this combination to issue certificates for identity, which is tied to the credentials themselves.

I understand you’ll be speaking at re:Invent 2022. Can you tell us about your session there? What do you hope customers take away from your session?

I am doing two sessions at re:Invent this year. The first one, Understanding the evolution of cloud-based PKI use cases, is a chalk talk about how cloud-based PKI use cases have evolved over the last 5–10 years. This talk is mainly for PKI administrators, information security engineers, developers, managers, directors, and IoT security professionals who want to learn more about how X.509 digital certificates are used in the cloud. We will dive deep into how these certs are being used for normal TLS communication, device certificates, containers, or even certificates used for identity like in IAM Roles Anywhere. The second session is a breakout session called AWS data protection: Using locks, keys, signatures, and certificates. It puts a spotlight on what AWS offers in terms of cryptographic tools and PKI platforms that help our customers navigate their data protection and digital signing needs. This session will provide a ground-floor understanding of how to get this protection by default or when needed, and how can you build your own logs, keys, and signatures for you own cloud application.

What’s the thing you’re most proud of in your career?

I’m proud to work with some of the smartest people who, at the same time, are very humble and genuinely believe in making this world a better place for everyone.

Outside of your work in tech, what is something you’re interested in that might surprise people?

I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old, so whenever I get some time to myself between those two, I love to read and take long strolls. I’m a passionate advocate that every voice is unique and has value to share. I’m a diversity and inclusion ambassador at Amazon and as part of this program, I mentor underrepresented groups and help build a community with integrity and a willingness to listen to others, which provides a space for us to be ourselves without fear of judgement. I try to do volunteer work whenever possible, being involved in community service programs organized through my children’s school activities, or even participating in local community kitchens by cooking and serving food that is distributed through a local non-profit organization.

If you had to pick an industry outside of security, what would you want to do?

I would’ve been a teacher or worked with a non-profit organization mentoring and volunteering. I think volunteering gives me a sense of peace.

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

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Author

Maddie Bacon

Maddie (she/her) is a technical writer for Amazon Security with a passion for creating meaningful content that focuses on the human side of security and encourages a security-first mindset. She previously worked as a reporter and editor, and has a BA in Mathematics. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, traveling, and staunchly defending the Oxford comma.

Param Sharma

Param Sharma

Param is a Principal Software Engineer with AWS PKI. She is passionate about PKI, security, and privacy. She works with AWS customers to design, deploy, and manage their PKI infrastructures, helping customers improve their security, risk, and compliance in the cloud. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, reading, and volunteering with local non-profit organizations.

A sneak peek at the security, identity, and compliance sessions for re:Invent 2022

Post Syndicated from Katie Collins original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/a-sneak-peek-at-the-security-identity-and-compliance-sessions-for-reinvent-2022/

AWS Re:Invent 2022

AWS re:Invent 2022 is fast approaching, and this post can help you plan your agenda with a look at the sessions in the security track. AWS re:Invent, your opportunity to catch up on the latest technologies in cloud computing, will take place in person in Las Vegas, NV, from November 28 – December 2, 2022.

This post provides abbreviated abstracts for all of the security, identity, and compliance sessions. For the full description, visit the AWS re:Invent session catalog. If you plan to attend AWS re:Invent 2022, and you’re interested in connecting with a security, identity, or compliance product team, reach out to your AWS Account Team. Don’t have a ticket yet? Join us in Las Vegas by registering for re:Invent 2022.

Leadership session

SEC214-L: What we can learn from customers: Accelerating innovation at AWS Security
CJ Moses, CISO at AWS, showcases part of the peculiar AWS culture of innovation—the working backwards process—and how new security products, services, and features are built with the customer in mind. AWS Security continuously innovates based directly on customer feedback so that organizations can accelerate their pace of innovation while integrating powerful security architecture into the heart of their business and operations.

Breakout sessions

Lecture-style presentations that cover topics at all levels (200-400) and are delivered by AWS experts, builders, customers, and partners.

SEC201: Proactive security: Considerations and approaches
Security is our top priority at AWS. Discover how the partnership between builder experience and security helps everyone ship securely. Hear about the tools, mechanisms, and programs that help AWS builders and security teams.

SEC203: Revitalize your security with the AWS Security Reference Architecture
As your team continually evolves its use of AWS services and features, it’s important to understand how AWS security services work together to improve your security posture. In this session, learn about the recently updated AWS Security Reference Architecture (AWS SRA), which provides prescriptive guidance for deploying the full complement of AWS security services in a multi-account environment.

SEC207: Simplify your existing workforce access with IAM Identity Center
In this session, learn how to simplify operations and improve efficiencies by scaling and securing your workforce access. You can easily connect AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On) to your existing identity source. IAM Identity Center integrated with AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory provides a centralized and scalable access management solution for your workplace users across multiple AWS accounts while improving the overall security posture of your organization.

SEC210: AWS and privacy engineering: Explore the possibilities
Learn about the intersection of technology and governance, with an emphasis on solution building. With the privacy regulation landscape continuously changing, organizations need innovative technical solutions to help solve privacy compliance challenges. This session covers a series of unique customer challenges and explores how AWS services can be used as building blocks for privacy-enhancing solutions.

SEC212: AWS data protection: Using locks, keys, signatures, and certificates
AWS offers a broad array of cryptographic tools and PKI platforms to help you navigate your data protection and digital signing needs. Discover how to get this by default and how to build your own locks, keys, signatures, and certificates when needed for your next cloud application. Learn best practices for data protection, data residency, digital sovereignty, and scalable certificate management, and get a peek into future considerations around crypto agility and encryption by default.

SEC309: Threat detection and incident response using cloud-native services
Threat detection and incident response processes in the cloud have many similarities to on premises, but there are some fundamental differences. In this session, explore how cloud-native services can be used to support threat detection and incident response processes in AWS environments.

SEC310: Security alchemy: How AWS uses math to prove security
AWS helps you strengthen the power of your security by using mathematical logic to answer questions about your security controls. This is known as provable security. In this session, explore the math that proves security systems of the cloud.

SEC312: Deploying egress traffic controls in production environments
Private workloads that require access to resources outside of the VPC should be well monitored and managed. There are solutions that can make this easier, but selecting one requires evaluation of your security, reliability, and cost requirements. Learn how Robinhood evaluated, selected, and implemented AWS Network Firewall to shape network traffic, block threats, and detect anomalous activity on workloads that process sensitive financial data.

SEC313: Harness the power of IAM policies & rein in permissions with Access Analyzer
Explore the power of IAM policies and discover how to use IAM Access Analyzer to set, verify, and refine permissions. Learn advanced skills that empower builders to apply fine-grained permissions across AWS. This session dives deep into IAM policies and explains IAM policy evaluation, policy types and their use cases, and critical access controls.

SEC327: Zero-privilege operations: Running services without access to data
AWS works with organizations and regulators to host some of the most sensitive workloads in industry and government. Learn how AWS secures data, even from trusted AWS operators and services. Explore the AWS Nitro System and how it provides confidential computing and a trusted runtime environment, and dive deep into the cryptographic chains of custody that are built into AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

SEC329: AWS security services for container threat detection
Containers are a cornerstone of many AWS customers’ application modernization strategies. The increased dependence on containers in production environments requires threat detection that is designed for container workloads. To help meet the container security and visibility needs of security and DevOps teams, new container-specific security capabilities have recently been added to Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon Detective. The head of cloud security at HBO Max will share container security monitoring best practices.

SEC332: Build Securely on AWS: Insights from the C-Suite
Security shouldn’t be top of mind only when it’s a headline in the news. A strong security posture is a proactive one. In this panel session, hear how CISOs and CIOs are taking a proactive approach to security by building securely on AWS.

SEC403: Protecting secrets, keys, and data: Cryptography for the long term
This session covers the range of AWS cryptography services and solutions, including AWS KMS, AWS CloudHSM, the AWS Encryption SDK, AWS libcrypto (AWS-LC), post-quantum hybrid algorithms, AWS FIPS accreditations, configurable security policies for Application Load Balancer and Amazon CloudFront, and more.

SEC404: A day in the life of a billion requests
Every day, sites around the world authenticate their callers. That is, they verify cryptographically that the requests are actually coming from who they claim to come from. In this session, learn about unique AWS requirements for scale and security that have led to some interesting and innovative solutions to this need.

SEC405: Zero Trust: Enough talk, let’s build better security
Zero Trust is a powerful new security model that produces superior security outcomes compared to the traditional network perimeter model. However, endless competing definitions and debates about what, Zero Trust is have kept many organizations’ Zero Trust efforts at or near the starting line. Hear from Delphix about how they put Zero Trust into production and the results and benefits they’ve achieved.

Builders’ sessions

Small-group sessions led by an AWS expert who guides you as you build the service or product on your own laptop. Use your laptop to experiment and build along with the AWS expert.

SEC202: Vulnerability management with Amazon Inspector and AWS Systems Manager
Join this builders’ session to learn how to use Amazon Inspector and AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to scan and patch software vulnerabilities on Amazon EC2 instances. Walk through how to understand, prioritize, suppress, and patch vulnerabilities using AWS security services.

SEC204: Analyze your network using Amazon VPC Network Access Analyzer
In this builders’ session, review how the new Amazon VPC Network Access Analyzer can help you identify network configurations that might lead to unintended network access. Learn ways that you can improve your security posture while still allowing you and your organization to be agile and flexible.

SEC211: Disaster recovery and resiliency for AWS data protection services
Resiliency is a core consideration when architecting cloud workloads. Preparing and implementing disaster recovery (DR) strategies is an important step for ensuring the resiliency of your solution in the face of regional disasters. Gain hands-on experience with implementing backup-restore and active-active DR strategies when working with AWS database services like Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora and data protection services like AWS KMS, AWS Secrets Manager, and AWS Backup.

SEC303: AWS CIRT toolkit for automating incident response preparedness
When it comes to life in the cloud, there’s nothing more important than security. At AWS, the Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) creates tools to support customers during active security events and to help them anticipate and respond to events using simulations. CIRT members demonstrate best practices for using these tools to enable service logs with Assisted Log Enabler for AWS, run a security event simulation using AWS CloudSaga, and analyze logs to respond to a security event with Amazon Athena.

SEC304: Machine-to-machine authentication on AWS
This session offers hands-on learning around the pros and cons of several methods of machine-to-machine authentication. Examine how to implement and use Amazon Cognito, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon API Gateway to authenticate services to each other with various types of keys and certificates.

SEC305: Kubernetes threat detection and incident response automation
In this hands-on session, learn how to use Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Detective to effectively analyze Kubernetes audit logs from Amazon EKS and alert on suspicious events or malicious access such as an increase in “403 Forbidden” or “401 Unauthorized” logs.

SEC308: Deploying repeatable, secure, and compliant Amazon EKS clusters
Learn how to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications that run Kubernetes on AWS with AWS Service Catalog. Walk through how to deploy the Kubernetes control plane into a virtual private cloud, connect worker nodes to the cluster, and configure a bastion host for cluster administrative operations.

Chalk talks

Highly interactive sessions with a small audience. Experts lead you through problems and solutions on a digital whiteboard as the discussion unfolds.

SEC206: Security operations metrics that matter
Security tooling can produce thousands of security findings to act on. But what are the most important items and metrics to focus on? Learn about a framework you can use to develop and implement security operations metrics in order to prioritize the highest-risk issues across your AWS environment.

SEC209: Continuous innovation in AWS threat detection & monitoring services
AWS threat detection teams continue to innovate and improve foundational security services for proactive and early detection of security events and posture management. Learn about recent launches that address use cases like container threat detection, protection from malware, and sensitive data identification. Services covered in this session include Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Detective, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, and centralized cloud security posture assessment with AWS Security Hub.

SEC311: Securing serverless workloads on AWS
Walk through design patterns for building secure serverless applications on AWS. Learn how to handle secrets with AWS Lambda extensions and AWS Secrets Manager, detect vulnerabilities in code with Amazon CodeGuru, ensure security-approved libraries are used in the code with AWS CodeArtifact, provide security assurance in code with AWS Signer, and secure APIs on Amazon API Gateway.

SEC314: Automate security analysis and code reviews with machine learning
Join this chalk talk to learn how developers can use machine learning to embed security during the development phase and build guardrails to automatically flag common issues that deviate from best practices. This session is tailored to developers and security professionals who are involved in improving the security of applications during the development lifecycle.

SEC315: Security best practices for Amazon Cognito applications
Customer identity and access management (CIAM) is critical when building and deploying web and mobile applications for your business. To mitigate the risks of unauthorized access, you need to implement strong identity protections by using the right security measures, such as multi-factor authentication, activity monitoring and alerts, adaptive authentication, and web firewall integration.

SEC316: Establishing trust with cryptographically attested identity
Cryptographic attestation is a mechanism for systems to make provable claims of their identity and state. Dive deep on the use of cryptographic attestation on AWS, powered by technologies such as NitroTPM and AWS Nitro Enclaves to assure system integrity and establish trust between systems. Come prepared for a lively discussion as you explore various use cases, architectures, and approaches for utilizing attestation to raise the security bar for workloads on AWS.

SEC317: Implementing traffic inspection capabilities at scale on AWS
Learn about a broad range of security offerings that can help you integrate firewall services into your network, including AWS WAF, AWS Network Firewall, and partner appliances used in conjunction with a Gateway Load Balancer. Learn how to choose network architectures for these firewall options to protect inbound traffic to your internet-facing applications.

SEC318: Scaling the possible: Digitizing the audit experience
Do you want to increase the speed and scale of your audits? As companies expand to new industries and markets, so does the scale of regulatory compliance. AWS undergoes hundreds of audits in a year. In this chalk talk, AWS experts discuss how they digitize and automate the regulator and auditor experience. Learn about pre-audit educational training, self-service of control evidence and walkthrough information, live chats with audit control owners, and virtual data center tours.

SEC319: Prevent unintended access with AWS IAM Access Analyzer policy validation
In this chalk talk, walk through several approaches to building automated AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy validation into your CI/CD pipeline. Consider some tools that can be used for policy validation, including AWS IAM Access Analyzer, and learn how mechanisms like AWS CloudFormation hooks and CI/CD pipeline controls can be used to incorporate these tools into your DevSecOps workflow.

SEC320: To Europe and beyond: Architecting for EU data protection regulation
Companies innovating on AWS are expanding to geographies with new data transfer and privacy challenges. Explore how to navigate compliance with EU data transfer requirements and discuss how the GDPR certification initiative can simplify GDPR compliance. Dive deep in a collaborative whiteboarding session to learn how to build GDPR-certifiable architectures.

SEC321: Building your forensics capabilities on AWS
You have a compromised resource on AWS. How do you acquire evidence and artifacts? Where do you transfer the data, and how do you store it? How do you analyze it safely within an isolated environment? Walk through building a forensics lab on AWS, methods for implementing effective data acquisition and analysis, and how to make sure you are getting the most out of your investigations.

SEC322: Transform builder velocity with security
Learn how AWS Support uses data to measure security and make informed decisions to grow the people side of security culture while embedding security expertise within development teams. This is empowering developers to deliver production-quality code with the highest security standards at the speed of business.

SEC324: Reimagine the security perimeter with Zero Trust
Zero Trust encompasses everything from the client to the cloud, so where do you start on your journey? In this chalk talk, learn how to look at your environment through a Zero Trust lens and consider architectural patterns that you can use to redefine your security perimeter.

SEC325: Beyond database password management: 5 use cases for AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Secrets Manager is integrated with AWS managed databases to make it easy for you to create, rotate, consume, and monitor database user names and passwords. This chalk talk explores how client applications use Secrets Manager to manage private keys, API keys, and generic credentials.

SEC326: Establishing a data perimeter on AWS, featuring Goldman Sachs
Organizations are storing an unprecedented and increasing amount of data on AWS for a range of use cases including data lakes, analytics, machine learning, and enterprise applications. They want to prevent intentional or unintentional transfers of sensitive non-public data for unauthorized use. Hear from Goldman Sachs about how they use data perimeter controls in their AWS environment to meet their security control objectives.

SEC328: Learn to create continuous detective security controls using AWS services
A risk owner needs to ensure that no matter what your organization is building in the cloud, certain security invariants are in place. While preventive controls are great, they are not always sufficient. Deploying detective controls to enable early identification of configuration issues or availability problems not only adds defense in depth, but can also help detect changes in security posture as your workloads evolve. Learn how to use services like AWS Security Hub, AWS Config, and Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics to deploy canaries and perform continuous checks.

SEC330: Harness the power of temporary credentials with IAM Roles Anywhere
Get an introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Roles Anywhere, and dive deep into how you can use IAM Roles Anywhere to access AWS services from outside of AWS. Learn how IAM Roles Anywhere securely delivers temporary AWS credentials to your workloads.

SEC331: Security at the industrial edge
Industrial organizations want to process data and take actions closer to their machines at the edge, and they need innovative and highly distributed patterns for keeping their critical information and cyber-physical systems safe. In modern industrial environments, the exponential growth of IoT and edge devices brings enormous benefits but also introduces new risks.

SEC333: Designing compliance as a code with AWS security services
Supporting regulatory compliance and mitigating security risks is imperative for most organizations. Addressing these challenges at scale requires automated solutions to identify compliance gaps and take continuous proactive measures. Hear about the architecture of compliance monitoring and remediation solutions, based on the example of the CPS 234 Information Security guidelines of the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA), which are mandated for the financial services industry in Australia and New Zealand.

SEC334: Understanding the evolution of cloud-based PKI use cases
Since AWS Private Certificate Authority (CA) launched in 2018, the service has evolved based on user needs. This chalk talk starts with a primer on certificate use for securing network connections and information. Learn about the predominant ways AWS customers are using ACM Private CA, and explore new use cases, including identifying IoT devices, customer-managed Kubernetes, and on premises.

SEC402: The anatomy of a ransomware event targeting data residing in Amazon S3
Ransomware events can cost governments, nonprofits, and businesses billions of dollars and interrupt operations. Early detection and automated responses are important steps that can limit your organization’s exposure. Walk through the anatomy of a ransomware event that targets data residing in Amazon S3 and hear detailed best practices for detection, response, recovery, and protection.

Workshops

Interactive learning sessions where you work in small teams to solve problems using AWS Cloud security services. Come prepared with your laptop and a willingness to learn!

SEC208: Executive security simulation
This workshop features an executive security simulation, designed to take senior security management and IT or business executive teams through an experiential exercise that illuminates key decision points for a successful and secure cloud journey. During this team-based, game-like simulation, use an industry case study to make strategic security, risk, and compliance decisions and investments.

SEC301: Threat detection and response workshop
This workshop takes you through threat detection and response using Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon Inspector. The workshop simulates different threats to Amazon S3, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon EKS, and Amazon EC2 and illustrates both manual and automated responses with AWS Lambda. Learn how to operationalize security findings.

SEC302: AWS Network Firewall and DNS Firewall security in multi-VPC architectures
This workshop guides participants through configuring AWS Network Firewall and Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall in an AWS multi-VPC environment. It demonstrates how VPCs can be interconnected with a centralized AWS Network Firewall and DNS Firewall configuration to ease the governance requirements of network security.

SEC306: Building a data perimeter to allow access to authorized users
In this workshop, learn how to create a data perimeter by building controls that allow access to data only from expected network locations and by trusted identities. The workshop consists of five modules, each designed to illustrate a different AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) principle or network control.

SEC307: Ship securely: Automated security testing for developers
Learn how to build automated security testing into your CI/CD pipelines using AWS services and open-source tools. The workshop highlights how to identify and mitigate common risks early in the development cycle and also covers how to incorporate code review steps.

SEC323: Data discovery and classification on AWS
Learn how to use Amazon Macie to discover and classify data in your Amazon S3 buckets. Dive deep into best practices as you follow the process of setting up Macie. Also use AWS Security Hub custom actions to set up a manual remediation, and investigate how to perform automated remediation using Amazon EventBridge and AWS Lambda.

SEC401: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy evaluation in action
Dive deep into the logic of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy evaluation. Gain experience with hands-on labs that walk through IAM use cases and learn how different policies interact with each other.

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Katie Collins

Katie Collins

Katie is a Product Marketing Manager in AWS Security, where she brings her enthusiastic curiosity to deliver products that drive value for customers. Her experience also includes product management at both startups and large companies. With a love for travel, Katie is always eager to visit new places while enjoying a great cup of coffee.

Author

Marta Taggart

Marta is a Seattle-native and Senior Product Marketing Manager in AWS Security Product Marketing, where she focuses on data protection services. Outside of work you’ll find her trying to convince Jack, her rescue dog, not to chase squirrels and crows (with limited success).