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Establishing a data perimeter on AWS: Analyze your account activity to evaluate impact and refine controls

Post Syndicated from Achraf Moussadek-Kabdani original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/establishing-a-data-perimeter-on-aws-analyze-your-account-activity-to-evaluate-impact-and-refine-controls/

A data perimeter on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a set of preventive controls you can use to help establish a boundary around your data in AWS Organizations. This boundary helps ensure that your data can be accessed only by trusted identities from within networks you expect and that the data cannot be transferred outside of your organization to untrusted resources. Review the previous posts in the Establishing a data perimeter on AWS series for information about the security objectives and foundational elements needed to define and enforce each perimeter type.

In this blog post, we discuss how to use AWS logging and analytics capabilities to help accelerate the implementation and effectively operate data perimeter controls at scale.

You start your data perimeter journey by identifying access patterns that you want to prevent and defining what trusted identities, trusted resources, and expected networks mean to your organization. After you define your trust boundaries based on your business and security requirements, you can use policy examples provided in the data perimeter GitHub repository to design the authorization controls for enforcing these boundaries. Before you enforce the controls in your organization, we recommend that you assess the potential impacts on your existing workloads. Performing the assessment helps you to identify unknown data access patterns missed during the initial design phase, investigate, and refine your controls to help ensure business continuity as you deploy them.

Finally, you should continuously monitor your controls to verify that they operate as expected and consistently align with your requirements as your business grows and relationships with your trusted partners change.

Figure 1 illustrates common phases of a data perimeter journey.

Figure 1: Data perimeter implementation journey

Figure 1: Data perimeter implementation journey

The usual phases of the data perimeter journey are:

  1. Examine your security objectives
  2. Set your boundaries
  3. Design data perimeter controls
  4. Anticipate potential impacts
  5. Implement data perimeter controls
  6. Monitor data perimeter controls
  7. Continuous improvement

In this post, we focus on phase 4: Anticipate potential impacts. We demonstrate how to analyze activity observed in your AWS environment to evaluate impact and refine your data perimeter controls. We also demonstrate how you can automate the analysis by using the data perimeter helper open source tool.

You can use the same techniques to support phase 6: Monitor data perimeter controls, where you will continuously monitor data access patterns in your organization and potentially troubleshoot permissions issues caused by overly restrictive or overly permissive policies as new data access paths are introduced.

Setting prerequisites for impact analysis

In this section, we describe AWS logging and analytics capabilities that you can use to analyze impact of data perimeter controls on your environment. We also provide instructions for configuring them.

While you might have some capabilities covered by other AWS tools (for example, AWS Security Lake) or external tools, the proposed approach remains applicable. For instance, if your logs are stored in an external security data lake or your configuration state recording is performed by an external cloud security posture management (CSPM) tool, you can extract and adapt the logic from this post to suit your context. The flexibility of this approach allows you to use the existing tools and processes in your environment while benefiting from the insights provided.

Pricing

Some of the required capabilities can generate additional costs in your environment.

AWS CloudTrail charges based on the number of events delivered to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Note that the first copy of management events is free. To help control costs, you can use advanced event selectors to select only events that matter to your context. For more details, see CloudTrail pricing.

AWS Config charges based on the number of configuration items delivered, the AWS Config aggregator and advanced queries are included in AWS Config pricing. To help control costs, you can select which resource types AWS Config records or change the recording frequency. For more details, see AWS Config pricing.

Amazon Athena charges based on the number of terabytes of data scanned in Amazon S3. To help control costs, use the proposed optimized tables with partitioning and reduce the time frame of your queries. For more details, see Athena pricing.

AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer doesn’t charge additional costs for external access findings. For more details, see IAM Access Analyzer pricing.

Create a CloudTrail trail to record access activity

The primary capability that you will use is a CloudTrail trail. CloudTrail records AWS API calls and events from your AWS accounts that contain the following information relevant to data perimeter objectives:

  • API calls performed by your identities or on your resources (record fields: eventSource, eventName)
  • Identity that performed API calls (record field: userIdentity)
  • Network origin of API calls (record fields: sourceIPAddress, vpcEndpointId)
  • Resources API calls are performed on (record fields: resources, requestParameters)

See the CloudTrail record contents page for the description of all available fields.

Data perimeter controls are meant to be applied across a broad set of accounts and resources, therefore, we recommend using a CloudTrail organization trail that collects logs across the AWS accounts in your organization. If you don’t have an organization trail configured, follow these steps or use one of the data perimeter helper templates for deploying prerequisites. If you use AWS services that support CloudTrail data events and want to analyze the associated API calls, enable the relevant data events.

Though CloudTrail provides you information about parameters of an API request, it doesn’t reflect values of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) condition keys present in the request. Thus, you still need to analyze the logs to help refine your data perimeter controls.

Create an Athena table to analyze CloudTrail logs

To ease and accelerate logs analysis, use Athena to query and extract relevant data from the log files stored by CloudTrail in an S3 bucket.

To create an Athena table

  1. Open the Athena console. If this is your first time visiting the Athena console in your current AWS Region, choose Edit settings to set up a query result location in Amazon S3.
  2. Next, navigate to the Query editor and create a SQL table by entering the following DDL statement into the Athena console query editor. Make sure to replace s3://<BUCKET_NAME_WITH_PREFIX>/AWSLogs/<ORGANIZATION_ID>/ to point to the S3 bucket location that contains your CloudTrail log data and <REGIONS> with the list of AWS regions where you want to analyze API calls. For example, to analyze API calls made in the AWS Regions Paris (eu-west-3) and North Virginia (us-east-1), use eu-west-3,us-east-1. We recommend that you include us-east-1 to retrieve API calls performed on global resources such as IAM roles.
    CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS cloudtrail_logs (
        eventVersion STRING,
        userIdentity STRUCT<
            type: STRING,
            principalId: STRING,
            arn: STRING,
            accountId: STRING,
            invokedBy: STRING,
            accessKeyId: STRING,
            userName: STRING,
            sessionContext: STRUCT<
                attributes: STRUCT<
                    mfaAuthenticated: STRING,
                    creationDate: STRING>,
                sessionIssuer: STRUCT<
                    type: STRING,
                    principalId: STRING,
                    arn: STRING,
                    accountId: STRING,
                    userName: STRING>,
                ec2RoleDelivery: STRING,
                webIdFederationData: MAP<STRING,STRING>>>,
        eventTime STRING,
        eventSource STRING,
        eventName STRING,
        awsRegion STRING,
        sourceIpAddress STRING,
        userAgent STRING,
        errorCode STRING,
        errorMessage STRING,
        requestParameters STRING,
        responseElements STRING,
        additionalEventData STRING,
        requestId STRING,
        eventId STRING,
        readOnly STRING,
        resources ARRAY<STRUCT<
            arn: STRING,
            accountId: STRING,
            type: STRING>>,
        eventType STRING,
        apiVersion STRING,
        recipientAccountId STRING,
        serviceEventDetails STRING,
        sharedEventID STRING,
        vpcEndpointId STRING,
        tlsDetails STRUCT<
            tlsVersion:string,
            cipherSuite:string,
            clientProvidedHostHeader:string
        >
    )
    PARTITIONED BY (
    `p_account` string,
    `p_region` string,
    `p_date` string
    )
    ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hive.hcatalog.data.JsonSerDe'
    STORED AS INPUTFORMAT 'com.amazon.emr.cloudtrail.CloudTrailInputFormat'
    OUTPUTFORMAT 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.HiveIgnoreKeyTextOutputFormat'
    LOCATION 's3://<BUCKET_NAME_WITH_PREFIX>/AWSLogs/<ORGANIZATION_ID>/'
    TBLPROPERTIES (
        'projection.enabled'='true',
        'projection.p_date.type'='date',
        'projection.p_date.format'='yyyy/MM/dd', 
        'projection.p_date.interval'='1', 
        'projection.p_date.interval.unit'='DAYS', 
        'projection.p_date.range'='2022/01/01,NOW', 
        'projection.p_region.type'='enum',
        'projection.p_region.values'='<REGIONS>',
        'projection.p_account.type'='injected',
    'storage.location.template'='s3://<BUCKET_NAME_WITH_PREFIX>/AWSLogs/<ORGANIZATION_ID>/${p_account}/CloudTrail/${p_region}/${p_date}'
    )

  3. Finally, run the Athena query and confirm that the cloudtrail_logs table is created and appears under the list of Tables.

Create an AWS Config aggregator to enrich query results

To further reduce manual steps for retrieval of relevant data about your environment, use the AWS Config aggregator and advanced queries to enrich CloudTrail logs with the configuration state of your resources.

To have a view into the resource configurations across the accounts in your organization, we recommend using the AWS Config organization aggregator. You can use an existing aggregator or create a new one. You can also use one of the data perimeter helper templates for deploying prerequisites.

Create an IAM Access Analyzer external access analyzer

To identify resources in your organization that are shared with an external entity, use the IAM Access Analyzer external access analyzer with your organization as the zone of trust.

You can use an existing external access analyzer or create a new one.

Install the data perimeter helper tool

Finally, you will use the data perimeter helper, an open-source tool with a set of purpose-built data perimeter queries, to automate the logs analysis process.

Clone the data perimeter helper repository and follow instructions in the Getting Started section.

Analyze account activity and refine your data perimeter controls

In this section, we provide step-by-step instructions for using the AWS services and tools you configured to effectively implement common data perimeter controls. We first demonstrate how to use the configured CloudTrail trail, Athena table, and AWS Config aggregator directly. We then show you how to accelerate the analysis with the data perimeter helper.

Example 1: Review API calls to untrusted S3 buckets and refine your resource perimeter policy

One of the security objectives targeted by companies is ensuring that their identities can only put or get data to and from S3 buckets belonging to their organization to manage the risk of unintended data disclosure or access to unapproved data. You can help achieve this security objective by implementing a resource perimeter on your identities using a service control policy (SCP). Start crafting your policy by referring to the resource_perimeter_policy template provided in the data perimeter policy examples repository:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "EnforceResourcePerimeterAWSResourcesS3",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "s3:GetObject",
        "s3:PutObject",
        "s3:PutObjectAcl"
      ],
      "Resource": "*",
      "Condition": {
        "StringNotEqualsIfExists": {
          "aws:ResourceOrgID": "<my-org-id>",
          "aws:PrincipalTag/resource-perimeter-exception": "true"
        },
        "ForAllValues:StringNotEquals": {
          "aws:CalledVia": [
            "dataexchange.amazonaws.com",
            "servicecatalog.amazonaws.com"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Replace the value of the aws:ResourceOrgID condition key with your organization identifier. See the GitHub repository README file for information on other elements of the policy.

As a security engineer, you can anticipate potential impacts by reviewing account activity and CloudTrail logs. You can perform this analysis manually or use the data perimeter helper tool to streamline the process.

First, let’s explore the manual approach to understand each step in detail.

Perform impact analysis without tooling

To assess the effects of the preceding policy before deployment, review your CloudTrail logs to understand on which S3 buckets API calls are performed. The targeted Amazon S3 API calls are recorded as CloudTrail data events, so make sure you enable the S3 data event for this example. CloudTrail logs provide request parameters from which you can extract the bucket names.

Below is an example Athena query to list the targeted S3 API calls made by principals in the selected account within the last 7 days. The 7-day timeframe is set to verify that the query runs quickly, but you can adjust the timeframe later to suit your specific requirements and obtain more realistic results. Replace <ACCOUNT_ID> with the AWS account ID you want to analyze the activity of.

SELECT
  useridentity.sessioncontext.sessionissuer.arn AS principal_arn,
  useridentity.type AS principal_type,
  eventname,
  JSON_EXTRACT_SCALAR(requestparameters, '$.bucketName') AS bucketname,
  resources,
  COUNT(*) AS nb_reqs
FROM "cloudtrail_logs"
WHERE
  p_account = '<ACCOUNT_ID>'
  AND p_date BETWEEN DATE_FORMAT(CURRENT_DATE - INTERVAL '7' day, '%Y/%m/%d') AND DATE_FORMAT(CURRENT_DATE, '%Y/%m/%d')
  AND eventsource = 's3.amazonaws.com'
  -- Get only requests performed by principals in the selected account
  AND useridentity.accountid = '<ACCOUNT_ID>'
  -- Keep only the targeted API calls
  AND eventname IN ('GetObject', 'PutObject', 'PutObjectAcl')
  -- Remove API calls made by AWS service principals - `useridentity.principalid` field in CloudTrail log equals `AWSService`.
  AND useridentity.principalid != 'AWSService'
  -- Remove API calls made by service-linked roles in the selected account
    AND COALESCE(NOT regexp_like(useridentity.sessioncontext.sessionissuer.arn, '(:role/aws-service-role/)'), True)
  -- Remove calls with errors
  AND errorcode IS NULL
GROUP BY
  useridentity.sessioncontext.sessionissuer.arn,
  useridentity.type,
  eventname,
  JSON_EXTRACT_SCALAR(requestparameters, '$.bucketName'),
  resources

As shown in Figure 2, this query provides you with a list of the S3 bucket names that are being accessed by principals in the selected account, while removing calls made by service-linked roles (SLRs) because they aren’t governed by SCPs. In this example, the IAM roles AppMigrator and PartnerSync performed API calls on S3 buckets named app-logs-111111111111, raw-data-111111111111, expected-partner-999999999999, and app-migration-888888888888.

Figure 2: Sample of the Athena query results

Figure 2: Sample of the Athena query results

The CloudTrail record field resources provides information on the list of resources accessed in an event. The field is optional and can notably contain the resource Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) and the account ID of the resource owner. You can use this record field to detect resources owned by accounts not in your organization. However, because this record field is optional, to scale your approach you can also use the AWS Config aggregator data to list resources currently deployed in your organization.

To know if the S3 buckets belong to your organization or not, you can run the following AWS Config advanced query. This query lists the S3 buckets inventoried in your AWS Config organization aggregator.

SELECT
  accountId,
  awsRegion,
  resourceId
WHERE
  resourceType = 'AWS::S3::Bucket'

As shown in Figure 3, buckets expected-partner-999999999999 and app-migration-888888888888 aren’t inventoried and therefore don’t belong to this organization.

Figure 3: Sample of the AWS Config advanced query results

Figure 3: Sample of the AWS Config advanced query results

By combining the results of the Athena query and the AWS Config advanced query, you can now pinpoint S3 API calls made by principals in the selected account on S3 buckets that are not part of your AWS organization.

If you do nothing, your starting resource perimeter policy would block access to these buckets. Therefore, you should investigate with your development teams why your principals performed those API calls and refine your policy if there is a legitimate reason, such as integration with a trusted third party. If you determine, for example, that your principals have a legitimate reason to access the bucket expected-partner-999999999999, you can discover the account ID (<third-party-account-a>) that owns the bucket by reviewing the record field resources in your CloudTrail logs or investigating with your developers and edit the policy as follows:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "EnforceResourcePerimeterAWSResourcesS3",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "s3:GetObject",
        "s3:PutObject",
        "s3:PutObjectAcl"
      ],
      "Resource": "*",
      "Condition": {
        "StringNotEqualsIfExists": {
          "aws:ResourceOrgID": "<my-org-id>",
          "aws:ResourceAccount": "<third-party-account-a>",
          "aws:PrincipalTag/resource-perimeter-exception": "true"
        },
        "ForAllValues:StringNotEquals": {
          "aws:CalledVia": [
            "dataexchange.amazonaws.com",
            "servicecatalog.amazonaws.com"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Now your resource perimeter policy helps ensure that access to resources that belong to your trusted third-party partner aren’t blocked by default.

Automate impact analysis with the data perimeter helper

Data perimeter helper provides queries that perform and combine the results of Athena and AWS Config aggregator queries on your behalf to accelerate policy impact analysis.

For this example, we use the s3_scp_resource_perimeter query to analyze S3 API calls made by principals in a selected account on S3 buckets not owned by your organization or inventoried in your AWS Config aggregator.

You can first add the bucket names of your trusted third-party partners that are already known in the data perimeter helper configuration file (resource_perimeter_trusted_bucket parameter). You then run the data perimeter helper query using the following command. Replace <ACCOUNT_ID> with the AWS account ID you want to analyze the activity of.

data_perimeter_helper --list-account <ACCOUNT_ID> --list-query s3_scp_resource_perimeter

Data perimeter helper performs these actions:

  • Runs an Athena query to list S3 API calls made by principals in the selected account, filtering out:
    • S3 API calls made at the account level (for example, s3:ListAllMyBuckets)
    • S3 API calls made on buckets that your organization owns
    • S3 API calls made on buckets listed as trusted in the data perimeter helper configuration file (resource_perimeter_trusted_bucket parameter)
    • API calls made by service principals and SLRs because SCPs don’t apply to them
    • API calls with errors
  • Gets the list of S3 buckets in your organization using an AWS Config advanced query.
  • Removes from the Athena query’s results API calls performed on S3 buckets inventoried in your AWS Config aggregator. This is done as a second clean-up layer in case the optional CloudTrail record field resources isn’t populated.

Data perimeter helper exports the results in the selected format (HTML, Excel, or JSON) so that you can investigate API calls that don’t align with your initial resource perimeter policy. Figure 4 shows a sample of results in HTML:

Figure 4: Sample of the s3_scp_resource_perimeter query results

Figure 4: Sample of the s3_scp_resource_perimeter query results

The preceding data perimeter helper query results indicate that the IAM role PartnerSync performed API calls on S3 buckets that aren’t part of the organization, giving you a head start in your investigation efforts. Following the investigation, you can document a trusted partner bucket in the data perimeter helper configuration file to filter out the associated API calls from subsequent queries:

111111111111:
  network_perimeter_expected_public_cidr: [
  ]
  network_perimeter_trusted_principal: [
  ]
  network_perimeter_expected_vpc: [
  ]
  network_perimeter_expected_vpc_endpoint: [
  ]
  identity_perimeter_trusted_account: [
  ]
  identity_perimeter_trusted_principal: [
  ]
  resource_perimeter_trusted_bucket: [
    expected-partner-999999999999
  ]

With a single command line, you have identified for your selected account the S3 API calls crossing your resource perimeter boundaries. You can now refine and implement your controls while lowering the risk of potential impacts. If you want to scale your approach to other accounts, you just need to run the same query against them.

Example 2: Review granted access and API calls by untrusted identities on your S3 buckets and refine your identity perimeter policy

Another security objective pursued by companies is ensuring that their S3 buckets can be accessed only by principals belonging to their organization to manage the risk of unintended access to company data. You can help achieve this security objective by implementing an identity perimeter on your buckets. You can start by crafting your identity perimeter policy using policy samples provided in the data perimeter policy examples repository.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "EnforceIdentityPerimeter",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Principal": "*",
      "Action": "s3:*",
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:s3:::<my-data-bucket>",
        "arn:aws:s3:::<my-data-bucket>/*"
      ],
      "Condition": {
        "StringNotEqualsIfExists": {
          "aws:PrincipalOrgID": "<my-org-id>",
          "aws:PrincipalAccount": [
            "<load-balancing-account-id>",
            "<third-party-account-a>",
            "<third-party-account-b>"
          ]
        },
        "BoolIfExists": {
          "aws:PrincipalIsAWSService": "false"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Replace values of the aws:PrincipalOrgID and aws:PrincipalAccount condition keys based on what trusted identities mean for your organization and on your knowledge of the intended access patterns you need to support. See the GitHub repository README file for information on elements of the policy.

To assess the effects of the preceding policy before deployment, review your IAM Access Analyzer external access findings to discover the external entities that are allowed in your S3 bucket policies. Then to accelerate your analysis, review your CloudTrail logs to learn who is performing API calls on your S3 buckets. This can help you accelerate the removal of granted but unused external accesses.

Data perimeter helper provides queries that streamline these processes for you:

Run these queries by using the following command, replacing <ACCOUNT_ID> with the AWS account ID of the buckets you want to analyze the access activity of:

data_perimeter_helper --list-account <ACCOUNT_ID> --list-query s3_external_access_org_boundary s3_bucket_policy_identity_perimeter_org_boundary

The query s3_external_access_org_boundary performs this action:

  • Extracts IAM Access Analyzer external access findings from either:
    • IAM Access Analyzer if the variable external_access_findings in the data perimeter variable file is set to IAM_ACCESS_ANALYZER
    • AWS Security Hub if the same variable is set to SECURITY_HUB. Security Hub provides cross-Region aggregation, enabling you to retrieve external access findings across your organization

The query s3_external_access_org_boundary performs this action:

  • Runs an Athena query to list S3 API calls made on S3 buckets in the selected account, filtering out:
    • API calls made by principals in the same organization
    • API calls made by principals belonging to trusted accounts listed in the data perimeter configuration file (identity_perimeter_trusted_account parameter)
    • API calls made by trusted identities listed in the data perimeter configuration file (identity_perimeter_trusted_principal parameter)

Figure 5 shows a sample of results for this query in HTML:

Figure 5: Sample of the s3_bucket_policy_identity_perimeter_org_boundary and s3_external_access_org_boundary queries results

Figure 5: Sample of the s3_bucket_policy_identity_perimeter_org_boundary and s3_external_access_org_boundary queries results

The result shows that only the bucket my-bucket-open-to-partner grants access (PutObject) to principals not in your organization. Plus, in the configured time frame, your CloudTrail trail hasn’t recorded S3 API calls made by principals not in your organization on buckets that the account 111111111111 owns.

This means that your proposed identity perimeter policy accounts for the access patterns observed in your environment. After reviewing with your developers, if the granted action on the bucket my-bucket-open-to-partner is not needed, you could deploy it on the analyzed account with a reduced risk of impacting business applications.

Example 3: Investigate resource configurations to support network perimeter controls implementation

The blog post Require services to be created only within expected networks provides an example of an SCP you can use to make sure that AWS Lambda functions can only be created or updated if associated with an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "EnforceVPCFunction",
      "Action": [
          "lambda:CreateFunction",
          "lambda:UpdateFunctionConfiguration"
       ],
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Resource": "*",
      "Condition": {
        "Null": {
           "lambda:VpcIds": "true"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Before implementing the preceding policy or to continuously review the configuration of your Lambda functions, you can use your AWS Config aggregator to understand whether there are functions in your environment that aren’t attached to a VPC.

Data perimeter helper provides the referential_lambda_function query that helps you automate the analysis. Run the query by using the following command:

data_perimeter_helper --list-query referential_lambda_function

Figure 6 shows a sample of results for this query in HTML:

Figure 6: Sample of the referential_lambda_function query results

Figure 6: Sample of the referential_lambda_function query results

By reviewing the inVpc column, you can quickly identify functions that aren’t currently associated with a VPC and investigate with your development teams before enforcing your network perimeter controls.

Example 4: Investigate access denied errors to help troubleshoot your controls

While you refine your data perimeter controls or after deploying them, you might encounter API calls that fail with an access denied error message. You can use CloudTrail logs to review those API calls and use the record to investigate the root-cause.

Data perimeter helper provides the common_only_denied query, which lists the API calls with access denied errors in the configured time frame. Run the query by using the following command, replacing <ACCOUNT_ID> with your account ID:

data_perimeter_helper --list-account <ACCOUNT_ID> --list-query common_only_denied

Figure 7 shows a sample of results for this query in HTML:

Figure 7: Sample of the common_only_denied query results

Figure 7: Sample of the common_only_denied query results

Let’s say you want to review S3 API calls with access denied error messages for one of your developers who uses a role called DevOps. You can update, in the HTML report, the input fields below the principal_arn and eventsource columns to match your lookup.

Then by reviewing the columns principal_arn, eventname, isAssumableBy, and nb_reqs, you learn that the role DevOps is assumable through a SAML provider and performed two GetObject API calls that failed with an access denied error message. By reviewing the sourceipaddress field you discover that the request has been performed from an IP address outside of your network perimeter boundary, you can then advise your developer to perform the API calls again from an expected network.

Data perimeter helper provides several ready-to-use queries and a framework to add new queries based on your data perimeter objectives and needs. See Guidelines to build a new query for detailed instructions.

Clean up

If you followed the configuration steps in this blog only to test the solution, you can clean up your account to avoid recurring charges.

If you used the data perimeter helper deployment templates, use the respective infrastructure as code commands to delete the provisioned resources (for example, for Terraform, terraform destroy).

To delete configured resources manually, follow these steps:

  • If you created a CloudTrail organization trail:
    • Navigate to the CloudTrail console, select the trail your created, and choose Delete.
    • Navigate to the Amazon S3 console and delete the S3 bucket you created to store CloudTrail logs from all accounts.
  • If you created an Athena table:
    • Navigate to the Athena console and select Query editor in the left navigation panel.
    • Run the following SQL query by replacing <TABLE_NAME> with the name of the created table:
      DROP TABLE <TABLE_NAME>

  • If you created an AWS Config aggregator:
    • Navigate to the AWS Config console and select Aggregators in the left navigation panel.
    • Select the created aggregator and select Delete from the Actions drop-down list.
  • If you installed data perimeter helper:
    • Follow the uninstallation steps in the data perimeter helper README file.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we reviewed how you can analyze access activity in your organization by using the CloudTrail logs to evaluate impact of your data perimeter controls and perform troubleshooting. We discussed how the log events data can be enriched using resource configuration information from AWS Config to streamline your analysis. Finally, we introduced the open source tool, data perimeter helper, that provides a set of data perimeter tailored queries to speed up your review process and a framework to create new queries.

For additional learning opportunities, see the Data perimeters on AWS page, which provides additional material such as a data perimeter workshop, blog posts, whitepapers, and webinar sessions.

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

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Achraf Moussadek-Kabdani

Achraf Moussadek-Kabdani

Achraf is a Senior Security Specialist at AWS. He works with global financial services customers to assess and improve their security posture. He is both a builder and advisor, supporting his customers to meet their security objectives while making security a business enabler.

Tatyana Yatskevich

Tatyana Yatskevich

Tatyana is a Principal Solutions Architect in AWS Identity. She works with customers to help them build and operate in AWS in the most secure and efficient manner.

AWS completes the 2024 Cyber Essentials Plus certification

Post Syndicated from Tariro Dongo original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-completes-the-2024-cyber-essentials-plus-certification/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pleased to announce the successful renewal of the United Kingdom Cyber Essentials Plus certification. The Cyber Essentials Plus certificate is valid for one year until March 22, 2025.

Cyber Essentials Plus is a UK Government–backed, industry-supported certification scheme intended to help organizations demonstrate controls against common cyber security threats. An independent third-party auditor certified by Information Assurance for Small and Medium Enterprises (IASME) completed the audit. The scope of our Cyber Essentials Plus certificate covers the AWS corporate network for the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany.

AWS compliance status is available on the AWS Cyber Essentials Plus compliance page, and through AWS Artifact. AWS Artifact is a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact.

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

 
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Tariro Dongo

Tariro Dongo

Tariro is a Security Assurance Program Manager at AWS, based in London. Tari is responsible for third-party and customer audits, attestations, certifications, and assessments across EMEA. Previously, Tari worked in security assurance and technology risk in the Big Four accounting firms and the financial services industry over the last 12 years.

The art of possible: Three themes from RSA Conference 2024

Post Syndicated from Anne Grahn original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/the-art-of-possible-three-themes-from-rsa-conference-2024/

San Francisco skyline with Oakland Bay Bridge at sunset, California, USA

RSA Conference 2024 drew 650 speakers, 600 exhibitors, and thousands of security practitioners from across the globe to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California from May 6 through 9.

The keynote lineup was diverse, with 33 presentations featuring speakers ranging from WarGames actor Matthew Broderick, to public and private-sector luminaries such as Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, security technologist Bruce Schneier, and cryptography experts Tal Rabin, Whitfield Diffie, and Adi Shamir.

Topics aligned with this year’s conference theme, “The art of possible,” and focused on actions we can take to revolutionize technology through innovation, while fortifying our defenses against an evolving threat landscape.

This post highlights three themes that caught our attention: artificial intelligence (AI) security, the Secure by Design approach to building products and services, and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) collaboration.

AI security

Organizations in all industries have started building generative AI applications using large language models (LLMs) and other foundation models (FMs) to enhance customer experiences, transform operations, improve employee productivity, and create new revenue channels. So it’s not surprising that AI dominated conversations. Over 100 sessions touched on the topic, and the desire of attendees to understand AI technology and learn how to balance its risks and opportunities was clear.

“Discussions of artificial intelligence often swirl with mysticism regarding how an AI system functions. The reality is far more simple: AI is a type of software system.” — CISA

FMs and the applications built around them are often used with highly sensitive business data such as personal data, compliance data, operational data, and financial information to optimize the model’s output. As we explore the advantages of generative AI, protecting highly sensitive data and investments is a top priority. However, many organizations aren’t paying enough attention to security.

A joint generative AI security report released by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the IBM Institute for Business Value during the conference found that 82% of business leaders view secure and trustworthy AI as essential for their operations, but only 24% are actively securing generative AI models and embedding security processes in AI development. In fact, nearly 70% say innovation takes precedence over security, despite concerns over threats and vulnerabilities (detailed in Figure 1).

Figure 1: Generative AI adoption concerns

Figure 1: Generative AI adoption concerns, Source: IBM Security

Because data and model weights—the numerical values models learn and adjust as they train—are incredibly valuable, organizations need them to stay protected, secure, and private, whether that means restricting access from an organization’s own administrators, customers, or cloud service provider, or protecting data from vulnerabilities in software running in the organization’s own environment.

There is no silver AI-security bullet, but as the report points out, there are proactive steps you can take to start protecting your organization and leveraging AI technology to improve your security posture:

  1. Establish a governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) foundation. Trust in gen AI starts with new security governance models (Figure 2) that integrate and embed GRC capabilities into your AI initiatives, and include policies, processes, and controls that are aligned with your business objectives.

    Figure 2: Updating governance, risk, and compliance models

    Figure 2: Updating governance, risk, and compliance models, Source: IBM Security

    In the RSA Conference session AI: Law, Policy, and Common Sense Suggestions to Stay Out of Trouble, digital commerce and gaming attorney Behnam Dayanim highlighted ethical, policy, and legal considerations—including AI-specific regulations—as well as governance structures such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0) that can help maximize a successful implementation and minimize potential risk.

  2. Strengthen your security culture. When we think of securing AI, it’s natural to focus on technical measures that can help protect the business. But organizations are made up of people—not technology. Educating employees at all levels of the organization can help avoid preventable harms such as prompt-based risks and unapproved tool use, and foster a resilient culture of cybersecurity that supports effective risk mitigation, incident detection and response, and continuous collaboration.

    “You’ve got to understand early on that security can’t be effective if you’re running it like a project or a program. You really have to run it as an operational imperative—a core function of the business. That’s when magic can happen.” — Hart Rossman, Global Services Security Vice President at AWS
  3. Engage with partners. Developing and securing AI solutions requires resources and skills that many organizations lack. Partners can provide you with comprehensive security support—whether that’s informing and advising you about generative AI, or augmenting your delivery and support capabilities. This can help make your engineers and your security controls more effective.

    While many organizations purchase security products or solutions with embedded generative AI capabilities, nearly two-thirds, as detailed in Figure 3, report that their generative AI security capabilities come through some type of partner.

    Figure 3: More than 90% of security gen AI capabilities are coming from third-party products or partners

    Figure 3: Most security gen AI capabilities are coming from third-party products or partners, Source: IBM Security

    Tens of thousands of customers are using AWS, for example, to experiment and move transformative generative AI applications into production. AWS provides AI-powered tools and services, a Generative AI Innovation Center program, and an extensive network of AWS partners that have demonstrated expertise delivering machine learning (ML) and generative AI solutions. These resources can support your teams with hands-on help developing solutions mapped to your requirements, and a broader collection of knowledge they can use to help you make the nuanced decisions required for effective security.

View the joint report and AWS generative AI security resources for additional guidance.

Secure by Design

Building secure software was a popular and related focus at the conference. Insecure design is ranked as the number four critical web application security concern on the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10.

The concept known as Secure by Design is gaining importance in the effort to mitigate vulnerabilities early, minimize risks, and recognize security as a core business requirement. Secure by Design builds off of security models such as Zero Trust, and aims to reduce the burden of cybersecurity and break the cycle of constantly creating and applying updates by developing products that are foundationally secure.

More than 60 technology companies—including AWS—signed CISA’s Secure by Design Pledge during RSA Conference as part of a collaborative push to put security first when designing products and services.

The pledge demonstrates a commitment to making measurable progress towards seven goals within a year:

  • Broaden the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA)
  • Reduce default passwords
  • Enable a significant reduction in the prevalence of one or more vulnerability classes
  • Increase the installation of security patches by customers
  • Publish a vulnerability disclosure policy (VDP)
  • Demonstrate transparency in vulnerability reporting
  • Strengthen the ability of customers to gather evidence of cybersecurity intrusions affecting products

“From day one, we have pioneered secure by design and secure by default practices in the cloud, so AWS is designed to be the most secure place for customers to run their workloads. We are committed to continuing to help organizations around the world elevate their security posture, and we look forward to collaborating with CISA and other stakeholders to further grow and promote security by design and default practices.” — Chris Betz, CISO at AWS

The need for security by design applies to AI like any other software system. To protect users and data, we need to build security into ML and AI with a Secure by Design approach that considers these technologies to be part of a larger software system, and weaves security into the AI pipeline.

Since models tend to have very high privileges and access to data, integrating an AI bill of materials (AI/ML BOM) and Cryptography Bill of Materials (CBOM) into BOM processes can help you catalog security-relevant information, and gain visibility into model components and data sources. Additionally, frameworks and standards such as the AI RMF 1.0, the HITRUST AI Assurance Program, and ISO/IEC 42001 can facilitate the incorporation of trustworthiness considerations into the design, development, and use of AI systems.

CISO collaboration

In the RSA Conference keynote session CISO Confidential: What Separates The Best From The Rest, Trellix CEO Bryan Palma and CISO Harold Rivas noted that there are approximately 32,000 global CISOs today—4 times more than 10 years ago. The challenges they face include staffing shortages, liability concerns, and a rapidly evolving threat landscape. According to research conducted by the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA), nearly half of organizations (46%) report that their cybersecurity team is understaffed, and more than 80% of CISOs recently surveyed by Trellix have experienced an increase in cybersecurity threats over the past six months. When asked what would most improve their organizations’ abilities to defend against these threats, their top answer was industry peers sharing insights and best practices.

Building trusted relationships with peers and technology partners can help you gain the knowledge you need to effectively communicate the story of risk to your board of directors, keep up with technology, and build success as a CISO.

AWS CISO Circles provide a forum for cybersecurity executives from organizations of all sizes and industries to share their challenges, insights, and best practices. CISOs come together in locations around the world to discuss the biggest security topics of the moment. With NDAs in place and the Chatham House Rule in effect, security leaders can feel free to speak their minds, ask questions, and get feedback from peers through candid conversations facilitated by AWS Security leaders.

“When it comes to security, community unlocks possibilities. CISO Circles give us an opportunity to deeply lean into CISOs’ concerns, and the topics that resonate with them. Chatham House Rule gives security leaders the confidence they need to speak openly and honestly with each other, and build a global community of knowledge-sharing and support.” — Clarke Rodgers, Director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS

At RSA Conference, CISO Circle attendees discussed the challenges of adopting generative AI. When asked whether CISOs or the business own generative AI risk for the organization, the consensus was that security can help with policies and recommendations, but the business should own the risk and decisions about how and when to use the technology. Some attendees noted that they took initial responsibility for generative AI risk, before transitioning ownership to an advisory board or committee comprised of leaders from their HR, legal, IT, finance, privacy, and compliance and ethics teams over time. Several CISOs expressed the belief that quickly taking ownership of generative AI risk before shepherding it to the right owner gave them a valuable opportunity to earn trust with their boards and executive peers, and to demonstrate business leadership during a time of uncertainty.

Embrace the art of possible

There are many more RSA Conference highlights on a wide range of additional topics, including post-quantum cryptography developments, identity and access management, data perimeters, threat modeling, cybersecurity budgets, and cyber insurance trends. If there’s one key takeaway, it’s that we should never underestimate what is possible from threat actors or defenders. By harnessing AI’s potential while addressing its risks, building foundationally secure products and services, and developing meaningful collaboration, we can collectively strengthen security and establish cyber resilience.

Join us to learn more about cloud security in the age of generative AI at AWS re:Inforce 2024 June 10–12 in Pennsylvania. Register today with the code SECBLOfnakb to receive a limited time $150 USD discount, while supplies last.

 
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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Anne Grahn

Anne Grahn

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

Danielle Ruderman

Danielle Ruderman

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

Accelerate incident response with Amazon Security Lake

Post Syndicated from Jerry Chen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/accelerate-incident-response-with-amazon-security-lake/

This blog post is the first of a two-part series that will demonstrate the value of Amazon Security Lake and how you can use it and other resources to accelerate your incident response (IR) capabilities. Security Lake is a purpose-built data lake that centrally stores your security logs in a common, industry-standard format. In part one, we will first demonstrate the value Security Lake can bring at each stage of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) SP 800-61 Computer Security Incident Handling Guide. We will then demonstrate how you can configure Security Lake in a multi-account deployment by using the AWS Security Reference Architecture (AWS SRA).

In part two of this series, we’ll walk through an example to show you how to use Security Lake and other AWS services and tools to drive an incident to resolution.

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), security is our top priority. When security incidents occur, customers need the right capabilities to quickly investigate and resolve them. Security Lake enhances your capabilities, especially during the detection and analysis stages, which can reduce time to resolution and business impact. We also cover incident response specifically in the security pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, provide prescriptive guidance on preparing for and handling incidents, and publish incident response playbooks.

Incident response life cycle

NIST SP 800-61 describes a set of steps you use to resolve an incident. These include preparation (Stage 1), detection and analysis (Stage 2), containment, eradication and recovery (Stage 3), and finally post-incident activities (Stage 4).

Figure 1 shows the workflow of incident response defined by NIST SP 800-61. The response flows from Stage 1 through Stage 4, with Stages 2 and 3 often being an iterative process. We will discuss the value of Security Lake at each stage of the NIST incident response handling process, with a focus on preparation, detection, and analysis.

Figure 1: NIST 800-61 incident response life cycle. Source: NIST 800-61

Figure 1: NIST 800-61 incident response life cycle. Source: NIST 800-61

Stage 1: Preparation

Preparation helps you ensure that tools, processes, and people are prepared for incident response. In some cases, preparation can also help you identify systems, networks, and applications that might not be sufficiently secure. For example, you might determine you need certain system logs for incident response, but discover during preparation that those logs are not enabled.

Figure 2 shows how Security Lake can accelerate the preparation stage during the incident response process. Through native integration with various security data sources from both AWS services and third-party tools, Security Lake simplifies the integration and concentration of security data, which also facilitates training and rehearsal for incident response.

Figure 2: Amazon Security Lake data consolidation for IR preparation

Figure 2: Amazon Security Lake data consolidation for IR preparation

Some challenges in the preparation stage include the following:

  • Insufficient incident response planning, training, and rehearsal – Time constraints or insufficient resources can slow down preparation.
  • Complexity of system integration and data sources – An increasing number of security data sources and integration points require additional integration effort, or increase risk that some log sources are not integrated.
  • Centralized log repository for mixed environments – Customers with both on-premises and cloud infrastructure told us that consolidating logs for those mixed environments was a challenge.

Security Lake can help you deal with these challenges in the following ways:

  • Simplify system integration with security data normalization
  • Streamline data consolidation across mixed environments
    • Security Lake supports multiple log sources, including AWS native services and custom sources, which include third-party partner solutions, other cloud platforms and your on-premises log sources. For example, see this blog post to learn how to ingest Microsoft Azure activity logs into Security Lake.
  • Facilitate IR planning and testing
    • Security Lake reduces the undifferentiated heavy lifting needed to get security data into tooling so teams spend less time on configuration and data extract, transform, and load (ETL) work and more time on preparedness.
    • With a purpose-built security data lake and data retention policies that you define, security teams can integrate data-driven decision making into their planning and testing, answering questions such as “which incident handling capabilities do we prioritize?” and running Well-Architected game days.

Stages 2 and 3: Detection and Analysis, Containment, Eradication and Recovery

The Detection and Analysis stage (Stage 2) should lead you to understand the immediate cause of the incident and what steps need to be taken to contain it. Once contained, it’s critical to fully eradicate the issue. These steps form Stage 3 of the incident response cycle. You want to ensure that those malicious artifacts or exploits are removed from systems and verify that the impacted service has recovered from the incident.

Figure 3 shows how Security Lake can enable effective detection and analysis. Doing so enables teams to quickly contain, eradicate, and recover from the incident. Security Lake natively integrates with other AWS analytics services, such as Amazon Athena, Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon OpenSearch Service, which makes it easier for your security team to generate insights on the nature of the incident and to take relevant remediation steps.

Figure 3: Amazon Security Lake accelerates IR Detection and Analysis, Containment, Eradication, and Recovery

Figure 3: Amazon Security Lake accelerates IR Detection and Analysis, Containment, Eradication, and Recovery

Common challenges present in stages 2 and 3 include the following:

  • Challenges generating insights from disparate data sources
    • Inability to generate insights from security data means teams are less likely to discover an incident, as opposed to having the breach revealed to them by a third party (such as a threat actor).
    • Breaches disclosed by a threat actor might involve higher costs than incidents discovered by the impacted organizations themselves, because typically the unintended access has progressed for longer and impacted more resources and data than if the impacted organization discovered it sooner.
  • Inconsistency of data visibility and data siloing
    • Security log data silos may slow IR data analysis because it’s challenging to gather and correlate the necessary information to understand the full scope and impact of an incident. This can lead to delays in identifying the root cause, assessing the damage, and taking remediation steps.
    • Data silos might also mean additional permissions management overhead for administrators.
  • Disparate data sources add barriers to adopting new technology, such as AI-driven security analytics tools
    • AI-driven security analysis requires a large amount of security data from various data sources, which might be in disparate formats. Without a centralized security data repository, you might need to make additional effort to ingest and normalize data for model training.

Security Lake offers native support for log ingestion for a range of AWS security services, including AWS CloudTrail, AWS Security Hub, and VPC Flow Logs. Additionally, you can configure Security Lake to ingest external sources. This helps enrich findings and alerts.

Security Lake addresses the preceding challenges as follows:

  • Unleash security detection capability by centralizing detection data
    • With a purpose-built security data lake with a standard object schema, organizations can centrally access their security data—AWS and third-party—using the same set of IR tools. This can help you investigate incidents that involve multiple resources and complex timelines, which could require access logs, network logs, and other security findings. For example, use Amazon Athena to query all your security data. You can also build a centralized security finding dashboard with Amazon QuickSight.
  • Reduce management burden
    • With Security Lake, permissions complexity is reduced. You use the same access controls in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to make sure that only the right people and systems have access to sensitive security data.

See this blog post for more details on generating machine learning insights for Security Lake data by using Amazon SageMaker.

Stage 4: Post-Incident Activity

Continuous improvement helps customers to further develop their IR capabilities. Teams should integrate lessons learned into their tools, policies, and processes. You decide on lifecycle policies for your security data. You can then retroactively review event data for insight and to support lessons learned. You can also share security telemetry at levels of granularity you define. Your organization can then establish distributed data views for forensic purposes and other purposes, while enforcing least privilege for data governance.

Figure 4 shows how Security Lake can accelerate the post-incident activity stage during the incident response process. Security Lake natively integrates with AWS Organizations to enable data sharing across various OUs within the organization, which further unleashes the power of machine learning to automatically create insights for incident response.

Figure 4: Security Lake accelerates post-incident activity

Figure 4: Security Lake accelerates post-incident activity

Having covered some advantages of working with your data in Security Lake, we will now demonstrate best practices for getting Security Lake set up.

Setting up for success with Security Lake

Most of the customers we work with run multiple AWS accounts, usually with AWS Organizations. With that in mind, we’re going to show you how to set up Security Lake and related tooling in line with guidance in the AWS Security Reference Architecture (AWS SRA). The AWS SRA provides guidance on how to deploy AWS security services in a multi-account environment. You will have one AWS account for security tooling and a different account to centralize log storage. You’ll run Security Lake in this log storage account.

If you just want to use Security Lake in a standalone account, follow these instructions.

Set up Security Lake in your logging account

Most of the instructions we link to in this section describe the process using either the console or AWS CLI tools. Where necessary, we’ve described the console experience for illustrative purposes.

The AmazonSecurityLakeAdministrator AWS managed IAM policy grants the permissions needed to set up Security Lake and related services. Note that you may want to further refine permissions, or remove that managed policy after Security Lake and the related services are set up and running.

To set up Security Lake in your logging account

  1. Note down the AWS account number that will be your delegated administrator account. This will be your centralized archive logs account. In the AWS Management Console, sign in to your Organizations management account and set up delegated administration for Security Lake.
  2. Sign in to the delegated administrator account, go to the Security Lake console, and choose Get started. Then follow these instructions from the Security Lake User Guide. While you’re setting this up, note the following specific guidance (this will make it easier to follow the second blog post in this series):

    Define source objective: For Sources to ingest, we recommend that you select Ingest the AWS default sources. However, if you want to include S3 data events, you’ll need to select Ingest specific AWS sources and then select CloudTrail – S3 data events. Note that we use these events for responding to the incident in blog post part 2, when we really drill down into user activity.

    Figure 5 shows the configuration of sources to ingest in Security Lake.

    Figure 5: Sources to ingest in Security Lake

    Figure 5: Sources to ingest in Security Lake

    We recommend leaving the other settings on this page as they are.

    Define target objective: We recommend that you choose Add rollup Region and add multiple AWS Regions to a designated rollup Region. The rollup Region is the one to which you will consolidate logs. The contributing Region is the one that will contribute logs to the rollup Region.

    Figure 6 shows how to select the rollup regions.

    Figure 6: Select rollup Regions

    Figure 6: Select rollup Regions

You now have Security Lake enabled, and in the background, additional services such as AWS Lake Formation and AWS Glue have been configured to organize your Security Lake data.

Now you need to configure a subscriber with query access so that you can query your Security Lake data. Here are a few recommendations:

  1. Subscribers are specific to a Region, so you want to make sure that you set up your subscriber in the same Region as your rollup Region.
  2. You will also set up an External ID. This is a value you define, and it’s used by the IAM role to prevent the confused deputy problem. Note that the subscriber will be your security tooling account.
  3. You will select Lake Formation for Data access, which will create shares in AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) that will be shared with the account that you specified in Subscriber credentials.
  4. If you’ve already set up Security Lake at some time in the past, you should select Specific log and event sources and confirm the source and version you want the subscriber to access. If it’s a new implementation, we recommend using version 2.0 or greater.
  5. There’s a note in the console that says the subscribing account will need to accept the RAM resource shares. However, if you’re using AWS Organizations, you don’t need to do that; the resource share will already list a status of Active when you select the Shared with me >> Resource shares in the subscriber (security tooling) account RAM console.

Note: If you prefer a visual guide, you can refer to this video to set up Security Lake in AWS Organizations.

Set up Amazon Athena and AWS Lake Formation in the security tooling account

If you go to Athena in your security tooling account, you won’t see your Security Lake tables yet because the tables are shared from the Security Lake account. Although services such as Amazon Athena can’t directly access databases or tables across accounts, the use of resource links overcomes this challenge.

To set up Athena and Lake Formation

  1. Go to the Lake Formation console in the security tooling account and follow the instructions to create resource links for the shared Security Lake tables. You’ll most likely use the Default database and will see your tables there. The table names in that database start with amazon_security_lake_table. You should expect to see about eight tables there.

    Figure 7 shows the shared tables in the Lake Formation service console.

    Figure 7: Shared tables in Lake Formation

    Figure 7: Shared tables in Lake Formation

    You will need to create resource links for each table, as described in the instructions from the Lake Formation Developer Guide.

    Figure 8 shows the resource link creation process.

    Figure 8: Creating resource links

    Figure 8: Creating resource links

  2. Next, go to Amazon Athena in the same Region. If Athena is not set up, follow the instructions to get it set up for SQL queries. Note that you won’t need to create a database—you’re going to use the “default” database that already exists. Select it from the Database drop-down menu in the Query editor view.
  3. In the Tables section, you should see all your Security Lake tables (represented by whatever names you gave them when you created the resource links in step 1, earlier).

Get your incident response playbooks ready

Incident response playbooks are an important tool that enable responders to work more effectively and consistently, and enable the organization to get incidents resolved more quickly. We’ve created some ready-to-go templates to get you started. You can further customize these templates to meet your needs. In part two of this post, you’ll be using the Unintended Data Access to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket playbook to resolve an incident. You can download that playbook so that you’re ready to follow it to get that incident resolved.

Conclusion

This is the first post in a two-part series about accelerating security incident response with Security Lake. We highlighted common challenges that decelerate customers’ incident responses across the stages outlined by NIST SP 800-61 and how Security Lake can help you address those challenges. We also showed you how to set up Security Lake and related services for incident response.

In the second part of this series, we’ll walk through a specific security incident—unintended data access—and share prescriptive guidance on using Security Lake to accelerate your incident response process.

 
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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Jerry Chen

Jerry Chen

Jerry is currently a Senior Cloud Optimization Success Solutions Architect at AWS. He focuses on cloud security and operational architecture design for AWS customers and partners. You can follow Jerry on LinkedIn.

Frank Phillis

Frank Phillis

Frank is a Senior Solutions Architect (Security) at AWS. He enables customers to get their security architecture right. Frank specializes in cryptography, identity, and incident response. He’s the creator of the popular AWS Incident Response playbooks and regularly speaks at security events. When not thinking about tech, Frank can be found with his family, riding bikes, or making music.

Navigating the threat detection and incident response track at re:Inforce 2024

Post Syndicated from Nisha Amthul original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/navigating-the-threat-detection-and-incident-response-track-at-reinforce-2024/

reInforce 2024 blog

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

We’re counting down to AWS re:Inforce, our annual cloud security event! We are thrilled to invite security enthusiasts and builders to join us in Philadelphia, PA, from June 10–12 for an immersive two-and-a-half-day journey into cloud security learning. This year, we’ve expanded the event by half a day to give you more opportunities to delve into the latest security trends and technologies. At AWS re:Inforce, you’ll have the chance to explore the breadth of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) security landscape, learn how to operationalize security services, and enhance your skills and confidence in cloud security to improve your organization’s security posture. As an attendee, you will have access to over 250 sessions across multiple topic tracks, including data protection; identity and access management; threat detection and incident response; network and infrastructure security; generative AI; governance, risk, and compliance; and application security. Plus, get ready to be inspired by our lineup of customer speakers, who will share their firsthand experiences of innovating securely on AWS.

In this post, we’ll provide an overview of the key sessions that include lecture-style presentations featuring real-world use cases from our customers, as well as the interactive small-group sessions led by AWS experts that guide you through practical problems and solutions.

The threat detection and incident response track is designed to demonstrate how to detect and respond to security risks to help protect workloads at scale. AWS experts and customers will present key topics such as threat detection, vulnerability management, cloud security posture management, threat intelligence, operationalization of AWS security services, container security, effective security investigation, incident response best practices, and strengthening security through the use of generative AI and securing generative AI workloads.

Breakout sessions, chalk talks, and lightning talks

TDR201 | Breakout session | How NatWest uses AWS services to manage vulnerabilities at scale
As organizations move to the cloud, rapid change is the new normal. Safeguarding against potential security threats demands continuous monitoring of cloud resources and code that are constantly evolving. In this session, NatWest shares best practices for monitoring their AWS environment for software and configuration vulnerabilities at scale using AWS security services like Amazon Inspector and AWS Security Hub. Learn how security teams can automate the identification and prioritization of critical security insights to manage alert fatigue and swiftly collaborate with application teams for remediation.

TDR301 | Breakout session | Developing an autonomous framework with Security Lake & Torc Robotics
Security teams are increasingly seeking autonomy in their security operations. Amazon Security Lake is a powerful solution that allows organizations to centralize their security data across AWS accounts and Regions. In this session, learn how Security Lake simplifies centralizing and operationalizing security data. Then, hear from Torc Robotics, a leading autonomous trucking company, as they share their experience and best practices for using Security Lake to establish an autonomous security framework.

TDR302 | Breakout session | Detecting and responding to threats in generative AI workloads
While generative AI is an emerging technology, many of the same services and concepts can be used for threat detection and incident response. In this session, learn how you can build out threat detection and incident response capabilities for a generative AI workload that uses Amazon Bedrock. Find out how to effectively monitor this workload using Amazon Bedrock, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Security Hub. The session also covers best practices for responding to and remediating security issues that may come up.

TDR303 | Breakout session | Innovations in AWS detection and response services
In this session, learn about the latest advancements and recent AWS launches in the field of detection and response. This session focuses on use cases like threat detection, workload protection, automated and continual vulnerability management, centralized monitoring, continuous cloud security posture management, unified security data management, and discovery and protection of workloads and data. Through these use cases, gain a deeper understanding of how you can seamlessly integrate AWS detection and response services to help protect your workloads at scale, enhance your security posture, and streamline security operations across your entire AWS environment.

TDR304 | Breakout session | Explore cloud workload protection with GuardDuty, feat. Booking.com
Monitoring your workloads at runtime allows you to detect unexpected activity sooner—before it escalates to broader business-impacting security issues. Amazon GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring offers fully managed threat detection that gives you end-to-end visibility across your AWS environment. GuardDuty’s unique detection capabilities are guided by AWS’s visibility into the cloud threat landscape. In this session, learn why AWS built the Runtime Monitoring feature and how it works. Also discover how Booking.com used GuardDuty for runtime protection, supporting their mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

TDR305 | Breakout session | Cyber threat intelligence sharing on AWS
Real-time, contextual, and comprehensive visibility into security issues is essential for resilience in any organization. In this session, join the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) as they present their Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing (CTIS) program, built on AWS. With the aim to improve the cyber resilience of the Australian community and help make Australia the most secure place to connect online, the ACSC protects Australia from thousands of threats every day. Learn the technical fundamentals that can help you apply best practices for real-time, bidirectional sharing of threat intelligence across all sectors.

TDR331 | Chalk talk | Unlock OCSF: Turn raw logs into insights with generative AI
So, you have security data stored using the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF)—now what? In this chalk talk, learn how to use AWS analytics tools to mine data stored using the OCSF and leverage generative AI to consume insights. Discover how services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon Q in QuickSight, and Amazon Bedrock can extract, process, and visualize security insights from OCSF data. Gain practical skills to identify trends, detect anomalies, and transform your OCSF data into actionable security intelligence that can help your organization respond more effectively to cybersecurity threats.

TDR332 | Chalk talk | Anatomy of a ransomware event targeting data within AWS
Ransomware events can interrupt operations and cost governments, nonprofits, and businesses billions of dollars. Early detection and automated responses are important mechanisms that can help mitigate your organization’s exposure. In this chalk talk, learn about the anatomy of a ransomware event targeting data within AWS including detection, response, and recovery. Explore the AWS services and features that you can use to protect against ransomware events in your environment, and learn how you can investigate possible ransomware events if they occur.

TDR333 | Chalk talk | Implementing AWS security best practices: Insights and strategies
Have you ever wondered if you are using AWS security services such as Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, AWS WAF, and others to the best of their ability? Do you want to dive deep into common use cases to better operationalize AWS security services through insights developed via thousands of deployments? In this chalk talk, learn tips and tricks from AWS experts who have spent years talking to users and documenting guidance outlining AWS security services best practices.

TDR334 | Chalk talk | Unlock your security superpowers with generative AI
Generative AI can accelerate and streamline the process of security analysis and response, enhancing the impact of your security operations team. Its unique ability to combine natural language processing with large existing knowledge bases and agent-based architectures that can interact with your data and systems makes it an ideal tool for augmenting security teams during and after an event. In this chalk talk, explore how generative AI will shape the future of the SOC and lead to new capabilities in incident response and cloud security posture management.

TDR431 | Chalk talk | Harnessing generative AI for investigation and remediation
To help businesses move faster and deliver security outcomes, modern security teams need to identify opportunities to automate and simplify their workflows. One way of doing so is through generative AI. Join this chalk talk to learn how to identify use cases where generative AI can help with investigating, prioritizing, and remediating findings from Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and AWS Security Hub. Then find out how you can develop architectures from these use cases, implement them, and evaluate their effectiveness. The talk offers tenets for generative AI and security that can help you safely use generative AI to reduce cognitive load and increase focus on novel, high-value opportunities.

TDR432 | Chalk talk | New tactics and techniques for proactive threat detection
This insightful chalk talk is led by the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT), the team responsible for swiftly responding to security events on the customer side of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. Discover the latest trends in threat tactics and techniques observed by the CIRT, along with effective detection and mitigation strategies. Gain valuable insights into emerging threats and learn how to safeguard your organization’s AWS environment against evolving security risks.

TDR433 | Chalk talk | Incident response for multi-account and federated environments
In this chalk talk, AWS security experts guide you through the lifecycle of a compromise involving federation and third-party identity providers. Learn how AWS detects unauthorized access and which approaches can help you respond to complex situations involving organizations with multiple accounts. Discover insights into how you can contain and recover from security events and discuss strong IAM policies, appropriately restrictive service control policies, and resource termination for security event containment. Also, learn how to build resiliency in an environment with IAM permission refinement, organizational strategy, detective controls, chain of custody, and IR break-glass models.

TDR227 | Lightning talk | How Razorpay scales threat detection using AWS
Discover how Razorpay, a leading payment aggregator solution provider authorized by the Reserve Bank of India, efficiently manages millions of business transactions per minute through automated security operations using AWS security services. Join this lightning talk to explore how Razorpay’s security operations team uses AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, and Amazon Inspector to monitor their critical workloads on AWS. Learn how they orchestrate complex workflows, automating responses to security events, and reduce the time from detection to remediation.

TDR321 | Lightning talk | Scaling incident response with AWS developer tools
In incident response, speed matters. Responding to incidents at scale can be challenging as the number of resources in your AWS accounts increases. In this lightning talk, learn how to use SDKs and the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to rapidly run commands across your estate so you can quickly retrieve data, identify issues, and resolve security-related problems.

TDR322 | Lightning talk | How Snap Inc. secures its services with Amazon GuardDuty
In this lightning talk, discover how Snap Inc. established a secure multi-tenant compute platform on AWS and mitigated security challenges within shared Kubernetes clusters. Snap uses Amazon GuardDuty and the OSS tool Falco for runtime protection across build time, deployment time, and runtime phases. Explore Snap’s techniques for facilitating one-time cluster access through AWS IAM Identity Center. Find out how Snap has implemented isolation strategies between internal tenants using the Pod Security Standards (PSS) and network policies enforced by the Amazon VPC Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin.

TDR326 | Lightning talk | Streamlining security auditing with generative AI
For identifying and responding to security-related events, collecting and analyzing logs is only the first step. Beyond this initial phase, you need to utilize tools and services to parse through logs, understand baseline behaviors, identify anomalies, and create automated responses based on the type of event. In this lightning talk, learn how to effectively parse security logs, identify anomalies, and receive response runbooks that you can implement within your environment.

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

TDR351 | Builders’ session | Accelerating incident remediation with IR playbooks & Amazon Detective
In this builders’ session, learn how to investigate incidents more effectively and discover root cause with Amazon Detective. Amazon Detective provides finding-group summaries by using generative AI to automatically analyze finding groups. Insights in natural language then help you accelerate security investigations. Find out how you can create your own incident response playbooks and test them by handling multi-event security issues.

TDR352 | Builders’ session | How to automate containment and forensics for Amazon EC2
Automated Forensics Orchestrator for Amazon EC2 deploys a mechanism that uses AWS services to orchestrate and automate key digital forensics processes and activities for Amazon EC2 instances in the event of a potential security issue being detected. In this builders’ session, learn how to deploy and scale this self-service AWS solution. Explore the prerequisites, learn how to customize it for your environment, and experience forensic analysis on live artifacts to identify what potential unauthorized users could do in your environment.

TDR353 | Builders’ session | Preventing top misconfigurations associated with security events
Have you ever wondered how you can prevent top misconfigurations that could lead to a security event? Join this builders’ session, where the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) reviews some of the most commonly observed misconfigurations that can lead to security events. Then learn how to build mechanisms using AWS Security Hub and other AWS services that can help detect and prevent these issues.

TDR354 | Builders’ session | Insights in your inbox: Build email reporting with AWS Security Hub
AWS Security Hub provides you with a comprehensive view of the security state of your AWS resources by collecting security data from across AWS accounts, AWS Regions, and AWS services. In this builders’ session, learn how to set up a customizable and automated summary email that distills security posture information, insights, and critical findings from Security Hub. Get hands-on with the Security Hub console and discover easy-to-implement code examples that you can use in your own organization to drive security improvements.

TDR355 | Builders’ session | Detecting ransomware and suspicious activity in Amazon RDS
In this builders’ session, acquire skills that can help you detect and respond to threats targeting AWS databases. Using services such as AWS Cloud9 and AWS CloudFormation, simulate real-world intrusions on Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora and use Amazon Athena to detect unauthorized activities. The session also covers strategies from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) for rapid incident response and configuring essential security settings to enhance your database defenses. The session provides practical experience in configuring audit logging and enabling termination protection to ensure robust database security measures.

TDR451 | Builders’ session | Create a generative AI runbook to resolve security findings
Generative AI has the potential to accelerate and streamline security analysis, response, and recovery, enhancing the effectiveness of human engagement. In this builders’ session, learn how to use Amazon SageMaker notebooks and Amazon Bedrock to quickly resolve security findings in your AWS account. You rely on runbooks for the day-to-day operations, maintenance, and troubleshooting of AWS services. With generative AI, you can gain deeper insights into security findings and take the necessary actions to streamline security analysis and response.

TDR441 | Code talk | How to use generative AI to gain insights in Amazon Security Lake
In this code talk, explore how you can use generative AI to gather enhanced security insights within Amazon Security Lake by integrating Amazon SageMaker Studio and Amazon Bedrock. Learn how AI-powered analytics can help rapidly identify and respond to security threats. By using large language models (LLMs) within Amazon Bedrock to process natural language queries and auto-generate SQL queries, you can expedite security investigations, focusing on relevant data sources within Security Lake. The talk includes a threat analysis exercise to demonstrate the effectiveness of LLMs in addressing various security queries. Learn how you can streamline security operations and gain actionable insights to strengthen your security posture and mitigate risks effectively within AWS environments.

TDR442 | Code talk | Security testing, the practical way
Join this code talk for a practical demonstration of how to test security capabilities within AWS. The talk can help you evaluate and quantify your detection and response effectiveness against key metrics like mean time to detect and mean time to resolution. Explore testing techniques that use open source tools alongside AWS services such as Amazon GuardDuty and AWS WAF. Gain insights into testing your security configurations in your environment and uncover best practices tailored to your testing scenarios. This talk equips you with actionable strategies to enhance your security posture and establish robust defense mechanisms within your AWS environment.

TDR443 | Code talk | How to conduct incident response in your Amazon EKS environment
Join this code talk to gain insights from both adversaries’ and defenders’ perspectives as AWS experts simulate a live security incident within an application across multiple Amazon EKS clusters, invoking an alert in Amazon GuardDuty. Witness the incident response process as experts demonstrate detection, containment, and recovery procedures in near real time. Through this immersive experience, learn how you can effectively respond to and recover from Amazon EKS–specific incidents, and gain valuable insights into incident handling within cloud environments. Don’t miss this opportunity to enhance your incident response capabilities and learn how to more effectively safeguard your AWS infrastructure.

TDR444 | Code talk | Identity forensics in the realm of short-term credentials
AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) is a common way for users to access AWS services and allows you to utilize role chaining for navigating AWS accounts. When investigating security incidents, understanding the history and potential impact is crucial. Examining a single session is often insufficient because the initial abused credential may be different than the one that precipitated the investigation, and other tokens might be generated. Also, a single session investigation may not encompass all permissions that the adversary controls, due to trust relationships between the roles. In this code talk, learn how you can construct identity forensics capabilities using Amazon Detective and create a custom graph database using Amazon Neptune.

TDR371-R | Workshop | Threat detection and response on AWS
Join AWS experts for an immersive threat detection and response workshop using Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon Detective. This workshop simulates security events for different types of resources and behaviors and illustrates both manual and automated responses with AWS Lambda. Dive in and learn how to improve your security posture by operationalizing threat detection and response on AWS.

TDR372-R | Workshop | Container threat detection and response with AWS security services
Join AWS experts for an immersive container security workshop using AWS threat detection and response services. This workshop simulates scenarios and security events that may arise while using Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS. The workshop also demonstrates how to use different AWS security services to detect and respond to potential security threats, as well as suggesting how you can improve your security practices. Dive in and learn how to improve your security posture when running workloads on AWS container orchestration services.

TDR373-R | Workshop | Vulnerability management with Amazon Inspector and Jenkins
Join AWS experts for an immersive vulnerability management workshop using Amazon Inspector and Jenkins for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). This workshop takes you through approaches to vulnerability management with Amazon Inspector for EC2 instances, container images residing in Amazon ECR and within CI/CD tools, and AWS Lambda functions. Explore the integration of Amazon Inspector with Jenkins, and learn how to operationalize vulnerability management on AWS.

Browse the full re:Inforce catalog to learn more about sessions in other tracks, plus gamified learning, innovation sessions, partner sessions, and labs.

Our comprehensive track content is designed to help arm you with the knowledge and skills needed to securely manage your workloads and applications on AWS. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to stay updated with the latest best practices in threat detection and incident response. Join us in Philadelphia for re:Inforce 2024 by registering today. We can’t wait to welcome you!

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

Nisha Amthul

Nisha Amthul

Nisha is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at AWS Security, specializing in detection and response solutions. She has a strong foundation in product management and product marketing within the domains of information security and data protection. When not at work, you’ll find her cake decorating, strength training, and chasing after her two energetic kiddos, embracing the joys of motherhood.

Spring 2024 SOC reports now available with 177 services in scope

Post Syndicated from Brownell Combs original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/spring-2024-soc-reports-now-available-with-177-services-in-scope/

We continue to expand the scope of our assurance programs at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and are pleased to announce that the Spring 2024 System and Organization Controls (SOC) 1, 2, and 3 reports are now available. The reports cover the 12-month period from April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024, so that customers have a full year of assurance from each report. These reports demonstrate our continuous commitment to adhere to the heightened expectations for cloud service providers.

The Spring 2024 SOC reports include an additional six services in scope, for a total of 177 services in scope. For up-to-date information, including when additional services are added, visit the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program webpage and choose SOC.

The six additional services in scope for the Spring 2024 SOC reports are:

Customers can download the Spring 2024 SOC reports through AWS Artifact, a self-service portal for on-demand access to AWS compliance reports. Sign in to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console, or learn more at Getting Started with AWS Artifact. You can also download the SOC 3 report as a PDF file from AWS.

AWS strives to continuously bring services into scope of its compliance programs to help you meet your architectural and regulatory needs. Please reach out to your AWS account team if you have questions or feedback about SOC compliance.

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

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

Brownell Combs

Brownell Combs

Brownell is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He leads multiple security and privacy initiatives within AWS. Brownell holds a master of science degree in computer science from the University of Virginia and a bachelor of science degree in computer science from Centre College. He has over 20 years of experience in IT risk management and CISSP, CISA, CRISC, and GIAC GCLD certifications.

Paul Hong

Paul Hong

Paul is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He leads multiple security, compliance, and training initiatives within AWS, and has over 10 years of experience in security assurance. Paul holds CISSP, CEH, and CPA certifications, and a master’s degree in accounting information systems and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from James Madison University, Virginia.

Tushar Jain

Tushar Jain

Tushar is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He leads multiple security, compliance, and training initiatives within AWS. Tushar holds a master of business administration from Indian Institute of Management, Shillong, India and a bachelor of technology in electronics and telecommunication engineering from Marathwada University, India. He has over 12 years of experience in information security and holds CCSK and CSXF certifications.

Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy

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

Nathan Samuel

Nathan Samuel

Nathan is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He leads multiple security and privacy initiatives within AWS. Nathan has a bachelor of commerce degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and has over 20 years of experience in security assurance. He holds the CISA, CRISC, CGEIT, CISM, CDPSE, and Certified Internal Auditor certifications.

ryan wilks

Ryan Wilks

Ryan is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He leads multiple security and privacy initiatives within AWS. Ryan has over 13 years of experience in information security. He has a bachelor of arts degree from Rutgers University and holds ITIL, CISM, and CISA certifications.

How to implement single-user secret rotation using Amazon RDS admin credentials

Post Syndicated from Adithya Solai original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-implement-single-user-secret-rotation-using-amazon-rds-admin-credentials/

You might have security or compliance standards that prevent a database user from changing their own credentials and from having multiple users with identical permissions. AWS Secrets Manager offers two rotation strategies for secrets that contain Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) credentials: single-user and alternating-user.

In the preceding scenario, neither single-user rotation nor alternating-user rotation would meet your security or compliance standards. Single-user rotation uses database user credentials in the secret to rotate itself (assuming the user has change-password permissions). Alternating-user rotation uses Amazon RDS admin credentials from another secret to create and update a _clone user credential, which means there are two valid user credentials with identical permissions.

In this post, you will learn how to implement a modified alternating-user solution that uses Amazon RDS admin user credentials to rotate database credentials while not creating an identical _clone user. This modified rotation strategy creates a short lag between when the password in the database changes and when the secret is updated. During this brief lag before the new password is updated, database calls using the old credentials might be denied. Test this in your environment to determine if the lag is within an acceptable range.

Walkthrough

In this walkthrough, you will learn how to implement the modified rotation strategy by modifying the existing alternating-user rotation template. To accomplish this, you need to complete the following:

  • Configure alternating-user rotation on the database credential secret for which you want to implement the modified rotation strategy.
  • Modify your AWS Lambda rotation function template code to implement the modified rotation strategy.
  • Test the modified rotation strategy on your database credential secret and verify that the secret was rotated while also not creating a _clone user.

To configure alternating-user rotation on the database credential secret

  1. Follow this AWS Security Blog post to set up alternating-user rotation on an Amazon RDS instance.
  2. When configuring rotation for the database user secret in the Secrets Manager console, clear the checkbox for Rotate immediately when the secret is stored. The next rotation will begin on your schedule in the Rotation schedule tab. Make sure that no _clone user is created by the default alternating-user rotation code through your database’s user tables.

Figure 1: Clear the checkbox for Rotate immediately when the secret is stored

Figure 1: Clear the checkbox for Rotate immediately when the secret is stored

To modify your Lambda function rotation Lambda template to implement the modified rotation strategy

  1. In the Secrets Manager console, select the Secrets menu from the left pane. Then, select the new database user secret’s name from the Secret name column.

    Figure 2: Select the new database user secret

    Figure 2: Select the new database user secret

  2. Select the Rotation tab on the Secrets page, and then choose the link under Lambda rotation function.

    Figure 3: Select the Lambda rotation function

    Figure 3: Select the Lambda rotation function

  3. From the rotation Lambda menu, Download select Download function code.zip.

    Figure 4: Select Download function code .zip from Download

    Figure 4: Select Download function code .zip from Download

  4. Unzip the .zip file. Open the lambda_function.py file in a code editor and make the following code changes to implement the modified rotation strategy.

    The following code changes show how to modify a rotation function for the MySQL alternating-user rotation code template. You must make similar changes in the CreateSecret and SetSecret steps of the alternating-user rotation code template for your database’s engine type.

    To make the needed changes, remove the lines of code that are in grey italic and add the lines of code that are bold.

    Consider using AWS Lambda function versions to enable reverting your Lambda function to previous iterations in case this modified rotation strategy goes wrong.

    In create_secret()

    The following code suggestion removes the creation of _clone-suffixed usernames.

    Remove:

    -- # Get the alternate username swapping between the original user and the user with _clone appended to it
    -- current_dict['username'] = get_alt_username(current_dict['username'])

    In set_secret()

    The following code suggestions remove the creation of _clone-suffixed usernames and subsequent checks for such usernames in conditional logic.

    Keep:

    # Get username character limit from environment variable
    username_limit = int(os.environ.get('USERNAME_CHARACTER_LIMIT', '16'))

    Remove:

    -- # Get the alternate username swapping between the original user and the user with _clone appended to it
    -- current_dict['username'] = get_alt_username(current_dict['username'])

    Keep:

    # Check that the username is within correct length requirements for version

    Remove:

    -- if current_dict['username'].endswith('_clone') and len(current_dict['username']) > username_limit:

    Add:

    ++ if len(current_dict[‘username’]) > username_limit:

    Keep:

    raise ValueError("Unable to clone user, username length with _clone appended would exceed %s character
    s" % username_limit)
    # Make sure the user from current and pending match

    Remove:

    -- if get_alt_username(current_dict['username']) != pending_dict['username']:

    Add:

    ++ if current_dict['username'] != pending_dict['username']:

    Remove:

    -- def get_alt_username(current_username):
    --   """Gets the alternate username for the current_username passed in
    --
    --   This helper function gets the username for the alternate user based on the passed in current username.
    --
    --   Args:
    --       current_username (client): The current username
    --
    --   Returns:
    --      AlternateUsername: Alternate username
    --
    --   Raises:
    --      ValueError: If the new username length would exceed the maximum allowed
    --
    --   """
    --   clone_suffix = "_clone"
    --   if current_username.endswith(clone_suffix):
    --       return current_username[:(len(clone_suffix) * -1)]
    --   else:
    --       return current_username + clone_suffix
    --

    The following code suggestions remove the logic of creating a new _clone user within the database, and rotates the existing user’s password.

    Keep:

    with conn.cursor() as cur:

    Remove:

    --   cur.execute("SELECT User FROM mysql.user WHERE User = %s", pending_dict['username'])
    --   # Create the user if it does not exist
    --   if cur.rowcount == 0:
    --      cur.execute("CREATE USER %s IDENTIFIED BY %s", (pending_dict['username'], pending_dict['password']))
    -- 
    --   # Copy grants to the new user
    --   cur.execute("SHOW GRANTS FOR %s", current_dict['username'])
    --   for row in cur.fetchall():
    --       grant = row[0].split(' TO ')
    --       new_grant_escaped = grant[0].replace('%', '%%')  # % is a special character in Python format strings.
    --       cur.execute(new_grant_escaped + " TO %s", (pending_dict['username'],))

    Keep:

        # Get the version of MySQL
        cur.execute("SELECT VERSION()")
        ver = cur.fetchone()[0]

    Remove:

    --   # Copy TLS options to the new user
    --   escaped_encryption_statement = get_escaped_encryption_statement(ver)
    --   cur.execute("SELECT ssl_type, ssl_cipher, x509_issuer, x509_subject FROM mysql.user WHERE User = %s", current_dict['username'])
    --   tls_options = cur.fetchone()
    --   ssl_type = tls_options[0]
    --   if not ssl_type:
    --       cur.execute(escaped_encryption_statement + " NONE", pending_dict['username'])
    --   elif ssl_type == "ANY":
    --       cur.execute(escaped_encryption_statement + " SSL", pending_dict['username'])
    --   elif ssl_type == "X509":
    --       cur.execute(escaped_encryption_statement + " X509", pending_dict['username'])
    --   else:
    --       cur.execute(escaped_encryption_statement + " CIPHER %s AND ISSUER %s AND SUBJECT %s", (pending_dict['username'], tls_options[1], tls_options[2], tls_options[3]))

    Keep:

        # Set the password for the user and commit
        password_option = get_password_option(ver)
        cur.execute("SET PASSWORD FOR %s = " + password_option, (pending_dict['username'], pending_dict['password']))
        conn.commit()
        logger.info("setSecret: Successfully set password for %s in MySQL DB for secret arn %s." % (pending_dict['username'], arn))

  5. Re-zip the folder with the local code changes. From the rotation Lambda menu, under the Code tab, choose Upload from and select .zip file. Upload the new .zip file.

    Figure 5: Use Upload from to upload the new .zip file as the Code source

    Figure 5: Use Upload from to upload the new .zip file as the Code source

To test the modified rotation strategy

  1. During the next scheduled rotation for the new database user secret, the modified rotation code will run. To test this immediately, select the Rotation tab within the Secrets menu and choose Rotate secret immediately in the Rotation configuration section.

    Figure 6: Choose Rotate secret immediately to test the new rotation strategy

    Figure 6: Choose Rotate secret immediately to test the new rotation strategy

  2. To verify that the modified rotation strategy worked, verify the sign-in details in both the secret and the database itself.
    1. To verify the Secrets Manager secret, select the Secrets menu in the Secrets Manager console and choose Retrieve secret value under the Overview tab. Verify that the username doesn’t have a _clone suffix and that there is a new password. Alternatively, make a get-secret-value call on the secret through the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and verify the username and password details.

      Figure 7: Use the secret details page for the database user secret to verify that the value of the username key is unchanged

      Figure 7: Use the secret details page for the database user secret to verify that the value of the username key is unchanged

    2. To verify the sign-in details in the database, sign in to the database with admin credentials. Run the following database command to verify that no users with a _clone suffix exist: SELECT * FROM mysql.user;. Make sure to use the commands appropriate for your database engine type.
    3. Also, verify that the new sign-in credentials in the secret work by signing in to the database with the credentials.

Clean up the resources

  • Follow the Clean up the resources section from the AWS Security Blog post used at the start of this walkthrough.

Conclusion

In this post, you’ve learned how to configure rotation of Amazon RDS database users using a modified alternating-users rotation strategy to help meet more specific security and compliance standards. The modified strategy ensures that database users don’t rotate themselves and that there are no duplicate users created in the database.

You can start implementing this modified rotation strategy through the AWS Secrets Manager console and Amazon RDS console. To learn more about Secrets Manager, see the Secrets Manager documentation.

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

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Adithya Solai

Adithya Solai

Adithya is a software development engineer working on core backend features for AWS Secrets Manager. He graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, with a BS in computer science. He is passionate about social work in education. He enjoys reading, chess, and hip-hop and R&B music.

2024 ISO and CSA STAR certificates now available with two additional AWS Regions and three additional services

Post Syndicated from Atulsing Patil original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/2024-iso-and-csa-star-certificates-now-available-with-two-additional-aws-regions-and-three-additional-services/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) successfully completed a special onboarding audit with no findings for ISO 9001:2015, 27001:2022, 27017:2015, 27018:2019, 27701:2019, 20000-1:2018, and 22301:2019, and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) STAR Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) v4.0. Ernst and Young CertifyPoint auditors conducted the audit and reissued the certificates on May 16, 2024. The objective of the audit was to assess the level of compliance with the requirements of the applicable international standards.

During this special onboarding, we added two additional AWS Regions (Israel (Tel Aviv)) and Canada West (Calgary)) and three additional AWS services to the scope since the last certification issued on Nov 22, 2023. The following are the three additional services:

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

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

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

Atul Patil

Atulsing Patil

Atulsing is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He has 27 years of consulting experience in information technology and information security management. Atulsing holds a Master of Science in Electronics degree and professional certifications such as CCSP, CISSP, CISM, CDPSE, ISO 27001 Lead Auditor, HITRUST CSF, Archer Certified Consultant, and AWS CCP.

Nimesh Ravas

Nimesh Ravasa

Nimesh is a Compliance Program Manager at AWS. He leads multiple security and privacy initiatives within AWS. Nimesh has 15 years of experience in information security and holds CISSP, CDPSE, CISA, PMP, CSX, AWS Solutions Architect – Associate, and AWS Security Specialty certifications.

Chinmaee Parulekar

Chinmaee Parulekar

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

Integrating AWS Verified Access with Jamf as a device trust provider

Post Syndicated from Mayank Gupta original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/integrating-aws-verified-access-with-jamf-as-a-device-trust-provider/

In this post, we discuss how to architect Zero Trust based remote connectivity to your applications hosted within Amazon Web Services (AWS). Specifically, we show you how to integrate AWS Verified Access with Jamf as a device trust provider. This post is an extension of our previous post explaining how to integrate AWS Verified Access with CrowdStrike. In this post, we also look at how to troubleshoot Verified Access policies and integration issues for when a user with valid access receives access denied or unauthorized error messages.

Verified Access is a networking service that is built on Zero Trust principles and provides secured access to corporate applications without needing a virtual private network (VPN). This enables your corporate users to be able to access their applications from anywhere with a complaint device. Verified Access reduces IT operations overhead because it is built on an open environment and integrates with your existing trust providers and lets you use your existing implementations.

Verified Access lets you centrally define access policies for your applications with additional context beyond only IP address, using claims from user identity and user device coming from the trust providers. Using these access policies, Verified Access evaluates each access request at scale in real time and records each access request centrally, making it easier and quicker for you to respond to security incidents or audit requests.

Jamf is an Apple mobile device management (MDM) software and security provider. Organizations can use Jamf to manage their corporate devices and maintain security posture. Jamf’s Zero Trust product—Jamf Trust—monitors device security posture and reports it back to the administrators on the Jamf Protect console. It monitors the device’s OS settings, patch level, and device settings against an organization’s defined policy and calculates device posture from secure to high risk.

Verified Access integrates with third-party device management providers such as Jamf to gather additional security claims from the device in addition to user identity to either allow or deny access.

Solution overview

In this example, you will set up remote access to a sales application and an HR application. Through the solution, you want to make sure only users from the sales group can access the sales application, and only users from the HR group are able to access the HR application.

You will onboard the applications to Verified Access, and access policies will be defined based on the security requirements using Cedar as the policy language. After you have onboarded the applications and have defined the access policies, engineers and users will be able to access the application from anywhere using the Verified Access endpoint without needing a VPN.

You will also use the claims coming from the device in the access policies to make sure that device is managed by Jamf and is secure—for example, that the device is at the right patch level or there are no security vulnerabilities—before granting user access to the respective application.

Figure 1: High-level solution architecture

Figure 1: High-level solution architecture

Prerequisites

To integrate Verified Access with Jamf device trust provider, you need to have the following prerequisites.

Verified Access:

  1. Enable AWS IAM Identity Center for your entire AWS Organization. If you don’t have it enabled, follow the steps to enable AWS IAM Identity Center
  2. Have users created and mapped to respective groups under AWS IAM Identity Center
  3. Apple device (EC2 Mac for this demo)
  4. Subscription with Jamf Pro and Jamf Security (RADAR)
  5. Jamf tenant ID

Jamf:

  1. Managed devices with Jamf Pro
  2. Volume purchasing for app deployment
  3. MacOS 12 or later

Walkthrough

For this demo, you will use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Mac instances, which will be enrolled and managed by Jamf. Because EC2 Mac instances don’t come with MDM capabilities out of the box, you can use the following steps to enroll an EC2 Mac instance with Jamf.

Enroll EC2 Mac instance with Jamf

To start, you need to create some credentials and store them in AWS Secrets Manager. These credentials are Jamf endpoint, Jamf user and password with enrollment privileges, and the EC2 Mac instance local admin and the password. We have used AWS Secrets Manager for this demo, but if desired, you could use Parameter Store, a capability of AWS Systems Manager. You can find AWS CloudFormation and Terraform templates for both Secrets Manager and Systems Manager at our sample code on GitHub.

The CloudFormation template will create:

  1. jamfServerDomain – This is your organization’s Jamf URL, the endpoint for your device to get the enrollment from.
  2. jamfEnrollmentUser – This is the authorized user within Jamf with device enrollment permissions.
  3. jamfEnrollmemtPassword – This is the password for the enrollment user provided in number 2.
  4. localAdmin – This is the admin user on your EC2 Mac instance, with the permissions to install required profiles and apply changes.
  5. localAdminPassword – This is the password for the admin user on your EC2 Mac instance provided in number 4.

The CloudFormation template also creates a Secrets Manager secret, an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy, a role, and an instance profile.

To allocate a Dedicated Host and launch an EC2 Mac instance

After you complete deploying the CloudFormation template, allocate an Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host for Mac and launch an EC2 Mac instance on the host. On the Launch an instance screen, after providing the basic details, expand the Advanced details section and select the IAM instance profile that was created as part of CloudFormation deployment.

Figure 2: Advanced details pane showing the selected IAM instance profile

Figure 2: Advanced details pane showing the selected IAM instance profile

To configure the instance:

  1. Connect to your EC2 Mac instance using Secure Shell (SSH).

    Figure 3: The steps for connecting to the instance using SSH client

    Figure 3: The steps for connecting to the instance using SSH client

  2. Enable screen sharing and set the admin password to the one you used when creating credentials. Use the following command:
    sudo /usr/bin/dscl . -passwd /Users/ec2-user 'l0c4l3x4mplep455w0rd' ; sudo launchctl enable system/com.apple.screensharing ; sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.screensharing.plist

  3. After screen sharing is enabled, connect to the EC2 Mac instance using VNC Viewer or a similar tool and enable automatic login from System Settings – > Users & Groups
  4. Place the AppleScript provided on the GitHub in /Users/Shared:
    1. You can either download the script to your local machine and then copy it over or download the script directly to the EC2 Mac instance.
    2. If you are using VNC Viewer to connect to the instance, you should be able to drag and drop the file from your local machine to the EC2 Mac instance.
  5. Edit and update the AppleScript with the secret ID from Secrets Manager for the MMSecret variable:
    1. MMSecret is the secret from the Secrets Manager that was created as part of the CloudFormation template deployment. Copy the secret Amazon Resource Name (ARN) from the Secrets Manager console or use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to get the ARN and update it in the AppleScript.
  6. Run the AppleScript using the following command and allow access to Accessibility, App Management, and Disk Access permissions for the script. While the script is running, the screen might flash a few times.
    osascript /Users/Shared/enroll-ec2-mac.scpt --setup

  7. After you see the Successful message, choose OK and restart the instance. After the instance has restarted, sign in to the instance and the enrollment will proceed.

The enrollment will take a few minutes and your EC2 Mac instance will receive the profiles and policies from the Jamf instance as configured by your administrator.

Jamf end setup for Verified Access

In this section, you will be working on your Jamf security portal, RADAR, to integrate Verified Access with Jamf, and then onboard your applications to Verified Access and define access policies. You begin this walkthrough by enabling Verified Access on Jamf first.

Jamf Protect and Jamf Trust are the components that collect device claims and share them with Verified Access. The following section illustrates how to make Jamf ready to send claims over to Verified Access. This section needs to be completed on Jamf Security and Jamf Pro Portals. Jamf UI can differ depending on the Jamf Pro version used.

To enable Verified Access profile and deploy Jamf Trust and Verified Access browser extensions

  1. Create an AWS Verified Access activation profile:
    1. Go to Jamf RADAR portal -> Devices -> Activation profiles.
    2. Choose Create profile. If presented with an option, choose Jamf Trust.
    3. Select Device identity from the options available and choose Next.
    4. Select Without identity provider and Assign random identifier and choose Next.
    5. Leave the following sections as they are and continue to choose Next until you reach the review screen.
    6. Choose Save and Create.
  2. Download the manifest files:
    1. Select the profile created in Step 1.
    2. Select your UEM (Jamf Pro in our case).
    3. Select your OS (macOS in our case).
    4. Download Configuration profiles and Browser manifests.
  3. Deploy Jamf Trust using Jamf Pro:
    1. For Jamf Trust, go to the App Store apps in your Jamf Pro instance.
    2. Search for and add Jamf Trust for deployment.
    3. For deployment method, select Install Automatically.
    4. Define scope for target computers and save.
  4. Deploy configuration profiles using Jamf Pro:
    1. Navigate to Configuration Profiles.
    2. Choose Upload and select the configuration file downloaded from the RADAR portal and upload it.
    3. In the General payload configuration tab, select basic settings and distribution method.
    4. Define scope for target computers and choose Save.
  5. Deploy browser extensions using Jamf Pro:
    1. Navigate to Settings -> computer management, choose Packages, and choose New.
    2. Use the general pane to define basic settings.
    3. Select Choose File and select the Verified Access PKG file downloaded from the RADAR portal to upload and choose Save.
    4. Navigate to Policies under Computers and choose New to create a new policy and use the general pane to define basic settings.
    5. Select Packages and choose Configure.
    6. Choose Add for the package you want to install and choose Install under Actions.
    7. Define scope for target computers and choose Save.
  6. Create and deploy Verified Access browser extensions (Google Chrome):
    1. In Jamf Pro, at the top of the sidebar, select Computers. In the sidebar, select Configuration Profiles and choose New.
    2. In General, use the default basic settings, including the level at which to apply the profile and the distribution method.
    3. Select the Application & Custom Settings, and then choose External Applications and choose Add.
    4. In the Source section, from the Choose source pop-up menu, choose Jamf Repository.
    5. In the Application Domain section, choose com.google.chrome. Select the default options for version and variant choices.
    6. Choose Add/Remove properties and deselect the Cloud Management Enrollment Token and, in the Custom Property field, enter ExtensionInstallForcelist, then choose Add and choose Apply.
    7. In the ExtensionInstallForcelist pop-up menu, select Array. For item 1, select String from the pop-up menu, and enter the following ID for the Google Chrome browser extension: aepkkaojepmbeifpjmonopnjcimcjcbd.
    8. Select the Scope tab and configure the scope of the profile and choose Save.
  7. Create and deploy Verified Access browser extensions (Firefox):
    1. In Jamf Pro, at the top of the sidebar, select Computers.
    2. Select Configuration Profiles in the sidebar and choose New.
    3. In General, use the default basic settings, including the level at which to apply the profile and the distribution method.
    4. Select the Application & Custom Settings payload, choose External Applications > Upload, and choose Add.
    5. In the Preference Domain field, enter org.mozilla.firefox.
    6. Use the following code to create the desired policies for browser extension behavior. Key-value pairs in the following sample PLIST can be modified to match desired policy options.
      <dict>
      <key>EnterprisePoliciesEnabled</key>
      <true/>
      <key>ExtensionSettings</key>
      <dict>
      <key>verified-access@amazonaws</key>
      <dict>
      <key>install_url</key>
      <string>https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/latest/aws-verified-access/latest.xpi</string>
      <key>installation_mode</key>
      <string>normal_installed</string>
      </dict>
      </dict>
      </dict>

    7. Select the Scope tab and configure the scope of the profile and choose Save.

To obtain your Jamf tenant ID for integrating with Verified Access:

  1. Navigate to your Jamf Security console.
  2. Navigate to Integrations and choose Access providers.
  3. Choose Verified Access and choose the connection name.
  4. Your Jamf Customer ID is your tenant ID you’ll use during the setup of integration.

    Figure 4: Jamf tenant ID

    Figure 4: Jamf tenant ID

To review your managed device posture within the Jamf security console:

  1. Navigate to your Jamf Security console.
  2. Navigate to Reports -> Security -> Device view to review current device posture of your managed devices.

    Figure 5: Device posture within Jamf

    Figure 5: Device posture within Jamf

Verified Access setup

There are four steps to onboard your applications to Verified Access:

  1. Onboard Verified Access trust providers.
  2. Create a Verified Access instance.
  3. Create one or more Verified Access groups.
  4. Onboard your application and create Verified Access endpoints.

The following steps explain in detail how to onboard your applications to Verified Access.

Step 1: Onboard Verified Access trust providers

Create a user trust provider

  1. Open the Amazon VPC console. In the navigation pane, choose Verified Access trust providers, and then Create Verified Access trust provider.
  2. Provide a Name and Description. The screenshot shows identitycenter-trust-provider as the name and Identity Center as trust provider as the description.
  3. Provide a Policy Reference name that you will use later while defining policies. This screenshot shows idcpolicy as the policy reference name.
  4. Select User Trust Provider.
  5. Select IAM Identity Center.
  6. Provide additional tags.
  7. Choose Create Verified Access trust provider.

Figure 6: This screenshot shows that user identity trust providers have been created

Figure 6: This screenshot shows that user identity trust providers have been created

Create a device trust provider

  1. Open the Amazon VPC console. In the navigation pane, choose Verified Access trust providers, and then Create Verified Access trust provider.
  2. Provide a Name and Description. The screenshot shows device-trust-provider as the name and Jamf as device trust provider as the description.
  3. Provide a Policy Reference name that you will use later while defining policies. The screenshot shows jamfpolicy as the policy reference name.
  4. Select Device trust provider.
  5. In Device details, provide the Jamf tenant ID that you obtained from the Jamf Security console.
  6. Provide additional tags.
  7. Choose Create Verified Access trust provider.

Figure 7: This screenshot shows the device trust provider has been created

Figure 7: This screenshot shows the device trust provider has been created

Step 2: Create a Verified Access instance

  1. Open the Amazon VPC console. In the navigation pane, choose Verified Access instances, and then Create Verified Access instance. Provide a Name and Description.
  2. From the dropdown list, select one of the trust providers you created in Step 1. You can only select one trust provider at the time of instance creation.
  3. Provide additional tags and choose Create Verified Access instance.
  4. After the instance is created, select the instance and choose Actions.
  5. Choose Attach Verified Access trust provider.
  6. Select the other trust provider from the dropdown list and choose Attach Verified Access trust provider.

Figure 8: The Verified Access instance has been created with both trust providers attached

Figure 8: The Verified Access instance has been created with both trust providers attached

Step 3: Create Verified Access groups

  1. Open the Amazon VPC console. In the navigation pane, choose Verified Access groups, and then Create Verified Access group.
  2. Provide a Name and Description. The screenshot shows hr-group for the name and AVA Group for HR application as the description.
  3. Select the Verified Access instance from the dropdown list that you created in Step 2.
  4. Leave policy empty for now. You will define the access policy later.
  5. Choose Create Verified Access group.

You need to repeat the preceding steps for HR applications, creating two groups, one for each application.

Figure 9: HR group successfully created

Figure 9: HR group successfully created

Step 4: Create Verified Access endpoints

Before proceeding with the endpoint creation, make sure you have your application deployed with an internal Application Load Balancer, and you have requested an ACM certificate for your public domain that your users will use to access the application.

  1. Open the Amazon VPC console. In the navigation pane, choose Verified Access endpoints and then Create Verified Access endpoint.
  2. Provide a Name and Description. The example has hr-endpoint for name and AVA endpoint for HR application as the description.
  3. Select the HR Group that you created in Step 3 from the dropdown list.
  4. Under Application Domain, provide the public DNS name for your application and then select the public TLS certificate created and stored to the ACM. For example: hr.xxxxx.people.aws.dev.
    1. Verified Access supports wildcard certificates, which means that you can use a wildcard certificate for all your endpoints, but it doesn’t support wildcard endpoints, which means you cannot have a single endpoint mapping to multiple hostnames.
  5. For attachment type, select VPC.
  6. Select the Security group to be used for the endpoint. Traffic from the endpoint that enters your load balancer is associated with this security group.
  7. For Endpoint type, choose Load balancer. Select the HTTP, port 80, load balancer ARN, and subnet.
  8. Choose Create Verified Access Endpoint.

Repeat the same steps to create an endpoint for the HR application.

It can take a few minutes for the endpoint to become active. Your endpoints are active when you see Active in the Status field.

Figure 10: The HR application endpoint has been created

Figure 10: The HR application endpoint has been created

Create Verified Access policies using trust data from user and device trust providers

Before you make the application available on your public domain for your users, define the access policies for your applications.

Verified Access policies are written in Cedar, an AWS policy language. Review the Verified Access policies documentation for details on policy syntax. The context that is available to use in policies varies based on the trust provider. You can review Trust data from trust providers to learn more about the available trust data for supported trust providers.

To Create or modify group level policy:

You now need to define an access policy for your applications at the group level.

  1. In the Amazon VPC console, select Verified Access groups.
  2. Select one of the groups you created earlier for your application.
  3. From Actions, choose Modify Verified Access Group Policy.
  4. In the policy document, provide the following policy:
    permit(principal,action,resource)
    when {
        context.idcpolicy.groups has "d6e20264-4081-7021-48df-def4276a19fe" &&
        context.idcpolicy.user.email.address like "*@example.com" &&
        context has "jamfpolicy" &&
        context.jamfpolicy has "risk" &&
        ["LOW","SECURE"].contains(context.jamfpolicy.risk)
    };

  5. Choose Modify Verified Access group policy.

The policy checks for claims received from the user trust provider (IAM Identity Center) and the device trust provider (Jamf). Based on these claims, it makes a decision whether the user is authorized to access the application. In the preceding policy, you check whether the user who is trying to access this application belongs to a certain group and has an email ending with example.com in IAM Identity Center by referencing to the idcpolicy context, which you defined while creating the user trust provider. Similarly, you use the jamfpolicy to reference the context coming from Jamf to validate whether the device used for accessing this application is secure or not. If access criteria aren’t matched, the user will receive a 403 Unauthorized error.

You need to repeat the preceding steps for the other group, defining the access policy with relevant group ID and claims for the application.

Amazon Route 53 configuration

After you complete your Verified Access setup and have defined your access policies, you will make your application public for your users to be able to access from anywhere, without a VPN and in a secure manner. For that, you will update your Amazon Route 53 records with the endpoints you created in Step 4: Create Verified Access endpoints.

  1. In the Amazon VPC console, select Verified Access endpoints.
  2. Select one of the endpoints you created earlier for your application.
  3. From the Details section, make a note of the Endpoint domain. Repeat these two steps for the other endpoint as well and make a note of the endpoint domain.
  4. Go to the Amazon Route53 console and in your hosted zone, choose Click Record.
  5. Provide a Record name. This is the subdomain your users will use to access the application.
  6. For Record type select CNAME.
  7. In the Value section, provide the endpoint domain that you copied from Verified Access endpoints. Leave everything else as the default settings and choose Create records. Repeat these steps for the other endpoint and provide the relevant subdomain and value to the record.

Figure 11: The Route 53 record has been created

Figure 11: The Route 53 record has been created

And that’s it. You have finished integrating Jamf Trust and Jamf Pro with Verified Access, and your users can now access their applications using the above CNAMES from their managed computers.

Test the solution

To test, use your browser (Firefox or Chrome) on one of your Jamf managed computers with the Verified Access extension installed to access one or both applications. The user will first be directed to the IAM Identity Center sign-in screen to sign in to the application. Then Verified Access will evaluate the user and the device posture before either granting or denying access to the user.

Figure 12: Access has been granted to the user based on identity and device posture

Figure 12: Access has been granted to the user based on identity and device posture

If the user meets the requirements, they will be presented with the application page. If the user doesn’t meet the requirements, they will receive a 403 Unauthorized error.

Figure 13: Access has been denied to the user based on identity and device posture

Figure 13: Access has been denied to the user based on identity and device posture

Troubleshooting on EC2 Mac

During testing or later, if your users receive a 403 Unauthorized error or the Verified Access extension isn’t forwarding the request, use the following steps to verify the browser extension being used and installed on the device is correct.

To verify the extension using Google Chrome:

  1. Verify that the browser extension is installed and is the latest version. If not, update the browser extension.
  2. Verify that Jamf Trust is installed and your device has the corresponding profiles for Jamf Trust. If not, install Jamf Trust and push the Jamf Trust profile to the device.
  3. If the problem persists, verify your local Jamf JSON configuration file and validate that the Chrome extension ID is correct. Follow these steps:
    1. Go to Chrome and select Manage Extensions.
    2. Enable Developer mode.
    3. Check the value of ID for your installed Verified Access browser extension.
    4. Open your terminal.
    5. Use the following command to change your directory to /Library/Google/Chrome/NativeMessagingHosts
      cd /Library/Google/Chrome/NativeMessagingHosts

    6. Verify that the value for chrome-extension matches the ID of the installed browser extension.

To verify the extension using Firefox:

  1. Verify that the browser extension is installed and is the latest version. If not, update the browser extension.
  2. Verify that Jamf Trust is installed and your device has the corresponding profiles for Jamf Trust. If not, install Jamf Trust and push the Jamf Trust profile to the device.
  3. If the problem persists, verify your local Jamf JSON configuration file and validate that it points to the correct Verified Access Firefox browser extension deployment.
    1. Open your terminal.
    2. Use the following command to change your directory to /Library/Application\ Support/Mozilla/NativeMessagingHosts:
      cd /Library/Application\ Support/Mozilla/NativeMessagingHosts

    3. Verify that the value for allowed_extensions is pointing to verified-access@amazonaws.

Conclusion

In this blog post, you learned how to use additional claims from a device trust provider such as Jamf in addition to user identity to provide access to corporate applications with AWS Verified Access. The access policies defined at Verified Access level consider the user identity and the device posture to determine and grant access to a user. Verified Access aligns with the principles of Zero Trust and evaluates each access request at scale in real time for user identity and device posture. Verified Access helps you keep your applications hosted in AWS securely without relying solely on a network perimeter for protection. To get started with Verified Access, visit the Amazon VPC console.

 
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Mayank Gupta

Mayank Gupta

Mayank is a senior technical account manager with AWS. With over 15 years of experience, Mayank’s expertise lies in cloud infrastructure, architecture, and security. He enjoys helping customers build scalable, resilient, highly available and secure applications. He is based in Glasgow, and his current interest lies in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technology.

A sneak peek at the data protection sessions for re:Inforce 2024

Post Syndicated from Katie Collins original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/a-sneak-peek-at-the-data-protection-sessions-for-reinforce-2024/

Join us in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on June 10–12, 2024 for AWS re:Inforce, a security learning conference where you can gain skills and confidence in cloud security, compliance, identity, and privacy. As an attendee, you have access to hundreds of technical and non-technical sessions, an Expo featuring Amazon Web Services (AWS) experts and AWS Security Competency Partners, and keynote and leadership sessions featuring Security leadership.

AWS re:Inforce features content in the following six areas:

  • Data Protection
  • Governance, Risk, and Compliance
  • Identity and Access Management
  • Network and Infrastructure Security
  • Threat Detection and Incident Response
  • Application Security

This post will highlight some of the Data Protection sessions that you can add to your agenda. The data protection content showcases best practices for data in transit, at rest, and in use. Learn how AWS, customers, and AWS Partners work together to protect data across industries like financial services, healthcare, and the public sector. You will learn from AWS leaders about how customers innovate in the cloud, use the latest generative AI tools, and raise the bar on data security, resilience, and privacy.

Breakout sessions, chalk talks, and lightning talks

DAP221: Secure your healthcare generative AI workloads on Amazon EKS
Many healthcare organizations have been modernizing their applications using containers on Amazon EKS. Today, they are increasingly adopting generative AI models to innovate in areas like patient care, drug discovery, and medical imaging analysis. In addition, these organizations must comply with healthcare security and privacy regulations. In this lightning talk, learn how you can work backwards from expected healthcare data protection outcomes. This talk offers guidance on extending healthcare organizations’ standardization of containerized applications on Amazon EKS to build more secure and resilient generative AI workloads.

DAP232: Innovate responsibly: Deep dive into data protection for generative AI
AWS solutions such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q are helping organizations across industries boost productivity and create new ways of operating. Despite all of the excitement, organizations often pause to ask, “How do these new services handle and manage our data?” AWS has designed these services with data privacy in mind and many security controls enabled by default, such as encryption of data at rest and in transit. In this chalk talk, dive into the data flows of these new generative AI services to learn how AWS prioritizes security and privacy for your sensitive data requirements.

DAP301: Building resilient event-driven architectures, feat. United Airlines
United Airlines plans to accept a delivery of 700 new planes by 2032. With this growing fleet comes more destinations, passengers, employees, and baggage—and a big increase in data, the lifeblood of airline operations. United Airlines is using event-driven architecture (EDA) to build a system that scales with their operations and evolves with their hybrid cloud throughout this journey. In this session, learn how United Airlines built a hybrid operations management system by modernizing from mainframes to AWS. Using Amazon MSK, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS KMS, and event mesh AWS ISV Partner Solace, they were able to design a well-crafted EDA to address their needs.

DAP302: Capital One’s approach for secure and resilient applications
Join this session to learn about Capital One’s strategic AWS Secrets Manager implementation that has helped ensure unified security across environments. Discover the key principles that can guide consistent use, with real-world examples to showcase the benefits and challenges faced. Gain insights into achieving reliability and resilience in financial services applications on AWS, including methods for maintaining system functionality amidst failures and scaling operations safely. Find out how you can implement chaos engineering and site reliability engineering using multi-Region services such as Amazon Route 53, AWS Auto Scaling, and Amazon DynamoDB.

DAP321: Securing workloads using data protection services, feat. Fannie Mae
Join this lightning talk to discover how Fannie Mae employs a comprehensive suite of AWS data protection services to securely manage their own keys, certificates, and application secrets. Fannie Mae demonstrates how they utilized services such as AWS Secrets Manager, AWS KMS, and AWS Private Certificate Authority to empower application teams to build securely and align with their organizational and compliance expectations.

DAP331: Encrypt everything: How different AWS services help you protect data
Encryption is supported by every AWS service that stores data. However, not every service implements encryption and key management identically. In this chalk talk, learn in detail how different AWS services such as Amazon S3 or Amazon Bedrock use encryption and manage keys. These insights can help you model threats to your applications and be better prepared to respond to questions about adherence to security standards and compliance requirements. Also, find out about some of the methodologies AWS uses when designing for encryption and key management at scale in a diverse set of services.

Hands-on sessions (builders’ sessions, code talks, and workshops)

DAP251: Build a privacy-enhancing healthcare data collaboration solution
In this builders’ session, learn how to build a privacy-enhanced environment to analyze datasets from multiple sources using AWS Clean Rooms. Build a solution for a fictional life sciences company that is researching a new drug and needs to perform analyses with a hospital system. Find out how you can help protect sensitive data using SQL query controls to limit how the data can be queried, Cryptographic Computing for Clean Rooms (C3R) to keep the data encrypted at all times, and differential privacy to quantifiably safeguard patients’ personal information in the datasets. You must bring your laptop to participate.

DAP341: Data protection controls for your generative AI applications on AWS
Generative AI is one of the most disruptive technologies of our generation and has the potential to revolutionize all industries. Cloud security data protection strategies need to evolve to meet the changing needs of businesses as they adopt generative AI. In this code talk, learn how you can implement various data protection security controls for your generative AI applications using Amazon Bedrock and AWS data protection services. Discover best practices and reference architectures that can help you enforce fine-grained data protection controls to scale your generative AI applications on AWS.

DAP342: Leveraging developer platforms to improve secrets management at scale
In this code talk, learn how you can leverage AWS Secrets Manager and Backstage.io to give developers the freedom to deploy secrets close to their applications while maintaining organizational standards. Explore how using a developer portal can remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting of creating secrets that have consistent naming, tagging, access controls, and encryption. This talk touches on cross-Region replication, cross-account IAM permissions and policies, and access controls and integration with AWS KMS. Also find out about secrets rotation as well as new AWS Secrets Manager features such as BatchGetSecretValue and managed rotation.

DAP371: Encryption in transit
Encryption in transit is a fundamental aspect of data protection. In this workshop, walk through multiple ways to accomplish encryption in transit on AWS. Find out how to enable HTTPS connections between microservices on Amazon ECS and AWS Lambda via Amazon VPC Lattice, enforce end-to-end encryption in Amazon EKS, and use AWS Private Certificate Authority to issue TLS certificates for private applications. You must bring your laptop to participate.

If these sessions look interesting to you, join us in Philadelphia by registering for re:Inforce 2024. We look forward to seeing you there!

 
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 Senior 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.

How to set up SAML federation in Amazon Cognito using IdP-initiated single sign-on, request signing, and encrypted assertions

Post Syndicated from Vishal Jakharia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-set-up-saml-federation-in-amazon-cognito-using-idp-initiated-single-sign-on-request-signing-and-encrypted-assertions/

When an identity provider (IdP) serves multiple service providers (SPs), IdP-initiated single sign-on provides a consistent sign-in experience that allows users to start the authentication process from one centralized portal or dashboard. It helps administrators have more control over the authentication process and simplifies the management.

However, when you support IdP-initiated authentication, the SP (Amazon Cognito in this case) can’t verify that it has solicited the SAML response that it receives from IdP because there is no SAML request initiated from the SP. To accept unsolicited SAML assertions in your user pool, you must consider its effect on your app security. Although your user pool can’t verify an IdP-initiated sign-in session, Amazon Cognito validates your request parameters and SAML assertions.

Amazon Cognito has recently enhanced support for the SAML 2.0 protocol by adding support to IdP-initiated single sign-on (SSO), SAML request signing and accepting encrypted SAML responses.

Amazon Cognito acts as the SP representing your application and generates a token after federation that can be used by the application to access protected backends. The SAML provider acts as an IdP, where the user identities and credentials are stored, and is responsible for authenticating the user.

This post describes the steps to integrate a SAML IdP, Microsoft Entra ID, with an Amazon Cognito user pool and use SAML IdP-initiated SSO flow. It also describes steps to enable signing authentication requests and accepting encrypted SAML responses.

IdP-initiated authentication flow using SAML federation

Figure 1: High-level diagram for SAML IdP-initiated authentication flow in a web or mobile app

Figure 1: High-level diagram for SAML IdP-initiated authentication flow in a web or mobile app

As shown in Figure 1, the high-level flow diagram of an application with federated authentication typically involves the following steps:

  1. An enterprise user opens their SSO portal and signs in. This usually opens a portal with several applications that the user has access to. When the user selects an Amazon Cognito protected application from their SSO portal, an IdP-initiated SSO flow is initiated.
  2. When the user launches an application from the SSO portal, Entra ID sends a SAML assertion to the Cognito endpoint to federate the user.
  3. Amazon Cognito validates the SAML assertion and creates the user in Cognito if this is first-time federation for the user or updates the user’s record if user has signed in before from this IdP. Cognito then generates an authorization code and redirects the user to the application URL with this authorization code. The application exchanges the authorization code for tokens from the Cognito token endpoint.
  4. After the application has tokens, it uses them to authorize access within the application stack as needed.

The SAML response contains claims or assertions that contain user-specific data. The SAML response is transferred over HTTPS to protect confidentiality of the data, but you can also enable encryption to further protect the confidentiality of transferred user information. This enables trusted parties who have the decryption key to decrypt the data. It protects the confidentiality of the data after it’s received by the SP.

Setting up SAML federation between Amazon Cognito and Entra ID

To set up SAML federation and use IdP-initiated SSO, you will complete the following steps:

  1. Create an Amazon Cognito user pool.
  2. Create an app client in the Cognito user pool.
  3. Add Cognito as an enterprise application in Entra ID.
  4. Add Entra ID as the SAML IdP and enable IdP-initiated SSO in Cognito.
  5. Add the newly created SAML IdP to your user pool app client.
  6. Enable encrypting the SAML response.
  7. Add RelayState in Entra ID SAML SSO.

Prerequisites

To implement the solution, you must have the necessary permissions to perform these tasks in Azure portal and in your AWS account.

Step 1: Create an Amazon Cognito user pool

Create a new user pool in Amazon Cognito with the default settings. Make a note of the user pool ID, for example, us-east-1_abcd1234. You will need this value for the next steps.

Add a domain name to user pool

The Cognito user pool’s hosted UI can be used as the OAuth 2.0 authorization server with a customizable web interface for sign-up and sign-in. Cognito OAuth 2.0 endpoints are accessible from a domain name that must be added to the user pool. There are two options for adding a domain name to a user pool. You can either use a Cognito domain or a domain name that you own. This solution uses a Cognito domain, which will look like the following:

https://<yourDomainPrefix>.auth.<aws-region>.amazoncognito.com

To add a domain name to a user pool:

  1. In the AWS Management Console for Amazon Cognito, navigate to the App integration tab for your user pool.
  2. On the right side of the pane, choose Actions and select Create Cognito domain.

    Figure 2: Create a Cognito domain

    Figure 2: Create a Cognito domain

  3. Enter an available domain prefix (for example example-corp-prd) to use with the Cognito domain.

    Figure 3: Add a domain prefix

    Figure 3: Add a domain prefix

  4. Choose Create Cognito domain.

Step 2: Create an app client in the Cognito user pool

Before you can use Amazon Cognito in your web application, you must register your app with Amazon Cognito as an app client. The IdP-initiated SAML flow can’t be enabled on one app client with the other SP-initiated authentication SAML IdPs or social IdPs. IdP-initiated SAML introduces additional risks that other SSO providers aren’t subject to. For example, it’s not possible to add a state parameter, which is usually used for cross-site request forgery (CSRF) mitigation. Because of this, you can’t add IdPs that aren’t SAML, including the user pool itself, to an app client that uses a SAML provider with IdP-initiated SSO.

To create an app client:

  1. In the Amazon Cognito console, navigate to the App integration tab for the same user pool and locate App clients. Choose Create an app client.
  2. Select an Application type. For this example, create a public client.
  3. Enter an App client name.
  4. Choose Don’t generate client secret.
  5. Keep the rest of the settings as default.
  6. Under Hosted UI settings, add Allowed callback URLs for your app client. This is where you will be directed after authentication.
  7. Choose Authorization code grant for OAuth 2.0 grant types.
  8. You can keep the remaining configuration as default and choose Create app client.

After the app client is successfully created, capture the app client ID from the App integration tab of the user pool.

Prepare information for the Entra ID setup

Prepare the Identifier (Entity ID) and Reply URL, which are required to add Amazon Cognito as an enterprise application in Entra ID (Step 3).

Create values for Identifier (Entity ID) and Reply URL according to the following formats:

For Identifier (Entity ID), the format is:
urn:amazon:cognito:sp:<yourUserPoolID>

For example: urn:amazon:cognito:sp:us-east-1_abcd1234

For Reply URL, the format is:
https://<yourDomainPrefix>.auth.<aws-region>.amazoncognito.com/saml2/idpresponse

For example: https://example-corp-prd.auth.us-east-1.amazoncognito.com/saml2/idpresponse

The reply URL is the endpoint where Entra ID will send the SAML assertion to Amazon Cognito during user authentication.

For more information, see Adding SAML identity providers to a user pool.

Step 3: Add Amazon Cognito as an enterprise application in Entra ID

With the user pool and app client created and the information for Entra ID prepared, you can add Amazon Cognito as an application in Entra ID. To complete this step, you will add Cognito as an enterprise application and set up SSO.

To add Cognito as an enterprise application

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
  2. In the search box, search for the service Microsoft Entra ID.
  3. In the left sidebar, select Enterprise applications.
  4. Choose New application.
  5. On the Browse Microsoft Entra Gallery page, choose Create your own application.

    Figure 4: Create an application in Entra ID

    Figure 4: Create an application in Entra ID

  6. Under What’s the name of your app?, enter a name for your application and select Integrate any other application you don’t find in the gallery (Non-gallery), as shown in Figure 4. Choose Create.
  7. It will take few seconds for the application to be created in Entra ID, and then you should be redirected to the Overview page for the newly added application.

To set up SSO using SAML:

  1. On the Getting started page, in the Set up single sign on tile, choose Get started, as shown in Figure 5.

    Figure 5: Choose Set up single sign-on in Getting Started

    Figure 5: Choose Set up single sign-on in Getting Started

  2. On the next screen, select SAML.
  3. In the middle pane under Set up Single Sign-On with SAML, in the Basic SAML Configuration section, choose the edit icon.
  4. In the right pane under Basic SAML Configuration, replace the default Identifier ID (Entity ID) with the identifier (entity ID) you created in Step 2. Replace Reply URL (Assertion Consumer Service URL) with the reply URL you created in Step 2.

    Figure 6: Add the identifier (entity ID) and reply URL

    Figure 6: Add the identifier (entity ID) and reply URL

  5. Now go to Attributes & Claims and note the claims, as shown in Figure 7. You’ll need these when creating attribute mapping in Amazon Cognito.

    Figure 7: Entra ID Attributes & Claims

    Figure 7: Entra ID Attributes & Claims

  6. Scroll down to the SAML Certificates section and copy the App Federation Metadata Url by choosing the copy into clipboard icon. Make a note of this URL to use in the next step.

    Figure 8: Copy SAML metadata URL from Entra ID

    Figure 8: Copy SAML metadata URL from Entra ID

Step 4: Add Entra ID as SAML IdP in Amazon Cognito

In this step, you’ll add Entra ID as a SAML IdP to your user pool and download the signing and encryption certificates.

To add the SAML IdP:

  1. In the Amazon Cognito console, navigate to the Sign-in experience tab of the same user pool. Locate Federated identity provider sign-in and choose Add an Identity provider.
  2. Choose a SAML IdP.
  3. Enter a Provider name, for example, EntraID.
  4. Under IdP-initiated SAML sign-in, choose Accept SP-initiated and IdP-initiated SAML assertions.
  5. Under Metadata document source, enter the metadata document endpoint URL you captured in Step 3.
  6. (Optional) Under SAML signing and encryption, select Require encrypted SAML assertion from this provider.

    Enable Required encrypted SAML assertion from this provider only if you can turn on token encryption in the Entra ID application. See Step 6.

  7. Under Map attributes between your SAML provider and your user pool to map SAML provider attributes to the user profile in your user pool. Include your user pool required attributes in your attribute map.

    For example, when you choose User pool attribute email, enter the SAML attribute name as it appears in the SAML assertion from your IdP. In our case it will be http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/emailaddress.

    Figure 9: Enter the SAML attribute name

    Figure 9: Enter the SAML attribute name

  8. Choose Add identity provider.

After the IdP has been created, you can navigate to the recently added EntraID IdP in the user pool for downloading the SAML signing and encryption certificate. These certificates must be imported into the Entra ID enterprise application.

To download the certificates

  1. To download the SAML signing certificate, Choose View signing certificate and Download as .crt
  2. To download the SAML encryption certificate, Choose View encryption certificate and Download as .crt.

Step 5: Add the newly created SAML IdP to your user pool app client

Before you can use Amazon Cognito in your web application, you must add the SAML IdP created in Step 4 to your app client.

To add the SAML IdP:

  1. In the Amazon Cognito console, navigate to the App integration tab for the same user pool and locate App clients.
  2. Choose the app client you created in Step 2.
  3. Locate the Hosted UI section and choose Edit.
  4. Under Identity providers, select the identity provider you created in Step 4 and choose Save changes.

    Figure 10: Enabling the Entra ID SAML identity provider in the Cognito app client

    Figure 10: Enabling the Entra ID SAML identity provider in the Cognito app client

At this stage, the Amazon Cognito OAuth 2.0 server is up and running and the web interface is accessible and ready to use. You can access the Cognito hosted UI from your app client using the Cognito console to test it further.

Step 6: Enable encrypting the SAML response in EntraID

For additional security and privacy of user data, enable encrypting the SAML response. Amazon Cognito and your IdP can establish confidentiality in SAML responses when users sign in and sign out. Cognito assigns a public-private RSA key pair and a certificate to each external SAML provider that you configure in your user pool. You will use the SAML encryption certificate downloaded in step 4.

To enable encrypting the SAML response:

  1. Navigate to your Enterprise application in Entra ID and in the left menu, under Security, select Token encryption.
  2. Import the SAML encryption certificate you have already downloaded in step 4.

    Figure 11: Import the Cognito encryption certificate to Entra ID

    Figure 11: Import the Cognito encryption certificate to Entra ID

  3. After the certificate is imported, it’s inactive by default. To activate it, right-click on the certificate and select Activate token encryption certificate. This enables the encrypted SAML response.

    Figure 12: Activate the token encryption certificate in Entra ID

    Figure 12: Activate the token encryption certificate in Entra ID

Step 7: Add RelayState in Entra ID SAML SSO

A RelayState parameter is required when using SAML IdP-initiated authentication flow. Set this up in Entra ID for the Amazon Cognito user pool and the enabled app client ID.

To add RelayState in Entra ID SAML SSO:

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal and open the enterprise application created in Step 3.
  2. In the left sidebar, choose Single sign-on.
  3. In the middle pane under Set up Single Sign-On with SAML, in the Basic SAML Configuration section, choose the edit icon.
  4. In the right pane under Basic SAML Configuration, apply the value as the format below to the Relay State (Optional) field.
    identity_provider=<IDProviderName>&client_id=<ClientId>&redirect_uri=<callbackURL>&response_type=code&scope=openid+email+phone

    1. Replace <IDProviderName> with the name you previously used for ID provider.
    2. Replace <ClientId> with the app client’s ClientID created in Step 2.
    3. Replace <ecallbackURL> with the URL of your web application that will receive the authorization code. It must be an HTTPS endpoint, except for in a local development environment where you can use http://localhost:PORT_NUMBER.

    For example:

    identity_provider=EntraID&client_id=abcd1234567&redirect_uri=https://example.com&response_type=code&scope=openid+email+phone

    Figure 13: Set RelayState in Entra ID single sign-on

    Figure 13: Set RelayState in Entra ID single sign-on

Test the IdP-initiated flow

Next, do a quick test to check if everything is configured properly.

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal and open the Enterprise application created in Step 3.
  2. In the left sidebar, choose Users and groups.
  3. On the right side, choose Add user/group. This will show the Add Assignment page.
  4. From the left side of the page, choose None Selected .
  5. Select a user from the right of the screen and follow the prompt to assign the user for this application.
  6. Once the user is assigned successfully, open https://www.microsoft365.com/apps and sign in as the assigned user.
  7. After you are signed in, choose the application icon registered as the IdP-initiated SSO.

    Figure 14: Testing IdP-initiated SSO from an Office 365 application

    Figure 14: Testing IdP-initiated SSO from an Office 365 application

  8. The application will start the IdP-initiated authentication flow and the user will be redirected to the application as a signed-in user.

Signing an authentication request in case of SP-initiated flow

The preceding authentication flow that you tested uses IdP-initiated SSO. If you’re using an SP-initiated flow, you can enable signing of the SAML request that is sent from the SP (Amazon Cognito) to the IdP (Entra ID) for additional security and integrity of communication between them.

You can enable the authentication request signing in Cognito while creating the IdP or by updating your existing IdP.

To enable signing of the SAML request:

  1. In the Amazon Cognito console, when you create or edit your SAML identity provider, under SAML signing and encryption, select the box Sign SAML requests to this provider and choose Save changes.

    Figure 15: Enabling signing SAML request

    Figure 15: Enabling signing SAML request

  2. Sign in to the Azure portal and access your Entra ID enterprise application. Go to Set up single sign on and edit Verification certificates (optional).
  3. Select the checkbox Require verification certificates and upload the Cognito user pool SAML signing certificate already downloaded in Step 4 with a .cer file extension. You must convert the .crt file to a .cer file because Entra ID requires a verification certificate in a .cer extension.

To convert the .crt certificate extension to .cer:

  1. Right-click the .crt file and choose Open.
  2. Navigate to the Details tab.
  3. Select Copy to File… and choose Next.
  4. Select Base-64 encoded X.509 (.CER) and choose Next.
  5. Give your export file a name (for example, Entra ID.cer) and choose Save.
  6. Choose Next.
  7. Confirm the details and choose Finish.

Test the SP-initiated flow

Next, do a quick test to check if everything is configured properly.

  1. In the Amazon Cognito console, navigate to the App integration tab for the same user pool and locate App clients.
  2. Choose the app client you created in Step 2.
  3. Locate the Hosted UI section and choose View Hosted UI.
  4. From the hosted UI, authenticate yourself using Entra ID as the identity provider.
  5. After authentication is completed successfully, you will be redirected to the callback URL you configured in your app client with the authorization code.

If you capture the SAML request, you will see that Amazon Cognito is sending a cryptographic signature with the signing certificate in the SAML request to the IdP, and the IdP will match the cryptographic signature with the uploaded certificate to ensure the integrity of the request.

Conclusion

In this post, you learned the benefits of using IdP-initiated single sign-on. It helps centralize administration and lowers dependency on service provider applications. Also, you learned how to integrate an Amazon Cognito user pool with Microsoft Entra ID as an external SAML IdP using IdP-initiated SSO so your users can use their corporate ID to sign in to web or mobile applications. Also, you learned about how to enable signed authentication requests when using an SP-initiated flow and encrypting SAML responses for additional security between Cognito and the SAML IdP.

 
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Vishal Jakharia

Vishal Jakharia

Vishal is a cloud support engineer based in New Jersey, USA. He is an Amazon Cognito subject matter expert who loves to work with customers and provide them solutions for implementing authentication and authorization. He helps customers migrate and build secure scalable architecture on the AWS Cloud.

Yungang Wu

Yungang Wu

Yungang is a senior cloud support engineer who specializes in the Amazon Cognito service. He helps AWS customers troubleshoot issues and suggests well-designed application authentication and authorization implementations.

AWS plans to invest €7.8B into the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, set to launch by the end of 2025

Post Syndicated from Max Peterson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-plans-to-invest-e7-8b-into-the-aws-european-sovereign-cloud-set-to-launch-by-the-end-of-2025/

English | German

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to believe it’s essential that our customers have control over their data and choices for how they secure and manage that data in the cloud. AWS gives customers the flexibility to choose how and where they want to run their workloads, including a proven track record of innovation to support specialized workloads around the world. While many customers are able to meet their stringent security, sovereignty, and privacy requirements using our existing sovereign-by-design AWS Regions, we know there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. AWS continues to innovate based on the criteria we know are most important to our customers to give them more choice and more control. Last year we announced the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a new independent cloud for Europe, designed to give public sector organizations and customers in highly regulated industries further choice to meet their unique sovereignty needs. Today, we’re excited to share more details about the AWS European Sovereign Cloud roadmap so that customers and partners can start planning. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is planning to launch its first AWS Region in the State of Brandenburg, Germany by the end of 2025. Available to all AWS customers, this effort is backed by a €7.8B investment in infrastructure, jobs creation, and skills development.

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will utilize the full power of AWS with the same familiar architecture, expansive service portfolio, and APIs that customers use today. This means that customers using the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will get the benefits of AWS infrastructure including industry-leading security, availability, performance, and resilience. We offer a broad set of services, including a full suite of databases, compute, storage, analytics, machine learning and AI, networking, mobile, developer tools, IoT, security, and enterprise applications. Today, customers can start building applications in any existing Region and simply move them to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud when the first Region launches in 2025. Partners in the AWS Partner Network, which features more than 130,000 partners, already provide a range of offerings in our existing AWS Regions to help customers meet requirements and will now be able to seamlessly deploy applications on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

More control, more choice

Like our existing Regions, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be powered by the AWS Nitro System. The Nitro System is an unparalleled computing backbone for AWS, with security and performance at its core. Its specialized hardware and associated firmware are designed to enforce restrictions so that nobody, including anyone in AWS, can access customer workloads or data running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Nitro based instances. The design of the Nitro System has been validated by the NCC Group, an independent cybersecurity firm. The controls that help prevent operator access are so fundamental to the Nitro System that we’ve added them in our AWS Service Terms to provide an additional contractual assurance to all of our customers.

To date, we have launched 33 Regions around the globe with our secure and sovereign-by-design approach. Customers come to AWS because they want to migrate to and build on a secure cloud foundation. Customers who need to comply with European data residency requirements have the choice to deploy their data to any of our eight existing Regions in Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm, Milan, Zurich, and Spain) to keep their data securely in Europe.

For customers who need to meet additional stringent operational autonomy and data residency requirements within the European Union (EU), the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be available as another option, with infrastructure wholly located within the EU and operated independently from existing Regions. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will allow customers to keep all customer data and the metadata they create (such as the roles, permissions, resource labels, and configurations they use to run AWS) in the EU. Customers who need options to address stringent isolation and in-country data residency needs will be able to use AWS Dedicated Local Zones or AWS Outposts to deploy AWS European Sovereign Cloud infrastructure in locations they select. We continue to work with our customers and partners to shape the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, applying learnings from our engagements with European regulators and national cybersecurity authorities.

Continued investment in Europe

Over the last 25 years, we’ve driven economic development through our investment in infrastructure, jobs, and skills in communities and countries across Europe. Since 2010, Amazon has invested more than €150 billion in the EU, and we’re proud to employ more than 150,000 people in permanent roles across the European Single Market.

AWS now plans to invest €7.8 billion in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud by 2040, building on our long-term commitment to Europe and ongoing support of the region’s sovereignty needs. This long-term investment is expected to lead to a ripple effect in the local cloud community through accelerating productivity gains, empowering the digital transformation of businesses, empowering the AWS Partner Network (APN), upskilling the cloud and digital workforce, developing renewable energy projects, and creating a positive impact in the communities where AWS operates. In total, the AWS planned investment is estimated to contribute €17.2 billion to Germany’s total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) through 2040, and support an average 2,800 full-time equivalent jobs in local German businesses each year. These positions, including construction, facility maintenance, engineering, telecommunications, and other jobs within the broader local economy, are part of the AWS data center supply chain.

In addition, AWS is also creating new highly skilled permanent roles to build and operate the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. These jobs will include software engineers, systems developers, and solutions architects. This is part of our commitment that all day-to-day operations of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be controlled exclusively by personnel located in the EU, including access to data centers, technical support, and customer service.

In Germany, we also collaborate with local communities on long-term, innovative programs that will have a lasting impact in the areas where our infrastructure is located. This includes developing cloud workforce and education initiatives for learners of all ages, helping to solve for the skills gap and prepare for the tech jobs of the future. For example, last year AWS partnered with Siemens AG to design the first apprenticeship program for AWS data centers in Germany, launched the first national cloud computing certification with the German Chamber of Commerce (DIHK), and established the AWS Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance in Germany. We will work closely with local partners to roll out these skills programs and make sure they are tailored to regional needs.

“High performing, reliable, and secure infrastructure is the most important prerequisite for an increasingly digitalized economy and society. Brandenburg is making progress here. In recent years, we have set on a course to invest in modern and sustainable data center infrastructure in our state, strengthening Brandenburg as a business location. State-of-the-art data centers for secure cloud computing are the basis for a strong digital economy. I am pleased Amazon Web Services (AWS) has chosen Brandenburg for a long-term investment in its cloud computing infrastructure for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.”

Brandenburg’s Minister of Economic Affairs, Prof. Dr. Jörg Steinbach

Build confidently with AWS

For customers that are early in their cloud adoption journey and are considering the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, we provide a wide range of resources to help adopt the cloud effectively. From lifting and shifting workloads to migrating entire data centers, customers get the organizational, operational, and technical capabilities needed for a successful migration to AWS. For example, we offer the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) to provide best practices for organizations to develop an efficient and effective plan for cloud adoption, and AWS Migration Hub to help assess migration needs, define migration and modernization strategy, and leverage automation. We frequently host AWS events, webinars, and workshops focused on cloud adoption and migration strategies, where customers can learn from AWS experts and connect with other customers and partners.

We’re committed to giving customers more control and more choice to help meet their unique digital sovereignty needs, without compromising on the full power of AWS. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is a testament to this. To help customers and partners continue to plan and build, we will share additional updates as we drive towards launch. You can discover more about the AWS European Sovereign Cloud on our European Digital Sovereignty website.

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

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German version

AWS European Sovereign Cloud bis Ende 2025: AWS plant Investitionen in Höhe von 7,8 Milliarden Euro

Amazon Web Services (AWS) ist davon überzeugt, dass es für Kunden von essentieller Bedeutung ist, die Kontrolle über ihre Daten und Auswahlmöglichkeiten zu haben, wie sie diese Daten in der Cloud sichern und verwalten. Daher können Kunden flexibel wählen, wie und wo sie ihre Workloads ausführen. Dazu gehört auch eine langjährige Erfolgsbilanz von Innovationen zur Unterstützung spezialisierter Workloads auf der ganzen Welt. Viele Kunden können bereits ihre strengen Sicherheits-, Souveränitäts- und Datenschutzanforderungen mit unseren AWS-Regionen unter dem „sovereign-by-design“-Ansatz erfüllen. Aber wir wissen ebenso: Es gibt keine Einheitslösung für alle. Daher arbeitet AWS kontinuierlich an Innovationen, die auf jenen Kriterien basieren, die für unsere Kunden am wichtigsten sind und ihnen mehr Auswahl sowie Kontrolle bieten. Vor diesem Hintergrund haben wir letztes Jahr die AWS European Sovereign Cloud angekündigt. Mit ihr entsteht eine neue, unabhängige Cloud für Europa. Sie soll Organisationen des öffentlichen Sektors und Kunden in stark regulierten Branchen dabei helfen, die sich wandelnden Anforderungen an die digitale Souveränität zu erfüllen.

Heute freuen wir uns, dass wir weitere Details über die Roadmap der AWS European Sovereign Cloud bekanntgeben können. So können unsere Kunden und Partner mit ihren weiteren Planungen beginnen. Der Start der ersten Region der AWS European Sovereign Cloud ist in Brandenburg bis zum Jahresende 2025 geplant. Dieses Angebot steht allen AWS-Kunden zur Verfügung und wird von einer Investition in Höhe von 7,8 Milliarden Euro in die Infrastruktur, Arbeitsplatzschaffung und Kompetenzentwicklung unterstützt.

Die AWS European Cloud in Brandenburg bietet die volle Leistungsfähigkeit, mit der bekannten Architektur, dem umfangreichen Angebot an Services und denselben APIs, die Millionen von Kunden bereits kennen. Das bedeutet: Kunden der AWS European Sovereign Cloud profitieren somit bei voller Unabhängigkeit von den bekannten Vorteilen der AWS-Infrastruktur, einschließlich der branchenführenden Sicherheit, Verfügbarkeit, Leistung und Resilienz.

AWS-Kunden haben Zugriff auf ein breites Spektrum an Services – darunter ein umfangreiches Angebot bestehend aus Datenbanken, Datenverarbeitung, Datenspeicherung, Analytics, maschinellem Lernen (ML) und künstlicher Intelligenz (KI), Netzwerken, mobilen Applikationen, Entwickler-Tools, Internet of Things (IoT), Sicherheit und Unternehmensanwendungen. Bereits heute können Kunden Anwendungen in jeder bestehenden Region entwickeln und diese einfach in die AWS European Sovereign Cloud auslagern, sobald die erste AWS-Region 2025 startet. Die Partner im AWS-Partnernetzwerks (APN), das mehr als 130.000 Partner umfasst, bietet bereits eine Reihe von Angeboten in den bestehenden AWS-Regionen an. Dadurch unterstützen sie Kunden dabei, ihre Anforderungen zu erfüllen und Anwendungen einfach in der AWS European Sovereign Cloud bereitzustellen.

Mehr Kontrolle, größere Auswahl

Die AWS European Sovereign Cloud nutzt wie auch unsere bestehenden Regionen das AWS Nitro System. Dabei handelt es sich um einen Computing-Backbone für AWS, bei dem Sicherheit und Leistung im Mittelpunkt stehen. Die spezialisierte Hardware und zugehörige Firmware sind so konzipiert, dass strikte Beschränkungen gelten und niemand, auch nicht AWS selbst, auf die Workloads oder Daten von Kunden zugreifen kann, die auf Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Nitro-basierten Instanzen laufen. Dieses Design wurde von der NCC Group validiert, einem unabhängigen Unternehmen für Cybersicherheit. Die Kontrollen, die den Zugriff durch Betreiber verhindern, sind grundlegend für das Nitro System. Daher haben wir sie in unsere AWS Service Terms aufgenommen, um allen unseren Kunden diese zusätzliche vertragliche Zusicherung zu geben.

Bis heute haben wir 33 Regionen rund um den Globus mit unserem sicheren und „sovereign-by-design“-Ansatz gestartet. Unsere Kunden nutzen AWS, weil sie auf einer sicheren Cloud-Umgebung migrieren und aufbauen möchten. Für Kunden, die europäische Anforderungen an den Ort der Datenverarbeitung erfüllen müssen, bietet AWS die Möglichkeit, ihre Daten in einer unserer acht bestehenden Regionen in Europa zu verarbeiten: Irland, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm, Mailand, Zürich und Spanien. So können sie ihre Daten sicher innerhalb Europas halten.

Müssen Kunden zusätzliche Anforderungen an die betriebliche Autonomie und den Ort der Datenverarbeitung innerhalb der Europäischen Union erfüllen, steht die AWS European Sovereign Cloud als weitere Option zur Verfügung. Die Infrastruktur hierfür ist vollständig in der EU angesiedelt und wird unabhängig von den bestehenden Regionen betrieben. Sie ermöglicht es AWS-Kunden, ihre Kundeninhalte und von ihnen erstellten Metadaten in der EU zu behalten – etwa Rollen, Berechtigungen, Ressourcenbezeichnungen und Konfigurationen für den Betrieb von AWS.

Sollten Kunden weitere Optionen benötigen, um eine Isolierung zu ermöglichen und strenge Anforderungen an den Ort der Datenverarbeitung in einem bestimmten Land zu erfüllen, können sie auf AWS Dedicated Local Zones oder AWS Outposts zurückgreifen. Auf diese Weise können sie die Infrastruktur der AWS European Sovereign Cloud am Ort ihrer Wahl einsetzen. Wir arbeiten mit unseren Kunden und Partnern kontinuierlich daran, die AWS European Sovereign Cloud so zu gestalten, dass sie den benötigten Anforderungen entspricht. Dabei nutzen wir auch Feedback aus unseren Gesprächen mit europäischen Regulierungsbehörden und nationalen Cybersicherheitsbehörden.

„Eine funktionierende, verlässliche und sichere Infrastruktur ist die wichtigste Vorrausetzung für eine zunehmend digitalisierte Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Brandenburg schreitet hier voran. Wir haben in den vergangenen Jahren entscheidende Weichen gestellt, um Investitionen in eine moderne und nachhaltige Rechenzentruminfrastruktur in unserem Land auszubauen und so den Wirtschaftsstandort Brandenburg zu stärken. Hochmoderne Rechenzentren für sicheres Cloud-Computing sind die Basis für eine digitale Wirtschaft. Für unsere digitale Souveränität ist es wichtig, dass Rechenleistungen vor Ort in Deutschland erbracht werden. Ich freue mich, dass Amazon Web Services Brandenburg für ein langfristiges Investment in ihre Cloud-Computing-Infrastruktur für die AWS European Sovereign Cloud ausgewählt hat.“

sagt Brandenburgs Wirtschaftsminister Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jörg Steinbach

Kontinuierliche Investitionen in Europa

Im Laufe der vergangenen 25 Jahre haben wir die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung in europäischen Ländern und Gemeinden vorangetrieben und in Infrastruktur, Arbeitsplätze sowie den Ausbau von Kompetenzen investiert. Seit 2010 hat Amazon über 150 Milliarden Euro in der Europäischen Union investiert und wir sind stolz darauf, im gesamten europäischen Binnenmarkt mehr als 150.000 Menschen in Festanstellung zu beschäftigen.

AWS plant bis zum Jahr 2040 7,8 Milliarden Euro in die AWS European Sovereign Cloud zu investieren. Diese Investition ist Teil der langfristigen Bestrebungen von AWS, das europäische Bedürfnis nach digitaler Souveränität zu unterstützen. Mit dieser langfristigen Investition löst AWS einen Multiplikatoreffekt für Cloud-Computing in Europa aus. Sie wird die digitale Transformation der Verwaltung und von Unternehmen vorantreiben, das AWS Partner Network (APN) stärken, die Zahl der Cloud- und Digitalfachkräfte erhöhen, erneuerbare Energieprojekte vorantreiben und eine positive Wirkung in den Gemeinden erzielen, in denen AWS präsent ist. Insgesamt wird die geplante AWS-Investition bis 2040 voraussichtlich 17,2 Milliarden Euro zum deutschen Bruttoinlandsprodukt und zur Schaffung von 2.800 Vollzeitstellen bei regionalen Unternehmen beitragen. Diese Arbeitsplätze in den Bereichen Bau, Instandhaltung, Ingenieurwesen, Telekommunikation und der breiteren regionalen Wirtschaft sind Teil der Lieferkette für AWS-Rechenzentren.

Darüber hinaus wird AWS neue Stellen für hochqualifizierte festangestellte Fachkräfte wie Softwareentwickler, Systemingenieure und Lösungsarchitekten schaffen, um die AWS European Sovereign Cloud aufzubauen und zu betreiben. Die Investition in zusätzliches Personal unterstreicht unser Commitment, dass der gesamte Betrieb dieser souveränen Cloud-Umgebung – angefangen bei der Zugangskontrolle zu den Rechenzentren über den technischen Support bis hin zum Kundendienst – ausnahmslos durch Fachkräfte innerhalb der Europäischen Union kontrolliert und gesteuert wird.

In Deutschland arbeitet AWS mit den Beteiligten vor Ort auch an langfristigen und innovativen Programmen zusammen. Diese sollen einen nachhaltigen positiven Einfluss auf die Gemeinden haben, in denen sich die Infrastruktur des Unternehmens befindet. AWS konzentriert sich auf die Entwicklung von Cloud-Fachkräften und Schulungsinitiativen für Lernende aller Altersgruppen. Diese Maßnahmen tragen dazu bei, den Fachkräftemangel zu beheben und sich auf die technischen Berufe der Zukunft vorzubereiten. Im vergangenen Jahr hat AWS beispielsweise gemeinsam mit der Siemens AG das erste Ausbildungsprogramm für AWS-Rechenzentren in Deutschland entwickelt. Ebenso hat das Unternehmen in Kooperation mit dem Deutschen Industrie und Handelstag (DIHK) den bundeseinheitlichen Zertifikatslehrgang zum „Cloud Business Expert“ entwickelt sowie die AWS Skills to Jobs Tech Alliance in Deutschland ins Leben gerufen. AWS wird gemeinsam mit lokalen Partnern daran arbeiten, Ausbildungsprogramme und Fortbildungen anzubieten, die auf die Bedürfnisse vor Ort zugeschnitten sind.

Vertrauensvoll bauen mit AWS

Für Kunden, die sich noch am Anfang ihrer Cloud-Reise befinden und die AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Betracht ziehen, bieten wir eine Vielzahl von Ressourcen an, um den Wechsel in die Cloud effektiv zu gestalten. Egal ob einzelne Workloads verlagert oder ganze Rechenzentren migriert werden sollen – Kunden erhalten von uns die nötigen organisatorischen, operativen und technischen Fähigkeiten für eine erfolgreiche Migration zu AWS. Beispielsweise bieten wir das AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) an, das Unternehmen bei der Entwicklung eines effizienten und effektiven Cloud-Adoptionsplans mit Best Practices unterstützt. Auch der AWS Migration Hub hilft bei der Bewertung des Migrationsbedarfs, der Definition der Migrations- und Modernisierungsstrategie und der Nutzung von Automatisierung. Darüber hinaus veranstalten wir regelmäßig AWS-Events, Webinare und Workshops rund um die Themen Cloud-Adoption und Migrationsstrategie. Dabei können Kunden von AWS-Experten lernen und sich mit anderen Kunden und Partnern vernetzen.

Wir sind bestrebt, unseren Kunden mehr Kontrolle und weitere Optionen anzubieten, damit diese ihre ganz individuellen Anforderungen an die digitale Souveränität erfüllen können, ohne dabei auf die volle Leistungsfähigkeit von AWS verzichten zu müssen.

Um Kunden und Partnern bei der weiteren Planung und Entwicklung zu unterstützen, werden wir laufend zusätzliche Updates bereitstellen, während wir auf den Start der AWS European Sovereign Cloud hinarbeiten. Mehr über die AWS European Sovereign Cloud erfahren Sie auf unserer Website zur European Digital Sovereignty.

 

Max Peterson

Max Peterson

Max is the Vice President of AWS Sovereign Cloud. He leads efforts to ensure that all AWS customers around the world have the most advanced set of sovereignty controls, privacy safeguards, and security features available in the cloud. Before his current role, Max served as the VP of AWS Worldwide Public Sector (WWPS) and created and led the WWPS International Sales division, with a focus on empowering government, education, healthcare, aerospace and satellite, and nonprofit organizations to drive rapid innovation while meeting evolving compliance, security, and policy requirements. Max has over 30 years of public sector experience and served in other technology leadership roles before joining Amazon. Max has earned both a Bachelor of Arts in Finance and Master of Business Administration in Management Information Systems from the University of Maryland.

Investigating lateral movements with Amazon Detective investigation and Security Lake integration

Post Syndicated from Yue Zhu original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/investigating-lateral-movements-with-amazon-detective-investigation-and-security-lake-integration/

According to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, lateral movement consists of techniques that threat actors use to enter and control remote systems on a network. In Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments, threat actors equipped with illegitimately obtained credentials could potentially use APIs to interact with infrastructures and services directly, and they might even be able to use APIs to evade defenses and gain direct access to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. To help customers secure their AWS environments, AWS offers several security services, such as Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service that monitors for malicious activity and anomalous behavior, and Amazon Detective, an investigation service that helps you investigate, and respond to, security events in your AWS environment.

After the service is turned on, Amazon Detective automatically collects logs from your AWS environment to help you analyze and investigate security events in-depth. At re:Invent 2023, Detective released Detective Investigations, a one-click investigation feature that automatically investigates AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles for indicators of compromise (IoC), and Security Lake integration, which enables customers to retrieve log data from Amazon Security Lake to use as original evidence for deeper analysis with access to more detailed parameters.

In this post, you will learn about the use cases behind these features, how to run an investigation using the Detective Investigation feature, and how to interpret the contents of investigation reports. In addition, you will also learn how to use the Security Lake integration to retrieve raw logs to get more details of the impacted resources.

Triage a suspicious activity

As a security analyst, one of the common workflows in your daily job is to respond to suspicious activities raised by security event detection systems. The process might start when you get a ticket about a GuardDuty finding in your daily operations queue, alerting you that suspicious or malicious activity has been detected in your environment. To view more details of the finding, one of the options is to use the GuardDuty console.

In the GuardDuty console, you will find more details about the finding, such as the account and AWS resources that are in scope, the activity that caused the finding, the IP address that caused the finding and information about its possible geographic location, and times of the first and last occurrences of the event. To triage the finding, you might need more information to help you determine if it is a false positive.

Every GuardDuty finding has a link labeled Investigate with Detective in the details pane. This link allows you to pivot to the Detective console based on aspects of the finding you are investigating to their respective entity profiles. The finding Recon:IAMUser/MaliciousIPCaller.Custom that’s shown in Figure 1 results from an API call made by an IP address that’s on the custom threat list, and GuardDuty observed it made API calls that were commonly used in reconnaissance activity, which commonly occurs prior to attempts at compromise. To investigate this finding, because it involves an IAM role, you can select the Role session link and it will take you to the role session’s profile in the Detective console.

Figure 1: Example finding in the GuardDuty console, with Investigate with Detective pop-up window

Figure 1: Example finding in the GuardDuty console, with Investigate with Detective pop-up window

Within the AWS Role session profile page, you will find security findings from GuardDuty and AWS Security Hub that are associated with the AWS role session, API calls the AWS role session made, and most importantly, new behaviors. Behaviors that deviate from expectations can be used as indicators of compromises to give you more information to determine if the AWS resource might be compromised. Detective highlights new behaviors first observed during the scope time of the events related to the finding that weren’t observed during the Detective baseline time window of 45 days.

If you switch to the New behavior tab within the AWS role session profile, you will find the Newly observed geolocations panel (Figure 2). This panel highlights geolocations of IP addresses where API calls were made from that weren’t observed in the baseline profile. Detective determines the location of requests using MaxMind GeoIP databases based on the IP address that was used to issue requests.

Figure 2: Detective’s Newly observed geolocations panel

Figure 2: Detective’s Newly observed geolocations panel

If you choose Details on the right side of each row, the row will expand and provide details of the API calls made from the same locations from different AWS resources, and you can drill down and get to the API calls made by the AWS resource from a specific geolocation (Figure 3). When analyzing these newly observed geolocations, a question you might consider is why this specific AWS role session made API calls from Bellevue, US. You’re pretty sure that your company doesn’t have a satellite office there, nor do your coworkers who have access to this role work from there. You also reviewed the AWS CloudTrail management events of this AWS role session, and you found some unusual API calls for services such as IAM.

Figure 3: Detective’s Newly observed geolocations panel expanded on details

Figure 3: Detective’s Newly observed geolocations panel expanded on details

You decide that you need to investigate further, because this role session’s anomalous behavior from a new geolocation is sufficiently unexpected, and it made unusual API calls that you would like to know the purpose of. You want to gather anomalous behaviors and high-risk API methods that can be used by threat actors to make impacts. Because you’re investigating an AWS role session rather than investigating a single role session, you decide you want to know what happened in other role sessions associated with the AWS role in case threat actors spread their activities across multiple sessions. To help you examine multiple role sessions automatically with additional analytics and threat intelligence, Detective introduced the Detective Investigation feature at re:Invent 2023.

Run an IAM investigation

Amazon Detective Investigation uses machine learning (ML) models and AWS threat intelligence to automatically analyze resources in your AWS environment to identify potential security events. It identifies tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used in a potential security event. The MITRE ATT&CK framework is used to classify the TTPs. You can use this feature to help you speed up the investigation and identify indicators of compromise and other TTPs quickly.

To continue with your investigation, you should investigate the role and its usage history as a whole to cover all involved role sessions at once. This addresses the potential case where threat actors assumed the same role under different session names. In the AWS role session profile page that’s shown in Figure 4, you can quickly identify and pivot to the corresponding AWS role profile page under the Assumed role field.

Figure 4: Detective’s AWS role session profile page

Figure 4: Detective’s AWS role session profile page

After you pivot to the AWS role profile page (Figure 5), you can run the automated investigations by choosing Run investigation.

Figure 5: Role profile page, from which an investigation can be run

Figure 5: Role profile page, from which an investigation can be run

The first thing to do in a new investigation is to choose the time scope you want to run the investigation for. Then, choose Confirm (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Setting investigation scope time

Figure 6: Setting investigation scope time

Next, you will be directed to the Investigations page (Figure 7), where you will be able to see the status of your investigation. Once the investigation is done, you can choose the hyperlinked investigation ID to access the investigation report.

Figure 7: Investigations page, with new report

Figure 7: Investigations page, with new report

Another way to run an investigation is to choose Investigations on the left menu panel in the Detective console, and then choose Run investigation. You will then be taken to the page where you will specify the AWS role Amazon Resource Number (ARN) you’re investigating, and the scope time (Figure 8). Then you can choose Run investigation to commence an investigation.

Figure 8: Configuring a new investigation from scratch rather than from an existing finding

Figure 8: Configuring a new investigation from scratch rather than from an existing finding

Detective also offers StartInvestigation and GetInvestigation APIs for running Detective Investigations and retrieving investigation reports programmatically.

Interpret the investigation report

The investigation report (Figure 9) includes information on anomalous behaviors, potential TTP mappings of observed CloudTrail events, and indicators of compromises of the resource (in this example, an IAM principal) that was investigated.

At the top of the report, you will find a severity level computed based on the observed behaviors during the scope window, as well as a summary statement to give you a quick understanding of what was found. In Figure 9, the AWS role that was investigated engaged in the following unusual behaviors:

  • Seven tactics showing that the API calls made by this AWS role were mapped to seven tactics of the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
  • Eleven cases of impossible travel representing API calls made from two geolocations that are too far apart for the same user to have physically travelled between them to make the calls from both, within the time span involved.
  • Zero flagged IP addresses. Detective would flag IP addresses that are considered suspicious according to its threat intelligence sources.
  • Two new Autonomous System Organizations (ASOs) which are entities with assigned Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) as used in Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing.
  • Nine new user agents were used to make API calls that weren’t observed in the 45 days prior to the events being investigated.

These indicators of compromise represent unusual behaviors that have either not been observed before in the AWS account involved or that are intrinsically considered high risk. The following summary panel includes the report that shows a detailed breakdown of the investigation results.

Unusual activities are important factors that you should look for during investigations, and sudden behavior change can be a sign of compromise. When you’re investigating an AWS role that can be assumed by different users from different AWS Regions, you are likely to need to examine activity at the granularity of the specific AWS role session that made the APIs calls. Within the report, you can do this by choosing the hyperlinked role name in the summary panel, and it will take you to the AWS role profile page.

Figure 9: Investigation report summary page

Figure 9: Investigation report summary page

Further down on the investigation report is the TTP Mapping from CloudTrail Management Events panel. Detective Investigations maps CloudTrail events to the MITRE ATT&CK framework to help you understand how an API can be used by threat actors. For each mapped API, you can see the tactics, techniques, and procedures it can be used for. In Figure 10, at the top there is a summary of TTPs with different severity levels. At the bottom is a breakdown of potential TTP mappings of observed CloudTrail management events during the investigation scope time.

When you select one of the cards, a side panel appears on the right to give you more details about the APIs. It includes information such as the IP address that made the API call, the details of the TTP the API call was mapped to, and if the API call succeeded or failed. This information can help you understand how these APIs can potentially be used by threat actors to modify your environment, and whether or not the API call succeeded tells you if it might have affected the security of your AWS resources. In the example that’s shown in Figure 10, the IAM role successfully made API calls that are mapped to Lateral Movement in the ATT&CK framework.

Figure 10: Investigation report page with event ATT CK mapping

Figure 10: Investigation report page with event ATT CK mapping

The report also includes additional indicators of compromise (Figure 11). You can find these if you select the Indicators tab next to Overview. Within this tab, you can find the indicators identified during the scope time, and if you select one indicator, details for that indicator will appear on the right. In the example in Figure 11, the IAM role made API calls with a user agent that wasn’t used by this IAM role or other IAM principals in this account, and indicators like this one show sudden behavior change of your IAM principal. You should review them and identify the ones that aren’t expected. To learn more about indicators of compromise in Detective Investigation, see the Amazon Detective User Guide.

Figure 11: Indicators of compromise identified during scope time

Figure 11: Indicators of compromise identified during scope time

At this point, you’ve analyzed the new and unusual behaviors the IAM role made and learned that the IAM role made API calls using new user agents and from new ASOs. In addition, you went through the API calls that were mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Among the TTPs, there were three API calls that are classified as lateral movements. These should attract attention for the following reasons: first, the purpose of these API calls is to gain access to the EC2 instance involved; and second, ec2-instance-connect:SendSSHPublicKey was run successfully.

Based on the procedure description in the report, this API would grant threat actors temporary SSH access to the target EC2 instance. To gather original evidence, examine the raw logs stored in Security Lake. Security Lake is a fully managed security data lake service that automatically centralizes security data from AWS environments, SaaS providers, on-premises sources, and other sources into a purpose-built data lake stored in your account.

Retrieve raw logs

You can use Security Lake integration to retrieve raw logs from your Security Lake tables within the Detective console as original evidence. If you haven’t enabled the integration yet, you can follow the Integration with Amazon Security Lake guide to enable it. In the context of the example investigation earlier, these logs include details of which EC2 instance was associated with the ec2-instance-connect:SendSSHPublicKey API call. Within the AWS role profile page investigated earlier, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will find the Overall API call volume panel (Figure 12). You can search for the specific API call using the Service and API method filters. Next, choose the magnifier icon, which will initiate a Security Lake query to retrieve the raw logs of the specific CloudTrail event.

Figure 12: Finding the CloudTrail record for a specific API call held in Security Lake

Figure 12: Finding the CloudTrail record for a specific API call held in Security Lake

You can identify the target EC2 instance the API was issued against from the query results (Figure 13). To determine whether threat actors actually made an SSH connection to the target EC2 instance as a result of the API call, you should examine the EC2 instance’s profile page:

Figure 13: Reviewing a CloudTrail log record from Security Lake

Figure 13: Reviewing a CloudTrail log record from Security Lake

From the profile page of the EC2 instance in the Detective console, you can go to the Overall VPC flow volume panel and filter the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs using the attributes related to the threat actor identified as having made the SSH API call. In Figure 14, you can see the IP address that tried to connect to 22/tcp, which is the SSH port of the target instance. It’s common for threat actors to change their IP address in an attempt to evade detection, and you can remove the IP address filter to see inbound connections to port 22/tcp of your EC2 instance.

Figure 14: Examining SSH connections to the target instance in the Detective profile page

Figure 14: Examining SSH connections to the target instance in the Detective profile page

Iterate the investigation

At this point, you’ve made progress with the help of Detective Investigations and Security Lake integration. You started with a GuardDuty finding, and you got to the point where you were able to identify some of the intent of the threat actors and uncover the specific EC2 instance they were targeting. Your investigation shouldn’t stop here because you’ve successfully identified the EC2 instance, which is the next target to investigate.

You can reuse this whole workflow by starting with the EC2 instance’s New behavior panel, run Detective Investigations on the IAM role attached to the EC2 instance and other IAM principals you think are worth taking a closer look at, then use the Security Lake integration to gather raw logs of the APIs made by the EC2 instance to identify the specific actions taken and their potential consequences.

Conclusion

In this post, you’ve seen how you can use the Amazon Detective Investigation feature to investigate IAM user and role activity and use the Security Lake integration to determine the specific EC2 instances a threat actor appeared to be targeting.

The Detective Investigation feature is automatically enabled for both existing and new customers in AWS Regions that support Detective where Detective has been activated. The Security Lake integration feature can be enabled in your Detective console. If you don’t currently use Detective, you can start a free 30-day trial. For more information on Detective Investigation and Security Lake integration, see Investigating IAM resources using Detective investigations and Security Lake integration.

 
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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Yue Zhu

Yue Zhu

Yue is a security engineer at AWS. Before AWS, he worked as a security engineer focused on threat detection, incident response, vulnerability management, and security tooling development. Outside of work, Yue enjoys reading, cooking, and cycling.

Governing and securing AWS PrivateLink service access at scale in multi-account environments

Post Syndicated from Anandprasanna Gaitonde original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/governing-and-securing-aws-privatelink-service-access-at-scale-in-multi-account-environments/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers have been adopting the approach of using AWS PrivateLink to have secure communication to AWS services, their own internal services, and third-party services in the AWS Cloud. As these environments scale, the number of PrivateLink connections outbound to external services and inbound to internal services increase and are spread out across multiple accounts in virtual private clouds (VPCs). While AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies allow you to control access to individual PrivateLink services, customers want centralized governance for the use of PrivateLink in adherence with organizational standards and security needs.

This post provides an approach for centralized governance for PrivateLink based services across your multi-account environment. It provides a way to create preventative controls through the use of service control policies (SCPs) and detective controls through event-driven automation. This allows your application teams to consume internal and external services while adhering to organization policies and provides a mechanism for centralized control as your AWS environment grows.

Scenarios faced by customers

Figure 1 shows an example customer environment comprising a multi-account structure created through AWS Organizations or using AWS Control Tower. There are separate organizational units (OUs) pertaining to different business units (BUs) with respective accounts. The business services’ account hosts several backend services that are utilized by consuming applications for their functionality. Since these services provide functionality to more than one internal application and will require access across VPC and account boundaries, these are exposed through AWS PrivateLink. One such service is shown in the business services account.

The customer has partners that provide services for integration with the customer’s application stack. The approved partner account provides a service that is approved for use by the cloud administration team. The NotApproved partner account provides services that are not approved within the customer’s organization. The customer has another OU dedicated to application teams. The application 1 account has an application that consumes the business service of the approved partner account. It is also planning to use the service from the NotApproved partner, which should be blocked. The application in the application 2 account is planning on using AWS services through interface endpoints as well as the approved partner account through PrivateLink integration.

Note: Throughout this post, “organization” is used to refer to an organization that you create and manage through AWS Organizations.

Figure 1: A multi-account customer environment

Figure 1: A multi-account customer environment

Current challenges

Access to individual PrivateLink connections can be controlled through IAM policies. At scale, however, different teams use and adopt PrivateLink for incoming and outgoing connections, and the number of VPC endpoint policies to create and manage increases. As mentioned in the problem statement presented in the introduction, as the customer environment scales and the number of PrivateLink connections increases, customers want centralized guardrails to manage PrivateLink resources at scale. For our example, the customer would like to put the following controls in place:

Preventative controls:

Use case 1:

  • Allow creation of VPC endpoints and allow access only to PrivateLink enabled AWS services.
  • Allow creation of VPC endpoints and initiating connection only to approved PrivateLink enabled third-party services.
  • Allow creation of VPC endpoints and initiating connection only to internal business services owned by accounts in the same organization.

Use case 2:

  • Allow only a cloud admin role to add permissions to connect to an endpoint service to prevent connections from external clients to internal VPC endpoint services.

Detective controls:

Use case 3:

  • Detect if connections are made to PrivateLink services exposed by AWS accounts not belonging to the customer’s organization.

Use case 4:

  • Detect if connections are made by external AWS accounts (not belonging to the customer’s organization) to PrivateLink services exposed for internal use by the customer’s AWS accounts.

This post presents a solution that uses SCPs, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Config to achieve governance. When the solution is deployed in your account, the following components are created as part of the architecture, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Resources deployed in the customer environment by the solution

Figure 2: Resources deployed in the customer environment by the solution

The following architecture is now in place:

  • SCPs to provide preventative controls for the PrivateLink connections.
  • Amazon EventBridge rules that are configured to trigger based on events from API calls captured by CloudTrail in specified accounts within specified OUs.
  • EventBridge rules in member accounts to send events to the event bus in the Audit account, and a central EventBridge rule in that account to trigger an AWS Lambda function based on PrivateLink related API calls.
  • A Lambda function that receives the events and validates if the VPC endpoint API call is allowed for the PrivateLink service and notifies a cloud administrator if a policy is violated.
  • An AWS Config rule that checks if PrivateLink enabled VPC endpoint services created within your AWS accounts have enabled auto accept of client connections and disabled notifications.

Use cases and solution approach

This section walks through each use case and how the solution components are used to address each use case.

Preventative control

Use case 1: Allowing the creation of a VPC endpoint connection to only AWS services and approved internal and third-party PrivateLink services

This solution allows creating a VPC endpoint for only approved partner PrivateLink services, PrivateLink services internal to the organization, and AWS services. This is implemented using an SCP and can be enforced at the individual account or OU. The approved partner services as well as the internal accounts that can host allowed PrivateLink services can be specified during the solution deployment. Application teams operating in AWS accounts within the customer environment can then create VPC endpoints to PrivateLink services of approved partners or AWS services. However, they will not be able to create a VPC endpoint to an unapproved PrivateLink service, for example. This is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Allowed and disallowed paths in PrivateLink connections by SCP

Figure 3: Allowed and disallowed paths in PrivateLink connections by SCP

The SCP that allows you to do this preventative control is shown in the following code snippet. In this example SCP policy, AllowedPrivateLinkPartnerService-ServiceName refers to the service name of the allowed partner PrivateLink. Also, the SCP allows the creation of VPC endpoints to internal PrivateLink services that are hosted in AllowedPrivateLinkAccount. Make sure that this SCP does not interfere with the other policies you created within your organization. The solution currently uses ec2:VpceServiceName and ec2:VpceServiceOwner conditions to identify the PrivateLink service of AWS services or a third-party partner. These conditions can be used in an SCP to control the creation of VPC endpoints:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Condition": {
        "StringNotEquals": {
          "ec2:VpceServiceName": [
            "AllowedPrivateLinkPartnerService-ServiceName",
          ],
          "ec2:VpceServiceOwner": [
            "AllowedPrivateLinkAccount",
            "amazon"
          ]
        }
      },
      "Action": [
        "ec2:CreateVpcEndpoint"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:ec2:*:*:vpc-endpoint/*",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Sid": "SCPDenyPrivateLink"
    }
  ]
}

Use case 2: Allow only a cloud admin role to add permissions to connect to an endpoint service

This solution makes sure that PrivateLink services that are owned and created in AWS accounts of the customer cannot be connected to consumers unless it is allowed by the cloud administrator role. The cloud administrator can then make sure that only legitimate internal AWS accounts are allowed access to that service and restrict access from other accounts outside of the customer’s organization. This is achieved through the use of a service control policy that will restrict modifications of permissions of the PrivateLink endpoint service. This makes sure that individual teams are not able to use the Allow principals configuration to open access to other entities directly, and only a cloud administrator role with the right permissions can make that change.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
  
      "Sid": "Statement1",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "ec2:ModifyVpcEndpointServicePermissions"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "*"
      ],
      "Condition": {
        "StringNotEquals": {
          "aws:PrincipalArn": [
            "arn:aws:iam::*:role/CloudNetworkAdmin"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

This policy can help in achieving the access control, as shown in Figure 4. The cloud administrator uses the Allow principals configuration of the business services PrivateLink service to provide access only to the application 1 account. The SCP allows only the cloud administrator to make the modification and does not allow another member of the team from bypassing that process and adding a nonapproved client application account to access the internal PrivateLink service.

Figure 4: Centralized control on access to the internal PrivateLink service to the customer’s own accounts

Figure 4: Centralized control on access to the internal PrivateLink service to the customer’s own accounts

Detective controls

For detective controls, we discuss two use cases that are deployed as part of the solution and can be enabled and disabled based on the test that you want to perform.

Use case 3: Detecting if connections are made by external AWS accounts (not belonging to the customer’s organization) to PrivateLink services exposed by the customer’s AWS accounts

In this use case, the customer would like to detect if connections are made to their business services from accounts outside of its organization. The solution uses individual member account trails for capturing API calls across the multi-account structure and cross-account EventBridge integration. CloudTrail events from member accounts capture events when a PrivateLink service connection is accepted through the API call event AcceptVPCConnectionEndpoint and sent to the event bus in the audit account. This triggers a Lambda function that then captures the information of the entity requesting the connection and details of the PrivateLink service and sends a notification to the cloud administrator. This is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Detecting the creation of a VPC endpoint or accepting a PrivateLink service connection using CloudTrail events in EventBridge

Figure 5: Detecting the creation of a VPC endpoint or accepting a PrivateLink service connection using CloudTrail events in EventBridge

Custom AWS Config rule for detective control

This detective control mechanism works in cases where PrivateLink services are configured to manually accept client connections. If the endpoint is configured to automatically accept connections, CloudTrail will not generate an event when a connection is accepted. AWS PrivateLink allows customers to configure connection notifications to send connection notification events to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Cloud administrators can get the notifications if they are subscribed to the SNS topic. However, if the notification configuration is removed by the member account, there is no way for the cloud administrator to have visibility for new connections and effectively apply governance requirements.

This solution employs an AWS Config rule to detect if PrivateLink services are created with the Auto Accept Connections setting enabled or without a connection notification configuration and flag it as noncompliant.

This is depicted in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Custom AWS Config rule and SNS notification deployed as part of the solution

Figure 6: Custom AWS Config rule and SNS notification deployed as part of the solution

When a PrivateLink service is created by one of the business services teams, an AWS Config organization rule in the audit account will detect the event, and the custom Lambda function will check if the connection notification configuration is present. If not, then the AWS Config rule will flag the resource as noncompliant. Cloud administrators can view these in the AWS Config dashboard or receive notifications configured through AWS Config.

Use case 4: Detecting if connections are made to PrivateLink services exposed by AWS accounts not belonging to the customer’s organization.

Using the same approach as presented in use case 3, connections made to PrivateLink services exposed by AWS accounts outside of the customer’s organization can be detected through the API call event from CloudTrail CreateVPCEndpoint. This event is sent to the centralized event bus and the Lambda function to check against the criteria and provide notifications to the cloud administrator.

Deploy and test the solution

This section walks through how to deploy and test our recommended solution.

Prerequisites

To deploy the solution, first follow these steps.

  1. In your AWS Organizations multi-account environment, go to the management account and enable trusted access for AWS CloudFormation, enable trusted access for AWS Config, and enable trusted access for CloudTrail.
  2. Identify an account in your organization to serve as the audit account and set it up as a delegated administrator for CloudFormation, AWS Config, and CloudTrail. Follow these steps to perform this step:
    1. Register a delegated administrator for CloudFormation.
    2. Perform the steps mentioned in step 1 of this post to register a delegated administrator for AWS Config.
    3. Register a delegated admin for CloudTrail.
  3. The solution uses the deployment of CloudFormation StackSets with self-managed permissions to set up the resources in the audit account. In order to enable this, create AWSCloudFormationStackSetAdministrationRole in the management account and AWSCloudFormationStackSetExecutionRole in the audit account by using the steps in the topic Grant self-managed permissions.
  4. In a separate AWS account that is different than your multi-account environment, create two PrivateLink VPC endpoint services as explained in the documentation. You can use this template to create a test PrivateLink VPC endpoint service. These will serve as two partner services, one of which is allowed, and another is untrusted and not allowed. Make note of their service names.

Figure 7: Simulated partner services (approved and not approved) in a separate test account

Figure 7: Simulated partner services (approved and not approved) in a separate test account

Deploying the solution

  1. Go to the management account of your AWS Organizations multi-account environment and use this CloudFormation template to deploy the solution, or choose the following Launch Stack button:

    Launch stack

    CloudFormation stacks can be deployed using the AWS CloudFormation console or using the AWS CLI.

  2. This initially displays the Create stack page. Leave the details entered by default, and then choose Next.
  3. On the Specify stack details page, enter the details for the input parameters for this solution. The following table shows the details that you will provide when setting up the CloudFormation template on the Specify stack details page on the CloudFormation console.

    AWSOrganizationsId Identifier for your organization. This can be obtained from your management account as described in the AWS Organizations User Guide.
    AdminRoleArn Role of the persona who is allowed to modify PrivateLink endpoint permissions.
    AllowedPrivateLinkAccounts AWS account IDs of accounts in your OU that host PrivateLink services.
    AllowedPrivateLinkPartnerServices Specify the service name of the approved PrivateLink services from partners. If you want to test with a simulated partner PrivateLink, take the service name of PrivateLink services created in Step 4 of the prerequisites as the partner services to which connections should be allowed. The unique service name of the partner’s PrivateLink service is provided by the partner to the customer so that they can connect to it.
    AuditAccountId AWS account ID of the audit account in your multi-account environment.
    PLOrganizationUnit OU identifier for the organizational unit where the solution will perform preventative and detective control.
    Figure 8: CloudFormation template input parameters for the solution as it appears on the console

    Figure 8: CloudFormation template input parameters for the solution as it appears on the console

  4. Choose Next and keep the defaults for the rest of the fields. Then, on the Review and create page, choose Submit to finish deploying the solution.

Testing the solution

Once the solution is deployed successfully, follow these steps to test the solution:

  1. For an account specified in the AllowedPrivateLinkAccounts parameter, create a VPC endpoint service as explained in the topic Create a service powered by AWS PrivateLink. Instead of creating this manually, use this CloudFormation template to create a test VPC endpoint service.
  2. Sign in to a member account within the OU that you specified in the CloudFormation template.
  3. From the member account, create a VPC endpoint connection to the internal PrivateLink service created in the account from Step 1. This connection will set up successfully because it is internal to the organization and therefore allowed by the SCP policy, and is not flagged to the cloud administrator as violating organization policy.
  4. From the member account, create a VPC endpoint connection to the AWS service that is supporting PrivateLink, such as AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). This connection will set up successfully because it is internal to the organization and therefore allowed by the SCP policy, and is not flagged to the cloud administrator as violating organization policy.
  5. From the member account, create a VPC endpoint connection to the PrivateLink service created in Step 4 of the prerequisites. This connection will set up successfully because it is internal to the organization and therefore allowed by the SCP policy, and is not flagged to the cloud administrator as violating organization policy.
  6. From the member account, create a VPC endpoint connection to the PrivateLink service created in Step 4 of the prerequisites and that is not an allowed partner service. This connection will fail because it is not allowed by the SCP policy.
  7. From an account outside of your organization, create a VPC endpoint connection to the internal PrivateLink service created in Step 1. The connection setup is successful, but the cloud administrator will see the internal PrivateLink service as NOT COMPLIANT because the connection from external clients is considered to be not compliant with organization requirements in this solution. This information allows the cloud admin to quickly find the noncompliant resource and work with the PrivateLink service owner team to remediate the issue.
  8. From the member account, create another VPC endpoint service without configuring the notification configuration, and leave the Acceptance required field unchecked. Navigate to the AWS Config console in the audit account and go to Aggregator->Rules. Check the evaluation of the rule starting with “OrgConfigRule-pl-governance-rule….” Once the evaluation is complete, it will indicate that this VPC endpoint service is NOT COMPLIANT, whereas the service created in Step 1 will show as COMPLIANT.

Considerations

  • The solution described here takes the approach of allowing all VPC endpoint connections from within a customer’s organization to the PrivateLink services in specified accounts and detecting and notifying all external ones. This can be modified based on your specific use cases and requirements.
  • The solution uses AWS Config rules that are applied to specific accounts of your organization, even though the solution is applied at an OU level. The AWS Config rules created in this solution are scoped to evaluate VPC endpoint services and should incur charges accordingly. Refer to the AWS Config pricing page to understand usage-based pricing for the service.
  • Other services, such AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge, also incur usage-based charges. Please verify that these are deleted to prevent incurring unnecessary charges.
  • SCP policies only affect member accounts. They do not apply to the management account, so actions denied through an SCP policy multi-account will still be allowed in the management account.

Cleanup

You can delete the solution by following these steps to avoid unnecessary charges:

  • Delete the CloudFormation stack created as part of Step 4 of the prerequisites.
  • Delete the CloudFormation stack of the main solution deployed in the management account as part of the Deploying the solution section.
  • Delete the CloudFormation stack created as part of Step 1 of Testing the solution.

Summary

As customers adopt AWS PrivateLink throughout their environment, the mechanisms discussed in this post provide a way for administrators to govern and secure their PrivateLink services at scale. This approach can help you create a scalable solution where interconnections are aligned to the organization’s guidelines and security requirements. While this solution presents an approach to governance, customers can tailor this solution to their unique organizational requirements.

 
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Author

Anandprasanna Gaitonde

Anand is a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, responsible for helping customers design and operate Well-Architected solutions to help them adopt the AWS Cloud successfully. He focuses on AWS networking and serverless technologies to design and develop solutions in the cloud across industry verticals. He holds a master of engineering in computer science and a postgraduate degree in software enterprise management.

Siva Devabakthini

Siva Devabakthini

Siva is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS who covers hyperscale customers in the AWS Digital Native Business segment. He focuses on AWS security, data analytics, and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies to design and develop solutions in the cloud. Outside of work, Siva loves traveling, trying different cuisines, and being outdoors with his family.

Emmanuel Isimah

Emmanuel Isimah

Emmanuel is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS who covers hyperscale customers in the enterprise retail space. He has a background in networking, security, and containers. Emmanuel helps customers build and secure innovative cloud solutions, solving their business problems by using data-driven approaches. Emmanuel’s areas of depth include security and compliance, containers, and networking.

How to use AWS managed applications with IAM Identity Center

Post Syndicated from Liam Wadman original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-use-aws-managed-applications-with-iam-identity-center/

AWS IAM Identity Center is the preferred way to provide workforce access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, and enables you to provide workforce access to many AWS managed applications, such as Amazon Q Developer (Formerly known as Code Whisperer).

As we continue to release more AWS managed applications, customers have told us they want to onboard to IAM Identity Center to use AWS managed applications, but some aren’t ready to migrate their existing IAM federation for AWS account management to Identity Center.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how you can enable Identity Center and use AWS managed applications—such as Amazon Q Developer—without migrating existing IAM federation flows to Identity Center.

A recap on AWS managed applications and trusted identity propagation

Just before re:Invent 2023, AWS launched trusted identity propagation, a technology that allows you to use a user’s identity and groups when accessing AWS services. This allows you to assign permissions directly to users or groups, rather than model entitlements in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). This makes permissions management simpler for users. For example, with trusted identity propagation, you can grant users and groups access to specific Amazon Redshift clusters without modeling all possible unique combinations of permissions in IAM. Trusted identity propagation is available today for Redshift and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with more services and features coming over time.

In 2023, we released Amazon Q Developer, which is integrated with IAM Identity Center, generally available as an AWS managed application. When you’re using Amazon Q Developer outside of AWS in integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Identity Center is used to sign in to Amazon Q Developer.

Amazon Q Developer is one of many AWS managed applications that are integrated with the OAuth 2.0 functionality of IAM Identity Center, and it doesn’t use IAM credentials to access the Q Developer service from within your IDEs. AWS managed applications and trusted identity propagation don’t require you to use the permission sets feature of Identity Center and instead use OpenID Connect to grant your workforce access to AWS applications and features.

IAM Identity Center for AWS application access only

In the following section, we use IAM Identity Center to sign in to Amazon Q Developer as an example of an AWS managed application.

Prerequisites

Step 1: Enable an organization instance of IAM Identity Center

To begin, you must enable an organization instance of IAM Identity Center. While it’s possible to use IAM Identity Center without an AWS Organizations organization, we generally recommend that customers operate with such an organization.

The IAM Identity Center documentation provides the steps to enable an organizational instance of IAM Identity Center, as well as prerequisites and considerations. One consideration I would emphasize here is the identity source. We recommend, wherever possible, that you integrate with an external identity provider (IdP), because this provides the most flexibility and allows you to take advantage of the advanced security features of modern identity platforms.

IAM Identity Center is available at no additional cost.

Note: In late 2023, AWS launched account instances for IAM Identity Center. Account instances allow you to create additional Identity Center instances within member accounts of your organization. Wherever possible, we recommend that customers use an organization instance of IAM Identity Center to give them a centralized place to manage their identities and permissions. AWS recommends account instances when you want to perform a proof of concept using Identity Center, when there isn’t a central IdP or directory that contains all the identities you want to use on AWS and you want to use AWS managed applications with distinct directories, or when your AWS account is a member of an organization in AWS Organizations that is managed by another party and you don’t have access to set up an organization instance.

Step 2: Set up your IdP and synchronize identities and groups

After you’ve enabled your IAM Identity Center instance, you need to set up your instance to work with your chosen IdP and synchronize your identities and groups. The IAM Identity Center documentation includes examples of how to do this with many popular IdPs.

After your identity source is connected, IAM Identity Center can act as the single source of identity and authentication for AWS managed applications, bridging your external identity source and AWS managed applications. You don’t have to create a bespoke relationship between each AWS application and your IdP, and you have a single place to manage user permissions.

Step 3: Set up delegated administration for IAM Identity Center

As a best practice, we recommend that you only access the management account of your AWS Organizations organization when absolutely necessary. IAM Identity Center supports delegated administration, which allows you to manage Identity Center from a member account of your organization.

To set up delegated administration

  1. Go to the AWS Management Console and navigate to IAM Identity Center.
  2. In the left navigation pane, select Settings. Then select the Management tab and choose Register account.
  3. From the menu that follows, select the AWS account that will be used for delegated administration for IAM Identity Center. Ideally, this member account is dedicated solely to the purpose of administrating IAM Identity Center and is only accessible to users who are responsible for maintaining IAM Identity Center.

Figure 1: Set up delegated administration

Figure 1: Set up delegated administration

Step 4: Configure Amazon Q Developer

You now have IAM Identity Center set up with the users and groups from your directory, and you’re ready to configure AWS managed applications with IAM Identity Center. From a member account within your organization, you can now enable Amazon Q Developer. This can be any member account in your organization and should not be the one where you set up delegated administration of IAM Identity Center, or the management account.

Note: If you’re doing this step immediately after configuring IAM Identity Center with an external IdP with SCIM synchronization, be aware that the users and groups from your external IdP might not yet be synchronized to Identity Center by your external IdP. Identity Center updates user information and group membership as soon as the data is received from your external IdP. How long it takes to finish synchronizing after the data is received depends on the number of users and groups being synchronized to Identity Center.

To enable Amazon Q Developer

  1. Open the Amazon Q Developer console. This will take you to the setup for Amazon Q Developer.

    Figure 2: Open the Amazon Q Developer console

    Figure 2: Open the Amazon Q Developer console

  2. Choose Subscribe to Amazon Q.

    Figure 3: The Amazon Q developer console

    Figure 3: The Amazon Q developer console

  3. You’ll be taken to the Amazon Q console. Choose Subscribe to subscribe to Amazon Q Developer Pro.

    Figure 4: Subscribe to Amazon Q Developer Pro

    Figure 4: Subscribe to Amazon Q Developer Pro

  4. After choosing Subscribe, you will be prompted to select users and groups you want to enroll for Amazon Q Developer. Select the users and groups you want and then choose Assign.

    Figure 5: Assign user and group access to Amazon Q Developer

    Figure 5: Assign user and group access to Amazon Q Developer

After you perform these steps, the setup of Amazon Q Developer as an AWS managed application is complete, and you can now use Amazon Q Developer. No additional configuration is required within your external IdP or on-premises Microsoft Active Directory, and no additional user profiles have to be created or synchronized to Amazon Q Developer.

Note: There are charges associated with using the Amazon Q Developer service.

Step 5: Set up Amazon Q Developer in the IDE

Now that Amazon Q Developer is configured, users and groups that you have granted access to can use Amazon Q Developer from their supported IDE.

In their IDE, a user can sign in to Amazon Q Developer by entering the start URL and AWS Region and choosing Sign in. Figure 6 shows what this looks like in Visual Studio Code. The Amazon Q extension for Visual Studio Code is available to download within Visual Studio Code.

Figure 6: Signing in to the Amazon Q Developer extension in Visual Studio Code

Figure 6: Signing in to the Amazon Q Developer extension in Visual Studio Code

After choosing Use with Pro license, and entering their Identity Center’s start URL and Region, the user will be directed to authenticate with IAM Identity Center and grant the Amazon Q Developer application access to use the Amazon Q Developer service.

When this is successful, the user will have the Amazon Q Developer functionality available in their IDE. This was achieved without migrating existing federation or AWS account access patterns to IAM Identity Center.

Clean up

If you don’t wish to continue using IAM Identity Center or Amazon Q Developer, you can delete the Amazon Q Developer Profile and Identity Center instance within their respective consoles, within the AWS account they are deployed into. Deleting your Identity Center instance won’t make changes to existing federation or AWS account access that is not done through IAM Identity Center.

Conclusion

In this post, we talked about some recent significant launches of AWS managed applications and features that integrate with IAM Identity Center and discussed how you can use these features without migrating your AWS account management to permission sets. We also showed how you can set up Amazon Q Developer with IAM Identity Center. While the example in this post uses Amazon Q Developer, the same approach and guidance applies to Amazon Q Business and other AWS managed applications integrated with Identity Center.

To learn more about the benefits and use cases of IAM Identity Center, visit the product page, and to learn more about Amazon Q Developer, visit the Amazon Q Developer product page.

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

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Liam Wadman

Liam Wadman

Liam is a Senior Solutions Architect with the Identity Solutions team. When he’s not building exciting solutions on AWS or helping customers, he’s often found in the mountains of British Columbia on his mountain bike. Liam points out that you cannot spell LIAM without IAM.

How to use WhatsApp to send Amazon Cognito notification messages

Post Syndicated from Nideesh K T original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-use-whatsapp-to-send-amazon-cognito-notification-messages/

While traditional channels like email and SMS remain important, businesses are increasingly exploring alternative messaging services to reach their customers more effectively. In recent years, WhatsApp has emerged as a simple and effective way to engage with users. According to statista, as of 2024, WhatsApp is the most popular mobile messenger app worldwide and has reached over two billion monthly active users in January 2024.

Amazon Cognito lets you add user sign-up and authentication to your mobile and web applications. Among many other features, Cognito provides a custom SMS sender AWS Lambda trigger for using third-party providers to send notifications. In this post, we’ll be using WhatsApp as the third-party provider to send verification codes or multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes instead of SMS during Cognito user pool sign up.

Note: WhatsApp is a third-party service subject to additional terms and charges. Amazon Web Services (AWS) isn’t responsible for third-party services that you use to send messages with a custom SMS sender in Amazon Cognito.

Overview

By default, Amazon Cognito uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) for delivery of SMS text messages. Cognito also supports custom triggers that will allow you to invoke an AWS Lambda function to support additional providers such as WhatsApp.

The architecture shown in Figure 1 depicts how to use a custom SMS sender trigger and WhatsApp to send notifications. The steps are as follows:

  1. A user signs up to an Amazon Cognito user pool.
  2. Cognito invokes the custom SMS sender Lambda function and sends the user’s attributes, including the phone number and a one-time code to the Lambda function. This one-time code is encrypted using a custom symmetric encryption AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key that you create.
  3. The Lambda function decrypts the one-time code using a Decrypt API call to your AWS KMS key.
  4. The Lambda function then obtains the WhatsApp access token from AWS Secrets Manager. The WhatsApp access token needs to be generated through Meta Business Settings (which are covered in the next section) and added to Secrets Manager. Lambda also parses the phone number, user attributes, and encrypted secrets.
  5. Lambda sends a POST API call to the WhatsApp API and WhatsApp delivers the verification code to the user as a message. The user can then use the verification code to verify their contact information and confirm the sign-up.

Figure 1: Custom SMS sender trigger flow

Figure 1: Custom SMS sender trigger flow

Prerequisites

Implementation

In the next steps, we look at how to create a Meta app, create a new system user, get the WhatsApp access token and create the template to send the WhatsApp token.

Create and configure an app for WhatsApp communication

To get started, create a Meta app with WhatsApp added to it, along with the customer phone number that will be used to test.

To create and configure an app

  1. Open the Meta for Developers console, choose My Apps and then choose Create App (or choose an existing Business type app and skip to step 4).
  2. Select Other choose Next and then select Business as the app type and choose Next.
  3. Enter an App name, App contact email, choose whether or not to attach a Business portfolio and choose Create app.
  4. Open the app Dashboard and in the Add product to your app section, under WhatsApp, choose Set up.
  5. Create or select an existing Meta business portfolio and choose Continue.
  6. In the left navigation pane, under WhatsApp, choose API Setup.
  7. Under Send and receive messages, take a note of the Phone number ID, which will be needed in the AWS CDK template later.
  8. Under To, add the customer phone number you want to use for testing. Follow the instructions to add and verify the phone number.

Note: You must have WhatsApp registered with the number and the WhatsApp client installed on your mobile device.

Create a user for accessing WhatsApp

Create a system user in Meta’s Business Manager and assign it to the app created in the previous step. The access tokens generated for this user will be used to make the WhatsApp API calls.

To create a user

  1. Open Meta’s Business Manager and select the business you created or associated your application with earlier from the dropdown menu under Business settings.
  2. Under Users, select System users and then choose Add to create a new system user.
  3. Enter a name for the System Username and set their role as Admin and choose Create system user.
  4. Choose Assign assets.
  5. From the Select asset type list, select Apps. Under Select assets, select your WhatsApp application’s name. Under Partial access, turn on the Test app option for the user. Choose Save Changes and then choose Done.
  6. Choose Generate New Token, select the WhatsApp application created earlier, and leave the default 60 days as the token expiration. Under Permissions select WhatsApp_business_messaging and WhatsApp_business_management and choose Generate Token at the bottom.
  7. Copy and save your access token. You will need this for the AWS CDK template later. Choose OK. For more details on creating the access token, see WhatsApp’s Business Management API Get Started guide.

Create a template in WhatsApp

Create a template for the verification messages that will be sent by WhatsApp.

To create a template

  1. Open Meta’s WhatsApp Manager.
  2. On the left icon pane, under Account tools, choose Message template and then choose Create Template.
  3. Select Authentication as the category.
  4. For the Name, enter otp_message.
  5. For Languages, enter English.
  6. Choose Continue.
  7. In the next screen, select Copy code and choose Submit.

Note: It’s possible that Meta might change the process or the UI. See the Meta documentation for specific details.

For more information on WhatsApp templates, see Create and Manage Templates.

Create a Secrets Manager secret

Use the Secrets Manager console to create a Secrets Manager secret and set the secret to the WhatsApp access token.

To create a secret

  1. Open the AWS Management Console and go to Secrets Manager.

    Figure 2: Open the Secrets Manager console

    Figure 2: Open the Secrets Manager console

  2. Choose Store a new secret.

    Figure 3: Store a new secret

    Figure 3: Store a new secret

  3. Under Choose a secret type, choose Other type of secret and under Key/value pairs, select the Plaintext tab and enter Bearer followed by the WhatsApp access token (Bearer <WhatsApp access token>).

    Figure 4: Add the secret

    Figure 4: Add the secret

  4. For the encryption key, you can use either the AWS KMS key that Secrets Manager creates or a customer managed AWS KMS key that you create and then choose Next.
  5. Provide the secret name as the WhatsAppAccessToken, choose Next, and then choose Store to create the secret.
  6. Note the secret Amazon Resource Name (ARN) to use in later steps.

Deploy the solution

In this section, you clone the GitHub repository and deploy the stack to create the resources in your account.

To clone the repository

  1. Create a new directory, navigate to that directory in a terminal and use the following command to clone the GitHub repository that has the Lambda and AWS CDK code:
  2. Change directory to the pattern directory:
    cd amazon-cognito-whatsapp-otp

To deploy the stack

  1. Configure the phone number ID obtained from WhatsApp, the secret name, secret ARN, and the Amazon Cognito user pool self-service sign-up option in the constants.ts file.

    Open the lib/constants.ts file and edit the fields. The SELF_SIGNUP value must be set to true for the purpose of this proof of concept. The SELF_SIGNUP value represents the Boolean value for the Amazon Cognito user pool sign-up option, which when set to true allows public users to sign up.

    export const PHONE_NUMBER_ID = '<phone number ID>'; 
    export const SECRET_NAME = '<WhatsAppAccessToken>'; 
    export const SECRET_ARN = 'arn:aws:secretsmanager:<AWSRegion>:<phone number ID>:secret:<WhatsAppAccessToken>'; 
    export const SELF_SIGNUP = <true>;

    Warning: If you activate user sign-up (enable self-registration) in your user pool, anyone on the internet can sign up for an account and sign in to your applications.

  2. Install the AWS CDK required dependencies by running the following command:
    npm install

  3. This project uses typescript as the client language for AWS CDK. Run the following command to compile typescript to JavaScript:
    npm run build

  4. From the command line, configure AWS CDK (if you have not already done so):
    cdk bootstrap <account number>/<AWS Region>

  5. Install and run Docker. We’re using the aws-lambda-python-alpha package in the AWS CDK code to build the Lambda deployment package. The deployment package installs the required modules in a Lambda compatible Docker container.
  6. Deploy the stack:
    cdk synth
    cdk deploy --all

Test the solution

Now that you’ve completed implementation, it’s time to test the solution by signing up a user on Amazon Cognito and confirming that the Lambda function is invoked and sends the verification code.

To test the solution

  1. Open AWS CloudFormation console.
  2. Select the WhatsappOtpStack that was deployed through AWS CDK.
  3. On the Outputs tab, copy the value of cognitocustomotpsenderclientappid.
  4. Run the following AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) command, replacing the client ID with the output of cognitocustomotpsenderclientappid, username, password, email address, name, phone number, and AWS Region to sign up a new Amazon Cognito user.
    aws cognito-idp sign-up --client-id <cognitocustomsmssenderclientappid> --username <TestUserPhoneNumber> --password <Password> --user-attributes Name="email",Value="<TestUserEmail>" Name="name",Value="<TestUserName>" Name="phone_number",Value="<TestPhoneNumber>" --region <AWS Region>

    Example:

    aws cognito-idp sign-up --client-id xxxxxxxxxxxxxx --username +12065550100  --password Test@654321 --user-attributes Name="email",Value="[email protected]" Name="name",Value="Jane" Name="phone_number",Value=”+12065550100" --region us-east-1

    Note: Password requirements are a minimum length of eight characters with at least one number, one lowercase letter, and one special character.

The new user should receive a message on WhatsApp with a verification code that they can use to complete their sign-up.

Cleanup

  1. Run the following command to delete the resources that were created. It might take a few minutes for the CloudFormation stack to be deleted.
    cdk destroy --all

  2. Delete the secret WhatsAppAccessToken that was created from the Secrets Manager console.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed you how to use an alternative messaging platform such as WhatsApp to send notification messages from Amazon Cognito. This functionality is enabled through the Amazon Cognito custom SMS sender trigger, which invokes a Lambda function that has the custom code to send messages through the WhatsApp API. You can use the same method to use other third-party providers to send messages.

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

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Nideesh K T

Nideesh K T

Nideesh is an experienced IT professional with expertise in cloud computing and technical support. Nideesh has been working in the technology industry for 8 years. In his current role as a Sr. Cloud Support Engineer, Nideesh provides technical assistance and troubleshooting for cloud infrastructure issues. Outside of work, Nideesh enjoys staying active by going to the gym, playing sports, and spending time outdoors.

Reethi Joseph

Reethi Joseph

Reethi is a Sr. Cloud Support Engineer at AWS with 7 years of experience specializing in serverless technologies. In her role, she helps customers architect and build solutions using AWS services. When not delving into the world of servers and generative AI, she spends her time trying to perfect her swimming strokes, traveling, trying new baking recipes, gardening, and watching movies.

How to enforce a security baseline for an AWS WAF ACL across your organization using AWS Firewall Manager

Post Syndicated from Omner Barajas original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-enforce-a-security-baseline-for-an-aws-waf-acl-across-your-organization-using-aws-firewall-manager/

Most organizations prioritize protecting their web applications that are exposed to the internet. Using the AWS WAF service, you can create rules to control bot traffic, help prevent account takeover fraud, and block common threat patterns such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS). Further, for those customers managing multi-account environments, it is possible to enforce security baselines for AWS WAF access control lists (ACLs) across the whole organization by using AWS Firewall Manager.

In a previous AWS Security Blog post, there is a good explanation about how to create Firewall Manager policies to deploy AWS WAF ACLs across multiple accounts. In addition, this AWS Architecture Blog post goes deeper, describing operating models for web applications security governance in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This post will show, in a central or hybrid operating model, how to create a policy to enforce a security baseline in your AWS WAF ACLs while still allowing application administrators or developers to apply specific ACL rules for their particular use case.

Centrally manage firewall policies

It’s a common scenario that a security team in an organization wants to implement a security baseline, consisting of a set of rules, across multiple applications that are distributed in multiple accounts. Those rules are not always applicable for all workloads because different applications might have different needs for protection or exposure to the public. Furthermore, sometimes local teams responsible for managing applications have permissions to create their own rules and decide not to follow policies mandated by the organization.

AWS Firewall Manager solves this problem by allowing you to centrally configure and manage firewall policies, deploy preconfigured AWS WAF rules across your organization, and automatically enforce them in existing and newly created resources.

The following architecture diagram describes how you can design a Firewall Manager policy from a central security account, establishing a security baseline that will be enforced within other member accounts in your organization. To do so, you create a managed AWS WAF ACL with the first and last group rules not editable, but allowing a custom rule group to be modified by administrators of member accounts.

Figure 1: AWS Firewall Manager enforcing security baseline for AWS WAF

Figure 1: AWS Firewall Manager enforcing security baseline for AWS WAF

Firewall Manager delegated administrators

At the time of writing this post, Firewall Manager supports up to 10 administrators who can manage firewall resources in your organization by applying scope conditions. For example, you can define an administrator for specific accounts or even a complete organization unit (OU), AWS Region, or policy type. Using this feature, you can enforce the principle of least privilege access, in addition to assigning administrators to enforce security baselines for your AWS ACL rules across your organization in a more granular way. This delegation needs to be completed from the AWS Organizations management account, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: AWS Firewall Manager administrator account delegation

Figure 2: AWS Firewall Manager administrator account delegation

Firewall Manager policies

A Firewall Manager policy contains the rule groups that will be applied to your protected resources. The service creates a web ACL in each account where the policy is enforced. Account administrators can add rules or rule groups to the resulting web ACL in addition to the rules groups defined by the Firewall Manager policy.

Rules groups

AWS WAF ACLs that are managed by Firewall Manager policies contain three sets of rules that provide a higher level of prioritization in the ACL. AWS WAF evaluates rule groups in the following order:

  1. Rule groups that are defined in the Firewall Manager policy with the highest priority
  2. Rules that are defined by the account administrator in the web ACL after the first rule group
  3. Rule groups that are defined in Firewall Manager to be evaluated at the end

Within each rule set, AWS WAF evaluates rules according to their priority settings, evaluating the rules from the lowest number up until either finds a match that terminates the evaluation or exhausts all of the rules.

Security baseline policy

Figure 3 shows an example of a Firewall Manager policy that will serve as the security web ACL baseline across your organization. This policy should be created in a delegated administrator acco­­unt and enforced across all or specific accounts in your organization where the administrator has permissions. Refer to the service documentation for additional guidance on setting up this type of policy.

Figure 3: AWS Firewall Manager policy rules acting as the security baseline

Figure 3: AWS Firewall Manager policy rules acting as the security baseline

First rule group

The first rule group in the policy will contain the following:

  • Organization-level blocked list – Known bad IP addresses by organization.
  • AWS IP reputation list – Recommended AWS managed rules for IP addresses with a bad reputation.
  • AWS Anonymous IP list – Recommended AWS managed rules for anonymous IP addresses.
  • Organization-level rate limit – A high-level rate limit defined by the organization.

Last rule group

The last rule group in the policy will contain the following:

  • Organization-level allowed list – Even if these are well-known IP addresses, they still need to be evaluated against the set of rules enforced by the organization and specific rules per application. If a “good” IP address is supplanted, it might hide the real source identity, bypassing AWS WAF rules.
  • AWS bot control – Recommended if you want to enforce bot control across your organization or a set of accounts managed by an administrator.

This configuration will allow individual account administrators to define and include their own rules to protect applications based on specific use cases and the expected number of requests.

When designing your own security baselines, take into consideration that some managed rules, such as bot control, might have additional cost, and enforcing them across your organization would increase the overall cost of the service.

Policy scope

The policy scope for your security baseline defines where the policy applies. It can apply to all accounts and resources in your organization or just a subset of accounts and resources. Based on the settings selected, Firewall Manager will apply policy for accounts in scope by using the following options:

  1. All accounts in your organization
  2. Only a specific list of accounts and organization units
  3. All accounts and OUs except a specific list of those to exclude

On the other hand, when selecting the scope for resources, you can use the following options:

  1. All resources
  2. Resources that have all of the specified tags
  3. All resources except those that have all the specified tags

For delegated administrators, scope definition will apply only for accounts, Regions, or OUs defined during the delegation process. Figure 4 shows an example of the scope definition for a policy.

Figure 4: Firewall Manager scope definition

Figure 4: Firewall Manager scope definition

Use case–specific rule groups

Figure 5 is an example of a specific use case, where AWS WAF administrators in a member account within the Firewall Manager policy scope want to protect their web application by using the following rules.

Figure 5: Web ACL managed by Firewall Manager containing rules in a member account

Figure 5: Web ACL managed by Firewall Manager containing rules in a member account

Middle rule group

The middle rule group is configured in each account within the ACL deployed by Firewall Manager. The examples from Figure 5 are rules oriented to apply protection that is specific for the application where the ACL is assigned:

  • App-level blocked list – Known IP addresses blocked by the administrator.
  • App-level rate limit – The rate limit supported by the application.
  • Core rule set – The recommended rule set, focused on OWASP Top Ten vulnerabilities.
  • Technology-specific protection – An example for PHP applications.
  • App-level allowed list – Well-known IP addresses that still need to be evaluated against some rules but bypass others, such as fraud prevention.
  • Account takeover prevention – This managed rule needs specific configuration per application to work as expected. However, it is recommended that you use it after the bot control managed rule to optimize cost. Take that into consideration when building your own security baseline.

This rule group will be second priority between the first and the last rule groups coming from the Firewall Manager policy. This configuration provides account administrators the ability to design their set of rules to cover the specific use case for their application and also the possibility to override rules evaluated in a lower priority (last rule group). For example, having a higher rate limit in the app-level rule than the org-level rule would have no impact on the traffic being filtered, since the org-level rule in the first group of the policy will have priority. However, having more granular bot control rules at the app-level will supersede the org-level rules contained in the last group of the policy. Take that logic into consideration when you decide which rules need to be in the first and last groups of your Firewall Manager policies.

Recommended approach for testing

Before you deploy your web ACL implementation for production, test and tune it in a staging or testing environment until you are comfortable with the potential impact on your traffic. Then, test and tune the rules in count mode with your production traffic before enabling them.

  1. Prepare the environment for testing:
    1. Enable logging and web request sampling for your ACL.
    2. Set the protection to count mode.
    3. Associate the ACL with a resource.
  2. Monitor and tune in the test environment:
    1. Monitor traffic and rules matching by using logs, metrics, the dashboard, or sampled requests.
    2. Configure mitigation rules such as false positive, matching, scope-down, and label match.
  3. Enable protection in production:
    1. Remove any additional rules that are no longer needed.
    2. Enable rules in production accounts.
    3. Closely monitor your application behavior to be sure requests are being handled as expected.

Cleanup

To avoid unexpected charges in your accounts, delete any unnecessary policies and resources. You can do that from the console by following these steps.

  1. On the Firewall Manager policies page, choose the radio button next to the policy name, and then choose Delete.
  2. In the Delete confirmation box, select Delete all policy resources, and then choose Delete again.

AWS WAF removes the policy and any associated resources, like web ACLs, that it created in your account. The changes might take a few minutes to propagate to all accounts.

Conclusion

By using Firewall Manager, you can take advantage of native cloud features to enforce security baseline configurations for your AWS WAF rules in a multi-account environment across your organization. It is possible to centrally design policies with broad rule groups to protect workloads from a high-level perspective while allowing application administrators to design custom rules to protect, for instance, web applications from specific use cases such as OWASP Top Ten or technology-related vulnerabilities.

The examples provided in this post can be further customized and adapted to align with your organization’s needs. Design policies to comply with security requirements and specific use cases to protect your workloads.

If you want to learn more, visit the Automations for AWS Firewall Manager webpage, which provides a solution with preset rules to create a quick security baseline to protect against distributed denial of service (DDoS).

 
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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Omner Barajas

Omner Barajas

Omner is a senior security specialist solutions architect based in Mexico, supporting customers in LATAM. He usually collaborates with account teams to help clients accelerate cloud adoption and improve security posture for their workloads, resolving complex technical challenges related to cybersecurity and compliance with international standards and regulations.

How Amazon Security Lake is helping customers simplify security data management for proactive threat analysis

Post Syndicated from Nisha Amthul original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-amazon-security-lake-is-helping-customers-simplify-security-data-management-for-proactive-threat-analysis/

In this post, we explore how Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers can use Amazon Security Lake to efficiently collect, query, and centralize logs on AWS. We also discuss new use cases for Security Lake, such as applying generative AI to Security Lake data for threat hunting and incident response, and we share the latest service enhancements and developments from our growing landscape. Security Lake centralizes security data from AWS environments, software as a service (SaaS) providers, and on-premises and cloud sources into a purpose-built data lake that is stored in your AWS account. Using Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) support, Security Lake normalizes and combines security data from AWS and a broad range of third-party data sources. This helps provide your security team with the ability to investigate and respond to security events and analyze possible threats within your environment, which can facilitate timely responses and help to improve your security across multicloud and hybrid environments.

One year ago, AWS embarked on a mission driven by the growing customer need to revolutionize how security professionals centralize, optimize, normalize, and analyze their security data. As we celebrate the one-year general availability milestone of Amazon Security Lake, we’re excited to reflect on the journey and showcase how customers are using the service, yielding both productivity and cost benefits, while maintaining ownership of their data.

Figure 1 shows how Security Lake works, step by step. For more details, see What is Amazon Security Lake?

Figure 1: How Security Lake works

Figure 1: How Security Lake works

Customer use cases

In this section, we highlight how some of our customers have found the most value with Security Lake and how you can use Security Lake in your organization.

Simplify the centralization of security data management across hybrid environments to enhance security analytics

Many customers use Security Lake to gather and analyze security data from various sources, including AWS, multicloud, and on-premises systems. By centralizing this data in a single location, organizations can streamline data collection and analysis, help eliminate data silos, and improve cross-environment analysis. This enhanced visibility and efficiency allows security teams to respond more effectively to security events. With Security Lake, customers simplify data gathering and reduce the burden of data retention and extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes with key AWS data sources.

For example, Interpublic Group (IPG), an advertising company, uses Security Lake to gain a comprehensive, organization-wide grasp of their security posture across hybrid environments. Watch this video from re:Inforce 2023 to understand how IPG streamlined their security operations.

Before adopting Security Lake, the IPG team had to work through the challenge of managing diverse log data sources. This involved translating and transforming the data, as well as reconciling complex elements like IP addresses. However, with the implementation of Security Lake, IPG was able to access previously unavailable log sources. This enabled them to consolidate and effectively analyze security-related data. The use of Security Lake has empowered IPG to gain comprehensive insight into their security landscape, resulting in a significant improvement in their overall security posture.

“We can achieve a more complete, organization-wide understanding of our security posture across hybrid environments. We could quickly create a security data lake that centralized security-related data from AWS and third-party sources,” — Troy Wilkinson, Global CISO at Interpublic Group

Streamline incident investigation and reduce mean time to respond

As organizations expand their cloud presence, they need to gather information from diverse sources. Security Lake automates the centralization of security data from AWS environments and third-party logging sources, including firewall logs, storage security, and threat intelligence signals. This removes the need for custom, one-off security consolidation pipelines. The centralized data in Security Lake streamlines security investigations, making security management and investigations simpler. Whether you’re in operations or a security analyst, dealing with multiple applications and scattered data can be tough. Security Lake makes it simpler by centralizing the data, reducing the need for scattered systems. Plus, with data stored in your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) account, Security Lake lets you store a lot of historical data, which helps when looking back for patterns or anomalies indicative of security issues.

For example, SEEK, an Australian online employment marketplace, uses Security Lake to streamline incident investigations and reduce mean time to respond (MTTR). Watch this video from re:Invent 2023 to understand how SEEK improved its incident response. Prior to using Security Lake, SEEK had to rely on a legacy VPC Flow Logs system to identify possible indicators of compromise, which took a long time. With Security Lake, the company was able to more quickly identify a host in one of their accounts that was communicating with a malicious IP. Now, Security Lake has provided SEEK with swift access to comprehensive data across diverse environments, facilitating forensic investigations and enabling them scale their security operations better.

Optimize your log retention strategy

Security Lake simplifies data management for customers who need to store large volumes of security logs to meet compliance requirements. It provides customizable retention settings and automated storage tiering to optimize storage costs and security analytics. It automatically partitions and converts incoming security data into a storage and query-efficient Apache Parquet format. Security Lake uses the Apache Iceberg open table format to enhance query performance for your security analytics. Customers can now choose which logs to keep for compliance reasons, which logs to send to their analytics solutions for further analysis, and which logs to query in place for incident investigation use cases. Security Lake helps customers to retain logs that were previously unfeasible to store and to extend storage beyond their typical retention policy, within their security information and event management (SIEM) system.

Figure 2 shows a section of the Security Lake activation page, which presents users with options to set rollup AWS Regions and storage classes.

Figure 2: Security Lake activation page with options to select a roll-up Region and set storage classes

Figure 2: Security Lake activation page with options to select a roll-up Region and set storage classes

For example, Carrier, an intelligent climate and energy solutions company, relies on Security Lake to strengthen its security and governance practices. By using Security Lake, Carrier can adhere to compliance with industry standards and regulations, safeguarding its operations and optimizing its log retention.

“Amazon Security Lake simplifies the process of ingesting and analyzing all our security-related log and findings data into a single data lake, strengthening our enterprise-level security and governance practices. This streamlined approach has enhanced our ability to identify and address potential issues within our environment more effectively, enabling us to proactively implement mitigations based on insights derived from the service,” — Justin McDowell, Associate Director for Enterprise Cloud Services at Carrier

Proactive threat and vulnerability detection

Security Lake helps customers identify potential threats and vulnerabilities earlier in the development process by facilitating the correlation of security events across different data sources, allowing security analysts to identify complex attack patterns more effectively. This proactive approach shifts the responsibility for maintaining secure coding and infrastructure to earlier phases, enhancing overall security posture. Security Lake can also optimize security operations by automating safeguard protocols and involving engineering teams in decision-making, validation, and remediation processes. Also, by seamlessly integrating with security orchestration tools, Security Lake can help expedite responses to security incidents and preemptively help mitigate vulnerabilities before exploitation occurs.

For example, SPH Media, a Singapore media company, uses Security Lake to get better visibility into security activity across their organization, enabling proactive identification of potential threats and vulnerabilities.

Security Lake and generative AI for threat hunting and incident response practices

Centralizing security-related data allows organizations to efficiently analyze behaviors from systems and users across their environments, providing deeper insight into potential risks. With Security Lake, customers can centralize their security logs and have them stored in a standardized format using OCSF. OCSF implements a well-documented schema maintained at schema.ocsf.io, which generative AI can use to contextualize the structured data within Security Lake tables. Security personnel can then ask questions of the data using familiar security investigation terminology rather than needing data analytics skills to translate an otherwise simple question into complex SQL (Structured Query Language) queries. Building upon the previous processes, Amazon Bedrock then takes an organization’s natural language incident response playbooks and converts them into a sequence of queries capable of automating what would otherwise be manual investigation tasks.

“Organizations can benefit from using Amazon Security Lake to centralize and manage security data with the OCSF and Apache Parquet format. It simplifies the integration of disparate security log sources and findings, reducing complexity and cost. By applying generative AI to Security Lake data, SecOps can streamline security investigations, facilitate timely responses, and enhance their overall security,” — Phil Bues, Research Manager, Cloud Security at IDC

Enhance incident response workflow with contextual alerts

Incident responders commonly deal with a high volume of automatically generated alerts from their IT environment. Initially, the response team members sift through numerous log sources to uncover relevant details about affected resources and the causes of alerts, which adds time to the remediation process. This manual process also consumes valuable analyst time, particularly if the alert turns out to be a false positive.

To reduce this burden on incident responders, customers can use generative AI to perform initial investigations and generate human-readable context from alerts. Amazon QuickSight Q is a generative AI–powered assistant that can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in your enterprise systems. Incident responders can now combine these capabilities with data in Amazon Security Lake to begin their investigation and build detailed dashboards in minutes. This allows them to visually identify resources and activities that could potentially trigger alerts, giving incident responders a head start in their response efforts. The approach can also be used to validate alert information against alternative sources, enabling faster identification of false positives and allowing responders to focus on genuine security incidents.

As natural language processing (NLP) models evolve they can also interpret incident response playbooks, often written in a human-readable, step-by-step format. Amazon Q Apps will enable the incident responder to use natural language to quickly and securely build their own generative AI playbooks to automate their tasks. This automation can streamline incident response tasks such as creating tickets in the relevant ticketing system, logging bugs in the version control system that hosts application code, and tagging resources as non-compliant if they fail to adhere to the organization’s IT security policy.

Incident investigation with automatic dashboard generation

By using Amazon QuickSight Q and data in Security Lake, incident responders can now generate customized visuals based on the specific characteristics and context of the incident they are investigating. The incident response team can start with a generic investigative question and automatically produce dashboards without writing SQL queries or learning the complexities of how to build a dashboard.

After building a topic in Amazon QuickSight Q. The investigator can either ask their own question or utilize the AI generated questions that Q has provided. In the example shown in Figure 3, the incident responder suspects a potential security incident and is seeking more information about Create or Update API calls in their environment, by asking ” I’m looking for what accounts ran an update or create api call in the last week, can you display the API Operation?

Figure 3: AI Generated visual to begin the investigation

Figure 3: AI Generated visual to begin the investigation

This automatically generated dashboard can be saved for later and from this dashboard the investigator can just focus on one account with a simple right click and get more information about the API calls performed by a single account. as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Investigating API calls for a single account

Figure 4: Investigating API calls for a single account

Using the centralized security data in Amazon Security Lake and Amazon QuickSight Q, incident responders can jump-start investigations and rapidly validate potential threats without having to write complex queries or manually construct dashboards.

Updates since GA launch

Security Lake makes it simpler to analyze security data, gain a more comprehensive understanding of security across your entire organization, and improve the protection of your workloads, applications, and data. Since the general availability release in 2023, we have made various updates to the service. It’s now available in 17 AWS Regions globally. To assist you in evaluating your current and future Security Lake usage and cost estimates, we’ve introduced a new usage page. If you’re currently in a 15-day free trial, your trial usage can serve as a reference for estimating post-trial costs. Accessing Security Lake usage and projected costs is as simple as logging into the Security Lake console.

We have released an integration with Amazon Detective that enables querying and retrieving logs stored in Security Lake. Detective begins pulling raw logs from Security Lake related to AWS CloudTrail management events and Amazon VPC Flow Logs. Security Lake enhances analytics performance with support for OCSF 1.1.0 and Apache Iceberg. Also, Security Lake has integrated several OCSF mapping enhancements, including OCSF Observables, and has adopted the latest version of the OCSF datetime profile for improved usability. Security Lake seamlessly centralizes and normalizes Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) audit logs, simplifying monitoring and investigation of potential suspicious activities in your Amazon EKS clusters, without requiring additional setup or affecting existing configurations.

Developments in Partner integrations

Over 100 sources of data are available in Security Lake from AWS and third-party sources. Customers can ingest logs into Security Lake directly from their sources. Security findings from over 50 partners are available through AWS Security Hub, and software as a service (SaaS) application logs from popular platforms such as Salesforce, Slack, and Smartsheet can be sent into Security Lake through AWS AppFabric. Since the GA launch, Security Lake has added 18 partner integrations, and we now offer over 70 direct partner integrations. New source integrations include AIShield by Bosch, Contrast Security, DataBahn, Monad, SailPoint, Sysdig, and Talon. New subscribers who have built integrations include Cyber Security Cloud, Devo, Elastic, Palo Alto Networks, Panther, Query.AI, Securonix, and Tego Cyber and new service partner offerings from Accenture, CMD Solutions, part of Mantel Group, Deloitte, Eviden, HOOP Cyber, Kyndryl, Kudelski Security, Infosys, Leidos, Megazone, PwC and Wipro.

Developments in the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework

The OCSF community has grown over the last year to almost 200 participants across security-focused independent software vendors (ISVs), government agencies, educational institutions, and enterprises. Leading cybersecurity organizations have contributed to the OCSF schema, such as Tanium and Cisco Duo. Many existing Security Lake partners are adding support for OCSF version 1.1, including Confluent, Cribl, CyberArk, DataBahn, Datadog, Elastic, IBM, Netskope, Orca Security, Palo Alto Networks, Panther, Ripjar, Securonix, SentinelOne, SOC Prime, Sumo Logic, Splunk, Tanium, Tego Cyber, Torq, Trellix, Stellar Cyber, Query.AI, Swimlane, and more. Members of the OCSF community who want to validate their OCSF schema for Security Lake have access to a validation script on GitHub.

Get help from AWS Professional Services

The global team of experts in the AWS Professional Services organization can help customers realize their desired business outcomes with AWS. Our teams of data architects and security engineers collaborate with customer security, IT, and business leaders to develop enterprise solutions.

The AWS ProServe Amazon Security Lake Assessment offering is a complimentary workshop for customers. It entails a two-week interactive assessment, delving deep into customer use cases and creating a program roadmap to implement Security Lake alongside a suite of analytics solutions. Through a series of technical and strategic discussions, the AWS ProServe team analyzes use cases for data storage, security, search, visualization, analytics, AI/ML, and generative AI. The team then recommends a target future state architecture to achieve the customer’s security operations goals. At the end of the workshop, customers receive a draft architecture and implementation plan, along with infrastructure cost estimates, training, and other technical recommendations.

Summary

In this post, we showcased how customers use Security Lake to collect, query, and centralize logs on AWS. We discussed new applications for Security Lake and generative AI for threat hunting and incident response. We invite you to discover the benefits of using Security Lake through our 15-day free trial and share your feedback. To help you in getting started and building your first security data lake, we offer a range of resources including an infographic, eBook, demo videos, and webinars. There are many different use cases for Security Lake that can be tailored to suit your AWS environment. Join us at AWS re:Inforce 2024, our annual cloud security event, for more insights and firsthand experiences of how Security Lake can help you centralize, normalize, and optimize your security data.

 
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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Nisha Amthul

Nisha Amthul

Nisha is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at AWS Security, specializing in detection and response solutions. She has a strong foundation in product management and product marketing within the domains of information security and data protection. When not at work, you’ll find her cake decorating, strength training, and chasing after her two energetic kiddos, embracing the joys of motherhood.

Author

Ross Warren

Ross is a Senior Product SA at AWS for Amazon Security Lake based in Northern Virginia. Prior to his work at AWS, Ross’ areas of focus included cyber threat hunting and security operations. Outside of work, he likes to spend time with his family, bake bread, make sawdust and enjoy time outside.

Jonathan Garzon

Jonathan Garzon

Jonathan is a Principal Product Manager at AWS with a passion for building products with delightful customer experiences and solving complex problems. He has launched and managed products in various domains, including networking, cybersecurity, and data analytics. Outside of work, Jonathan enjoys spending time with friends and family, playing soccer, mountain biking, hiking, and playing the guitar.

AWS achieves Spain’s ENS High 311/2022 certification across 172 services

Post Syndicated from Daniel Fuertes original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-spains-ens-high-311-2022-certification-across-172-services/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has recently renewed the Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS) High certification, upgrading to the latest version regulated under Royal Decree 311/2022. The ENS establishes security standards that apply to government agencies and public organizations in Spain and service providers on which Spanish public services depend.

This security framework has gone through significant updates since the Royal Decree 3/2010 to the latest Royal Decree 311/2022 to adapt to evolving cybersecurity threats and technologies. The current scheme defines basic requirements and lists additional security reinforcements to meet the bar of the different security levels (Low, Medium, High).

Achieving the ENS High certification for its 311/2022 version underscores AWS commitment to maintaining robust cybersecurity controls and highlights our proactive approach to cybersecurity.

We are happy to announce the addition of 14 services to the scope of our ENS certification, for a new total of 172 services in scope. The certification now covers 31 Regions. Some of the additional services in scope for ENS High include the following:

  • Amazon Bedrock – This fully managed service offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities you need to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI.
  • Amazon EventBridge – Use this service to easily build loosely coupled, event-driven architectures. It creates point-to-point integrations between event producers and consumers without needing to write custom code or manage and provision servers.
  • AWS HealthOmics – This service helps healthcare and life science organizations and their software partners store, query, and analyze genomic, transcriptomic, and other omics data and then uses that data to generate insights to improve health.
  • AWS Signer – This is a fully managed code-signing service to ensure the trust and integrity of your code. AWS Signer manages the code-signing certificate’s public and private keys and enables central management of the code-signing lifecycle.
  • AWS Wickr – This service encrypts messages, calls, and files with a 256-bit end-to-end encryption protocol. Only the intended recipients and the customer organization can decrypt these communications, reducing the risk of adversary-in-the-middle attacks.

AWS achievement of the ENS High certification is verified by BDO Auditores S.L.P., which conducted an independent audit and confirmed that AWS continues to adhere to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability standards at its highest level as described in Royal Decree 311/2022.

AWS has also updated the existing eight Security configuration guidelines that map the ENS controls to the AWS Well-Architected Framework and provides guidance relating to the following topics: compliance profile, secure configuration, Prowler quick guide, hybrid connectivity, multi-account environments, Amazon WorkSpaces, incident response and monitorization and governance. AWS has also supported Prowler to offer new functionalities and to include the latest controls of the ENS.

For more information about ENS High and the AWS Security configuration guidelines, see the AWS Compliance page Esquema Nacional de Seguridad High. To view the complete list of services included in the scope, see the AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program – Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS) page. You can download the ENS High Certificate from AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console or from Esquema Nacional de Seguridad High.

As always, we are committed to bringing new services into the scope of our ENS High program based on your architectural and regulatory needs. If you have questions about the ENS program, reach out to your AWS account team or contact AWS Compliance.

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

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Daniel Fuertes

Daniel Fuertes

Daniel is a security audit program manager at AWS based in Madrid, Spain. Daniel leads multiple security audits, attestations, and certification programs in Spain and other EMEA countries. Daniel has ten years of experience in security assurance and compliance, including previous experience as an auditor for the PCI DSS security framework. He also holds the CISSP, PCIP, and ISO 27001 Lead Auditor certifications.

Borja Larrumbide

Borja Larrumbide

Borja is a Security Assurance Manager for AWS in Spain and Portugal. He received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Boston University (USA). Since then, he has worked at companies such as Microsoft and BBVA. Borja is a seasoned security assurance practitioner with many years of experience engaging key stakeholders at national and international levels. His areas of interest include security, privacy, risk management, and compliance.

AWS is issued a renewed certificate for the BIO Thema-uitwerking Clouddiensten with increased scope

Post Syndicated from Ka Yie Lee original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-is-issued-a-renewed-certificate-for-the-bio-thema-uitwerking-clouddiensten-with-increased-scope/

We’re pleased to announce that Amazon Web Services (AWS) demonstrated continuous compliance with the Baseline Informatiebeveiliging Overheid (BIO) Thema-uitwerking Clouddiensten while increasing the AWS services and AWS Regions in scope. This alignment with the BIO Thema-uitwerking Clouddiensten requirements demonstrates our commitment to adhere to the heightened expectations for cloud service providers.

AWS customers across the Dutch public sector can use AWS certified services with confidence, knowing that the AWS services listed in the certificate adhere to the strict requirements imposed on the consumption of cloud-based services.

Baseline Informatiebeveiliging Overheid (BIO)

The BIO framework is an information security framework that the four layers of the Dutch public sector are required to adhere to. This means that it’s mandatory for the Dutch central government, all provinces, municipalities, and regional water authorities to be compliant with the BIO framework.

To support AWS customers in demonstrating their compliance with the BIO framework, AWS developed a Landing Zone for the BIO framework. This Landing Zone for the BIO framework is a pre-configured AWS environment that includes a subset of the technical requirements of the BIO framework. It’s a helpful tool that provides a starting point from which customers can further build their own AWS environment.

For more information regarding the Landing Zone for the BIO framework, see the AWS Reference Guide for Dutch BIO Framework and BIO Theme-elaboration Cloud Services in AWS Artifact. You can also reach out to your AWS account team or contact AWS through the Contact Us page.

Baseline Informatiebeveiliging Overheid Thema-uitwerking Clouddiensten

In addition to the BIO framework, there’s another information security framework designed specifically for the use of cloud services, called BIO Thema-uitwerking Clouddiensten. The BIO Thema-uitwerking Clouddiensten is a guidance document for Dutch cloud service consumers to help them formulate controls and objectives when using cloud services. Consumers can consider it to be an additional control framework on top of the BIO framework.

AWS was evaluated by the monitoring body, EY CertifyPoint, in March 2024, and it was determined that AWS successfully demonstrated compliance for eight AWS services in total. In addition to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which were assessed as compliant in March 2023; Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon GuardDuty, AWS LambdaAWS Config and AWS CloudTrail are added to the scope. The renewed Certificate of Compliance illustrating the compliance status of AWS and the assessment summary report from EY CertifyPoint are available on AWS Artifact. The certificate is available in Dutch and English.

For more information regarding the BIO Thema-uitwerking Clouddiensten, see the AWS Reference Guide for Dutch BIO Framework and BIO Theme-elaboration Cloud Services in AWS Artifact. You can also reach out to your AWS account team or contact AWS through the Contact Us page.

AWS strives to continuously bring services into scope of its compliance programs to help you meet your architectural and regulatory needs.

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

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

Ka Yie Lee

Ka Yie Lee

Ka Yie is a Security Assurance Specialist for the Benelux region at AWS, based in Amsterdam. She engages with regulators and industry groups in the Netherlands and Belgium. She also helps ensure that AWS addresses local information security frameworks. Ka Yie holds master’s degrees in Accounting, Auditing and Control, and Commercial and Company Law. She also holds professional certifications such as CISSP.

Gokhan Akyuz

Gokhan Akyuz

Gokhan is a Security Audit Program Manager at AWS, based in Amsterdam. He leads security audits, attestations, and certification programs across Europe and the Middle East. He has 17 years of experience in IT and cybersecurity audits, IT risk management, and controls implementation in a wide range of industries.