Tag Archives: Security, Identity & Compliance

New AWS Shield feature discovers network security issues before they can be exploited (Preview)

Post Syndicated from Esra Kayabali original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-shield-feature-discovers-network-security-issues-before-they-can-be-exploited-preview/

Today, I’m happy to announce AWS Shield network security director (preview), a capability that simplifies identification of configuration issues related to threats such as SQL injections and distributed denial of service (DDoS) events, and proposes remediations. This feature identifies and analyzes network resources, connections, and configurations. It compares them against AWS best practices to create a network topology that highlights resources requiring protection.

Organizations today face significant challenges in maintaining a robust network security posture. Security teams often struggle to efficiently discover all resources in their environments, understand how these resources are interconnected, and identify which security services are currently configured. Additionally, they find determining how well resources are configured relative to AWS best practices requires considerable expertise and effort. Many teams find it difficult to identify which network security services and rule sets would best protect their applications from common and emerging threats.

AWS Shield network security director addresses these challenges through three key capabilities. First, it performs comprehensive analysis to discover resources across your AWS accounts, identify connectivity between resources, and determine which network security services and configurations are currently in place. Second, it prioritizes resources by severity level based on AWS network security best practices and threat intelligence. Finally, it provides specific remediation recommendations such as step-by-step instructions for implementing the right AWS security services, including AWS WAF, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) security groups, and Amazon VPC network access control lists (ACLs) to protect your resources.

The service supports critical network security use cases, including protecting applications against internet-born threats and controlling human access to resources based on port, protocol, or IP address range. It provides network analysis to discover assets and delivers analysis that eliminates time-consuming manual processes for identifying resources that need protection. The service offers resource prioritization by assigning security findings a severity level based on network context and adherence to AWS best practices, helping you focus on what matters most. Additionally, it supplies actionable recommendations with specific guidance on which services and configurations will address each security gap. You can also get answers, in natural language, from AWS Shield network security director from within Amazon Q Developer in the AWS Management Console and chat applications.

Getting started with AWS Shield network security director
To use AWS Shield network security director, I need to initiate a network analysis of my AWS resources. I go to the AWS WAF & Shield console and choose Getting started under AWS Shield network security director in the navigation pane. I choose Get started, which takes me to the configuration page. On this page, I can choose how to perform my first network analysis: I can assess findings from across all supported Regions or from my current Region only. I select Start network analysis.

After the analysis is completed, the dashboard page shows a breakdown of resource types by severity level and the most common categories of network security findings associated with their resources. Resources are categorized by type and severity level (critical, high, medium, low, informational), making it easy to identify which areas need immediate attention.

Next, I explore the Resources section to understand the distribution of my assets and filter by severity level in my environment. I can use Resource overview to review a specific severity level, which will redirect me to the Resources under Network security director with the associated severity level filter. I choose the resources that have Medium severity level.

I choose a specific resource to view its network topology map showing how it connects to other resources and associated findings. This visualization helps me understand the potential impact of security configurations and identify exposed paths. I review detailed findings such as “Allows unrestricted inbound access (0.0.0.0/0) on all ports” with severity ratings.

Next, I go to Findings under Network security director, which shows common configuration issues. For each finding, I receive detailed information and recommended remediation steps. The service rates the severity of findings (high, medium, low) to help me prioritize my response. Critical-severity findings such as “CloudFront origin is also internet accessible without CloudFront protections” or high-severity findings such as “Allows unrestricted inbound access (0.0.0.0/0) on all ports” are presented first, followed by medium- and low-severity issues.

You can analyze your network security configurations, in natural language, with AWS Shield network security director within Amazon Q Developer in the AWS Management Console and chat applications. For example, you can say “Do I have any network security issues on my CloudFront distributions?” or “Are any of my resources vulnerable to bots and scrapers?” This integration helps security teams quickly understand their security posture and receive guidance on implementing best practices without having to navigate through extensive documentation.

To explore this capability, I ask “What are my most critical network security issues?” in the Explore with Amazon Q section. Amazon Q analyzes my network security configuration and generates a response based on the security assessment of my AWS environment.

With this comprehensive view of your network security, you can now make data-driven decisions to strengthen your defenses against emerging threats.

Join the preview
AWS Shield network security director is available in the US East (N. Virginia) and Europe (Stockholm) Regions. The Amazon Q Developer capability to analyze network security configurations is available in preview in US East (N. Virginia). To begin strengthening your network security, visit the AWS Shield network security director console and initiate your first network security analysis.

For more information, visit the AWS Shield product page.

— Esra

AWS Certificate Manager introduces exportable public SSL/TLS certificates to use anywhere

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun (윤석찬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-certificate-manager-introduces-exportable-public-ssl-tls-certificates-to-use-anywhere/

Today, we’re announcing exportable public SSL/TLS certificates from AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). Prior to this launch, you can issue your public certificates or import certificates issued by third-party certificate authorities (CAs) at no additional cost, and deploy them with integrated AWS services such as Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront distribution, and Amazon API Gateway.

Now you can export public certificates from ACM, get access to the private keys, and use them on any workloads running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, containers, or on-premises hosts. The exportable public certificate are valid for 395 days. There is a charge at time of issuance, and again at time of renewal. Public certificates exported from ACM are issued by Amazon Trust Services and are widely trusted by commonly used platforms such as Apple and Microsoft and popular web browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

ACM exportable public certificates in action
To export a public certificate, you first request a new exportable public certificate. You cannot export previously created public certificates.

To get started, choose Request certificate in the ACM console and choose Enable export in the Allow export section. If you select Disable export, the private key for this certificate will be disallowed for exporting from ACM and this cannot be changed after certificate issuance.

You can also use the request-certificate command to request a public exportable certificate with Export=ENABLED option on the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

aws acm request-certificate \
--domain-name mydomain.com \
--key-algorithm EC_Prime256v1 \
--validation-method DNS \
--idempotency-token <token> \
--options \
CertificateTransparencyLoggingPreference=DISABLED \
Export=ENABLED

After you request the public certificate, you must validate your domain name to prove that you own or control the domain for which you are requesting the certificate. The certificate is typically issued within seconds after successful domain validation.

When the certificate enters status Issued, you can export your issued public certificate by choosing Export.

Export your public certificate

Enter a passphrase for encrypting the private key. You will need the passphrase later to decrypt the private key. To get the public key, Choose Generate PEM Encoding.

You can copy the PEM encoded certificate, certificate chain, and private key or download each to a separate file.

Download PEM keys

You can use the export-certificate command to export a public certificate and private key. For added security, use a file editor to store your passphrase and output keys to a file to prevent being stored in the command history.

aws acm export-certificate \
     --certificate-arn arn:aws:acm:us-east-1:<accountID>:certificate/<certificateID> \
     --passphrase fileb://path-to-passphrase-file \
     | jq -r '"\(.Certificate)\(.CertificateChain)\(.PrivateKey)"' \
     > /tmp/export.txt

You can now use the exported public certificates for any workload that requires SSL/TLS communication such as Amazon EC2 instances. To learn more, visit Configure SSL/TLS on Amazon Linux in your EC2 instances.

Things to know
Here are a couple of things to know about exportable public certificates:

  • Key security – An administrator of your organization can set AWS IAM policies to authorize roles and users who can request exportable public certificates. ACM users who have current rights to issue a certificate will automatically get rights to issue an exportable certificate. ACM admins can also manage the certificates and take actions such as revoking or deleting the certificates. You should protect exported private keys using secure storage and access controls.
  • Revocation – You may need to revoke exportable public certificates to comply with your organization’s policies or mitigate key compromise. You can only revoke the certificates that were previously exported. The certificate revocation process is global and permanent. Once revoked, you can’t retrieve revoked certificates to reuse. To learn more, visit Revoke a public certificate in the AWS documentation.
  • Renewal – You can configure automatic renewal events for exportable public certificates by Amazon EventBridge to monitor certificate renewals and create automation to handle certificate deployment when renewals occur. To learn more, visit Using Amazon EventBridge in the AWS documentation. You can also renew these certificates on-demand. When you renew the certificates, you’re charged for a new certificate issuance. To learn more, visit Force certificate renewal in the AWS documentation.

Now available
You can now issue exportable public certificates from ACM and export the certificate with the private keys to use other compute workloads as well as ELB, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon API Gateway.

You are subject to additional charges for an exportable public certificate when you create it with ACM. It costs $15 per fully qualified domain name and $149 per wildcard domain name. You only pay once during the lifetime of the certificate and will be charged again only when the certificate renews. To learn more, visit the AWS Certificate Manager Service Pricing page.

Give ACM exportable public certificates a try in the ACM console. To learn more, visit the ACM Documentation page and send feedback to AWS re:Post for ACM or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

Verify internal access to critical AWS resources with new IAM Access Analyzer capabilities

Post Syndicated from Micah Walter original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/verify-internal-access-to-critical-aws-resources-with-new-iam-access-analyzer-capabilities/

Today, we’re announcing a new capability in AWS IAM Access Analyzer that helps security teams verify which AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and users have access to their critical AWS resources. This new feature provides comprehensive visibility into access granted from within your Amazon Web Services (AWS) organization, complementing the existing external access analysis.

Security teams in regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, need to verify access to sensitive data stores like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets containing credit card information or healthcare records. Previously, teams had to invest considerable time and resources conducting manual reviews of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies or rely on pattern-matching tools to understand internal access patterns.

The new IAM Access Analyzer internal access findings identify who within your AWS organization has access to your critical AWS resources. It uses automated reasoning to collectively evaluate multiple policies, including service control policies (SCPs), resource control policies (RCPs), and identity-based policies, and generates findings when a user or role has access to your S3 buckets, Amazon DynamoDB tables, or Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) snapshots. The findings are aggregated in a unified dashboard, simplifying access review and management. You can use Amazon EventBridge to automatically notify development teams of new findings to remove unintended access. Internal access findings provide security teams with the visibility to strengthen access controls on their critical resources and help compliance teams demonstrate access control audit requirements.

Let’s try it out

To begin using this new capability, you can enable IAM Access Analyzer to monitor specific resources using the AWS Management Console. Navigate to IAM and select Analyzer settings under the Access reports section of the left-hand navigation menu. From here, select Create analyzer.

Screenshot of creating an Analyzer in the AWS Console

From the Create analyzer page, select the option of Resource analysis – Internal access. Under Analyzer details, you can customize your analyzer’s name to whatever you prefer or use the automatically generated name. Next, you need to select your Zone of trust. If your account is the management account for an AWS organization, you can choose to monitor resources across all accounts within your organization or the current account you’re logged in to. If your account is a member account of an AWS organization or a standalone account, then you can monitor resources within your account.

The zone of trust also determines which IAM roles and users are considered in scope for analysis. An organization zone of trust analyzer evaluates all IAM roles and users in the organization for potential access to a resource, whereas an account zone of trust only evaluates the IAM roles and users in that account.

For this first example, we assume our account is the management account and create an analyzer with the organization as the zone of trust.

Screenshot of creating an Analyzer in the AWS Console

Next, we need to select the resources we wish to analyze. Selecting Add resources gives us three options. Let’s first examine how we can select resources by identifying the account and resource type for analysis.

Screenshot of creating an Analyzer in the AWS Console

You can use Add resources by account dialog to choose resource types through a new interface. Here, we select All supported resource types and select the accounts we wish to monitor. This will create an analyzer that monitors all supported resource types. You can either select accounts through the organization structure (shown in the following screenshot) or paste in account IDs using the Enter AWS account ID option.

Screenshot of creating an Analyzer in the AWS Console

You can also choose to use the Define specific resource types dialog, which you can use to pick from a list of supported resource types (as shown in the following screenshot). By creating an analyzer with this configuration, IAM Access Analyzer will continually monitor both existing and new resources of the selected type within the account, checking for internal access.

Screenshot of creating an Analyzer in the AWS Console

After you’ve completed your selections, choose Add resources.

Screenshot of creating an Analyzer in the AWS Console

Alternatively, you can use the Add resources by resource ARN option.

Screenshot of creating an Analyzer in the AWS Console

Or you can use the Add resources by uploading a CSV file option to configure monitoring a list of specific resources at scale.

Screenshot of creating an Analyzer in the AWS Console

After you’ve completed the creation of your analyzer, IAM Access Analyzer will analyze policies daily and generate findings that show access granted to IAM roles and users within your organization. The updated IAM Access Analyzer dashboard now provides a resource-centric view. The Active findings section summarizes access into three distinct categories: public access, external access outside of the organization (requires creation of a separate external access analyzer), and access within the organization. The Key resources section highlights the top resources with active findings across the three categories. You can see a list of all analyzed resources by selecting View all active findings or Resource analysis on the left-hand navigation menu.

Screenshot of Access Analyzer findings

On the Resource analysis page, you can filter the list of all analyzed resources for further analysis.

Screenshot of creating an Analyzer in the AWS Console

When you select a specific resource, any available external access and internal access findings are listed on the Resource details page. Use this feature to evaluate all possible access to your selected resource. For each finding, IAM Access Analyzer provides you with detailed information about allowed IAM actions and their conditions, including the impact of any applicable SCPs and RCPs. This means you can verify that access is appropriately restricted and meets least-privilege requirements.

Screenshot of creating an Analyzer in the AWS Console

Pricing and availability

This new IAM Access Analyzer capability is available today in all commercial Regions. Pricing is based on the number of critical AWS resources monitored per month. External access analysis remains available at no additional charge. Pricing for EventBridge applies separately.

To learn more about IAM Access Analyzer and get started with analyzing internal access to your critical resources, visit the IAM Access Analyzer documentation.

Introducing the new console experience for AWS WAF

Post Syndicated from Harith Gaddamanugu original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/introducing-the-new-console-experience-for-aws-waf/

Protecting publicly facing web applications can be challenging due to the constantly evolving threat landscape. You must defend against sophisticated threats, including zero-day vulnerabilities, automated events, and changing compliance requirements. Navigating through consoles and selecting the protections best suited to your use case can be complicated, requiring not only security expertise but also a deep understanding of the applications you want to protect.

Today, we’re excited to share that AWS WAF has launched a new console experience designed to simplify security configuration. This enhanced interface provides an integrated security solution that provides comprehensive protection across your application landscape, featuring a streamlined single-page workflow that can reduce deployment time from hours to minutes. AWS WAF now provides pre-configured rule packs for specific workloads, automated security recommendations, and a unified dashboard for clear visibility into security status. The new console also offers flexible protection levels and integrated partner solutions to help you scale security operations effectively.

In this post, we walk you through the features of the enhanced console experience for AWS WAF. You can now select your workload type to automatically apply expert-curated protection packs, helping to maintain comprehensive protection across your workloads.

Reduce web application security implementation steps by 80 percent

The simplified interface consolidates the configuration steps into a single page, reducing the need to navigate through multiple pages. This consolidation creates an intuitive workflow that significantly reduces setup complexity. You can complete configurations that previously took hours within minutes, representing an 80 percent reduction in implementation time.

The new experience offers pre-configured security defaults and documentation, helping users of all technical abilities to effectively secure applications. When starting the setup process, you select the application category and feature focus to protect an API or web application, and AWS WAF automatically customizes the protection parameters accordingly.

AWS WAF now also integrates with AWS Marketplace through a dedicated page for direct deployment of partner solutions.

This streamlined approach, shown in Figure 1, transforms what was previously a complex, time-consuming process into a straightforward, efficient workflow that maintains robust security standards while dramatically reducing implementation time and potential configuration errors.

Figure 1: Workload specific protection

Figure 1: Workload specific protection

Simplified AWS WAF rule deployment through protection packs

AWS WAF simplifies security deployment through three configuration options, each based on AWS security expertise and ready for immediate implementation. These protection packs provide comprehensive configuration optimized for various application types.

  • Recommended: Enables recommended protections for the selected application categories and traffic sources
  • Essentials: Enables essential protections for the selected application categories and traffic sources
  • You build it: Select and customize protections from the available options to fit your needs

Implementation requires a single step: selecting the appropriate protection pack based on your security needs, as shown in Figure 2. This approach minimizes complex configurations while maintaining security standards.

Figure 2: Choosing a rule package during AWS WAF onboarding

Figure 2: Choosing a rule package during AWS WAF onboarding

Real-time monitoring, automated recommendations, and protection activity visualization

The new console features an outcome-driven dashboard, shown in Figure 3, that simplifies security monitoring by consolidating threat detection metrics, rule performance analytics, and actionable insights into a single view. Security teams can now respond to threats faster without having to navigate through multiple screens.

Figure 3: Resources and protections dashboard

Figure 3: Resources and protections dashboard

AWS Threat Intelligence enhances monitoring capabilities by analyzing two weeks of allowed traffic patterns to proactively identify potential vulnerabilities. The service examines critical traffic dimensions including IP reputation, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, bot activities, anonymous IP sources, and vulnerable application traffic. When AWS WAF detects vulnerabilities, it recommends specific AWS Managed Rules to strengthen your security posture, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Automated recommendations dashboard

Figure 4: Automated recommendations dashboard

The new real-time monitoring dashboard, as shown in Figure 5, offers comprehensive security insights at a glance. It displays request counts for traffic within your specified time range and summarizes protection rules with their corresponding termination actions. A standout feature is the Sankey visualization, which maps protection activity to AWS WAF actions, helping security teams track traffic flow, identify rule interaction patterns, and optimize configurations.

Figure 5: Summary and protection activity visualization dashboard

Figure 5: Summary and protection activity visualization dashboard

Outcome driven dashboards for actionable insights

The new dashboard, shown in Figure 6, displays security metrics based on business impact. The left panel contains four main categories: traffic, bot, rule, and CAPTCHA characteristics. The right panel shows metrics within each category. Under Traffic characteristics, you can view metrics by countries, attack types, and device types.

Figure 6: New, outcome-driven dashboard

Figure 6: New, outcome-driven dashboard

Bot characteristics include detection ratio, categories, token information, signals, session thresholds, IP token reuse thresholds, and coordinated activity. Rule characteristics highlight the top 10 managed rules, while CAPTCHA characteristics show solved, abandoned, and unsolved puzzle metrics. This organized structure helps you analyze data effectively, starting with category selection and progressing to rule evaluation. You can combine categories and metrics to visualize patterns, investigate incidents, and make informed decisions. Interactive features, such as IP blocking on hover, enable immediate action. The new console experience allows you to quickly identify threats, optimize WAF rules, and maintain effective security controls based on specific needs.

Query logs from the console

The new AWS WAF console features an integrated log explorer. You can access two analysis options from the bottom of the new console page: sampled requests for immediate review or log explorer for detailed analysis. The log explorer, shown in Figure 7, requires Amazon CloudWatch logging and provides pre-built filters for rule actions and time frames, enabling quick pattern identification and trend analysis. If CloudWatch logging isn’t enabled, you can still analyze security events through sampled requests.

Figure 7: New log explorer view for traffic analysis

Figure 7: New log explorer view for traffic analysis

Availability and pricing

Starting today, these dashboards are available by default in the AWS WAF console at no additional cost to you and require no additional setup to be completed.

Customer success

Early adopters are already seeing significant benefits. Sarah Chen, Security Engineer at National Retail Corporation, reports: “With the new console, we configured protection for our PHP applications in under 10 minutes. The rule recommendations helped us identify and block sophisticated attacks targeting our applications, reducing our security incidents by 60 percent in the first month.”

Conclusion

By combining intelligent monitoring, guided configuration, and straightforward access to specialized solutions, our enhanced console helps organizations to maintain robust security postures without the complexity traditionally associated with advanced security management.

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

Harith Gaddamanugu

Harith Gaddamanugu

Harith is a Sr Edge Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, where he architects critical infrastructure and security solutions that serve millions of users globally. With a decade of expertise in cloud perimeter protection and web acceleration, he guides large enterprises building resilient architectures. Outside work, Harith enjoys hiking and landscape photography with his family.

How AWS improves active defense to empower customers

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

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

Stopping malware from spreading

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

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

Advancements in threat hunting and mitigating software vulnerabilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protecting architectures built on AWS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better together

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

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

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

Stephen Goodman

Stephen Goodman

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

Tom Scholl

Tom Scholl

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

How to create post-quantum signatures using AWS KMS and ML-DSA

Post Syndicated from Jake Massimo original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-create-post-quantum-signatures-using-aws-kms-and-ml-dsa/

As the capabilities of quantum computing evolve, AWS is committed to helping our customers stay ahead of emerging threats to public-key cryptography. Today, we’re announcing the integration of FIPS 204: Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard (ML-DSA) into AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Customers can now create and use ML-DSA keys through the same familiar AWS KMS APIs they use today for digital signatures, including CreateKey, Sign, and Verify operations. This new feature is generally available and you can use ML-DSA in the following AWS Regions: US West (N. California), and Europe (Milan) with the remaining commercial Regions to follow in the coming days. This launch is part of our broader AWS post-quantum cryptography migration plan, which we covered in our recent blog post. In this post, we guide you through creating ML-DSA keys and post-quantum signatures with AWS KMS.

Many organizations use AWS KMS to cryptographically sign firmware, operating systems, applications, or other artifacts. With ML-DSA support in AWS KMS, you can now generate and use post-quantum keys for signing operations within FIPS-140-3 Level 3 certified HSMs. By implementing ML-DSA signatures now, you can help make sure that your systems remain secure throughout their operational lifetime, even if cryptographically relevant quantum computers become available. This is especially important for manufacturers who install long-lived roots of trust during production—whether embedded directly in hardware or in devices that might remain offline for extended periods. In both cases, cryptographic signatures cannot be easily updated after deployment, making post-quantum readiness critical for the entire operational lifetime of these systems.

What’s new

AWS KMS offers three new AWS KMS key specs: ML_DSA_44, ML_DSA_65, and ML_DSA_87, which you can use with the new post-quantum SigningAlgorithm ML_DSA_SHAKE_256. Like our other signing algorithms, this name includes the hash function that’s used within the signature scheme to digest messages before signing or verification. In this case, the hash function used is SHAKE256—part of the SHA-3 family of hash functions standardized by NIST in FIPS 202.

Table 1 shows the details for each key spec, including their NIST security categories and corresponding key sizes in bytes. Each ML-DSA key spec represents a balance between security strength and resource requirements. ML-DSA-44 is suitable for applications requiring security comparable to classical 128-bit encryption, while ML-DSA-65 and ML-DSA-87 provide progressively stronger security levels equivalent to classical 192-bit and 256-bit encryption, respectively. As you move up in security levels, you’ll notice corresponding increases in key and signature sizes, enabling you to choose the key spec that best matches your security needs and engineering constraints.

Key spec NIST security Level Public key (B) Private key (B) Signature (B)
ML_DSA_44 1 (equivalent to 128-bit security) 1312 2560 2420
ML_DSA_65 3 (equivalent to 192-bit security) 1952 4032 3309
ML_DSA_87 5 (equivalent to 256-bit security) 2592 4896 4627

When using the AWS KMS Sign API with a RAW MessageType, the message to be signed is limited to 4096 bytes. For messages larger than 4096 bytes, pre-processing the message outside of AWS KMS to create what’s known as µ (mu) is required to generate a smaller-sized message input to the KMS Sign API. This external mu process pre-digests the message using the public key of the ML-DSA signing key pair to create a message size of 64 bytes. To support this launch, we’ve added a new message type in the KMS Sign API—EXTERNAL_MU—that can be used with ML-DSA signing or verification calls to indicate when a message has been pre-processed using µ (mu) before submitted to AWS KMS.

In the following sections, we include more information about constructing external mu and demonstrate basic AWS KMS operations with ML-DSA. We cover key creation, signature generation and verification, and both RAW and EXTERNAL_MU signing modes. Note that the produced RAW or EXTERNAL_MU ML-DSA signatures are identical when the same message and signing key are used.

Creating ML-DSA keys

To start, create an asymmetric AWS KMS key using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) example command:

aws kms create-key --key-spec ML_DSA_65 --key-usage SIGN_VERIFY

This command will return a response similar to the following:

{
    "KeyMetadata": {
        "Origin": "AWS_KMS",
        "KeyId": "1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab",
        "MultiRegion": false,
        "Description": "",
        "KeyManager": "CUSTOMER",
        "Enabled": true,
        "SigningAlgorithms": [
            "ML_DSA_SHAKE_256"
        ],
        "CustomerMasterKeySpec": "ML_DSA_65",
        "KeyUsage": "SIGN_VERIFY",
        "KeySpec": "ML_DSA_65",
        "KeyState": "Enabled",
        "CreationDate": 1748371316.734,
        "Arn": "arn:aws:kms:us-west-2:111122223333:key/1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab",
        "AWSAccountId": "111122223333"
    }
}

Make note of the KeyId or Arn value from the response; you’ll need this to reference your key in subsequent signing operations. The response confirms that the creation of an ML_DSA_65 key configured for SIGN_VERIFY operations, which will use the ML_DSA_SHAKE_256 signing algorithm for signature operations.

Signing

In this section, we include some examples of ML-DSA signing and verifying a JSON Web Token (JWT) commonly used to transfer claims between parties for web authorization. In 2021, we described how to sign and verify JWTs with Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), a classic asymmetric cryptographic algorithm (see How to verify AWS KMS signatures in decoupled architectures at scale). In the following examples, the token is instead signed with an ML-DSA private key managed by AWS KMS and verified either within AWS KMS or externally using OpenSSL.

The JWT content to be signed is from section 3.1 of RFC7519. More specifically, the JWT header is:

{"typ":"JWT",
 "alg":"ML-DSA-65"}

And the JWT claim set is:

{"iss":"joe",
 "exp":1748952000,
 "http://example.com/is_root":true}

You can produce the JWT message to be signed by using the Base64URL encoding of the header and payload as:

echo -n -e '{"typ":"JWT",\015\012 "alg":"ML-DSA-65"}' | \
	basenc --base64url -w 0 | \
	sed 's/=//g' ; echo -n "." ; echo -n -e '{"iss":"joe",\015\012 "exp":1748952000,\015\012 "http://example.com/is_root":true}' | \
	basenc --base64url -w 0 | sed 's/=//g' ; echo ""

This command will output the following Base64 to be signed with ML-DSA:

eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLA0KICJhbGciOiJNTC1EU0EtNjUifQ.eyJpc3MiOiJqb2UiLA0KICJleHAiOjE3NDg5NTIwMDAsDQogImh0dHA6Ly9leGFtcGxlLmNvbS9pc19yb290Ijp0cnVlfQ

Note that the following examples output the ML-DSA signature produced on the message by using the ML-DSA private key managed by AWS KMS in a binary format. You need to convert them to Base64URL to use them in JWT, but various data encryption and signing formats can use these signatures. These include Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS), CBOR Object Signing and Encryption (COSE), or image signing encodings for UEFI and Open Titan. While converting between binary and these formats is straightforward, support for the new algorithms might not be available in common cryptographic implementations of these signing formats at the time of this writing.

RAW ML-DSA signing (no external mu)

To sign a message of less than 4096 bytes in AWS KMS with ML-DSA, you can use the AWS CLI:aws kms sign \

aws kms sign \
    --key-id <1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab> \
    --message ' eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLA0KICJhbGciOiJNTC1EU0EtNjUifQ.eyJpc3MiOiJqb2UiLA0KICJleHAiOjE3NDg5NTIwMDAsDQogImh0dHA6Ly9leGFtcGxlLmNvbS9pc19yb290Ijp0cnVlfQ' \
    --message-type RAW \
    --signing-algorithm ML_DSA_SHAKE_256 \
    --output text \
    --query Signature | base64 --decode > ExampleSignature.bin

Make sure to replace the target-key-id value of <1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab> with your KeyId. This command will produce a signature and write it to disk as ExampleSignature.bin.

After producing the signature, you can create the complete JWT (consisting of header, payload, and signature) with a single command:

echo -n "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLA0KICJhbGciOiJNTC1EU0EtNjUifQ.eyJpc3MiOiJqb2UiLA0KICJleHAiOjE3NDg5NTIwMDAsDQogImh0dHA6Ly9leGFtcGxlLmNvbS9pc19yb290Ijp0cnVlfQ." ; \
	basenc --base64url -w 0 ExampleSignature.bin | \
	sed 's/=//g' ; echo ""

This command will output a ready-to-use JWT in the format required by RFC 7519 and signed using AWS KMS:

eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLA0KICJhbGciOiJNTC1EU0EtNjUifQ.eyJpc3MiOiJqb2UiLA0KICJleHAiOjE3NDg5NTIwMDAsDQogImh0dHA6Ly9leGFtcGxlLmNvbS9pc19yb290Ijp0cnVlfQ.<base64url of the signature as per RFC7519>

External mu ML-DSA signing

Note that AWS KMS imposes a 4096-byte limit on the size of the raw message when using the Sign API to minimize the latency of the response. In cases where the message to be signed is larger than 4096 bytes or if pre-digesting the external mu has performance advantages you need, you must use the EXTERNAL_MU message type instead of RAW in AWS KMS.

Before using the EXTERNAL_MU message type with the AWS KMS Sign API, you must locally perform a pre-hash calculation on your message. So, first, retrieve the public key from AWS KMS, and convert it to DER format using the following command (replace the example key ID with a valid key ID from your AWS account):

aws kms get-public-key \
    --key-id <1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab> \
    --output text \
    --query PublicKey | base64 --decode > public_key.der

To construct the external mu digest:

  1. Construct a message prefix (M`): M` = (domain separator || context length || context || Message).

    In this example, set the domain separator value and context length as zero; this sets the context used in the signature as the empty string, which is the default.

  2. Hash the public key then prepend it to the message prefix:
    (SHAKE256(pk) || M’).
  3. Hash to produce a 64-byte mu:
    Mu = SHAKE256(SHAKE256(pk) || M’)

You can use a single OpenSSL 3.5 command to construct the digest:

{
    openssl asn1parse -inform DER -in public_key.der -strparse 17 -noout -out - 2>/dev/null |
    openssl dgst -provider default -shake256 -xoflen 64 -binary;
    printf '\x00\x00';
    echo -n "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLA0KICJhbGciOiJNTC1EU0EtNjUifQ.eyJpc3MiOiJqb2UiLA0KICJleHAiOjE3NDg5NTIwMDAsDQogImh0dHA6Ly9leGFtcGxlLmNvbS9pc19yb290Ijp0cnVlfQ"
} | openssl dgst -provider default -shake256 -xoflen 64 -binary > mu.bin

Now you can call AWS KMS to sign the 64-byte digest to produce the ML-DSA signature in file ExampleSignature.bin, making sure to set the MessageType to EXTERNAL_MU:

aws kms sign \
    --key-id 1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab \
    --message fileb://mu.bin \
    --message-type EXTERNAL_MU \
    --signing-algorithm ML_DSA_SHAKE_256 \
    --output text \
    --query Signature | base64 --decode > ExampleSignature.bin

The final signed JWT token is identical to the one produced previously in RAW mode.

Signature verification using AWS KMS

In this section, we show you how to verify ML-DSA signatures using AWS KMS or locally in your own environment. We assume that you have an ML-DSA signature in ExampleSignature.bin, produced on the JWT content with the private key in AWS KMS and identified with KEY_ARN.

Note that, although the following examples demonstrate signature verification using public keys directly from AWS KMS, these same principles extend to certificate-based systems, such as a private PKI, in which public keys are embedded in end-entity certificates (of the signer). In such scenarios, verifiers would first verify the identity of the signer by validating the certificate chain ties to a trusted root, then use the public key of the end-entity certificate to verify the ML-DSA signature of the content. The IETF is standardizing ML-DSA for use in X.509 certificates through RFC draft draft-ietf-lamps-dilithium-certificates.

RAW ML-DSA verification

To verify the signature using AWS KMS, you can call the following command, replacing the example key-id with the same one you used to sign.

aws kms verify \
    --key-id <1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab> \
    --message "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLA0KICJhbGciOiJNTC1EU0EtNjUifQ.eyJpc3MiOiJqb2UiLA0KICJleHAiOjE3NDg5NTIwMDAsDQogImh0dHA6Ly9leGFtcGxlLmNvbS9pc19yb290Ijp0cnVlfQ" \
    --message-type RAW \
    --signing-algorithm ML_DSA_SHAKE_256 \
    --signature fileb://ExampleSignature.bin

The response will return:

{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-west-2:111122223333:key/1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab",
    "SignatureValid": true,
    "SigningAlgorithm": "ML_DSA_SHAKE_256"
}

The verification result is stored in the SignatureValid field.

External mu ML-DSA verification

If you have the external mu digest of the JWT content in mu.bin along with the signature and the corresponding keypair in AWS KMS, you can use the digest without having access to the entire message or calculating the digest again.

aws kms verify \
    --key-id <1234abcd-12ab-34cd-56ef-1234567890ab> \
    --message fileb://mu.bin \
    --message-type EXTERNAL_MU \
    --signing-algorithm ML_DSA_SHAKE_256 \
    --signature fileb://ExampleSignature.bin

To regenerate the external mu mu.bin from the message and the public key, see the External mu ML DSA signing section above.

Local signature verification using OpenSSL 3.5

If you want to reduce AWS KMS API consumption costs and better control the use of API quotas while keeping the security of AWS KMS-generated and stored keys for ML-DSA signature generation, you can verify ML-DSA signatures locally, outside of AWS KMS.

In this example, you use OpenSSL 3.5 to verify the signature in ExampleSignature.bin. You first must fetch the DER-encoded public key from AWS KMS in file public_key.der as shown in the External mu ML DSA signing section. OpenSSL 3.5 can then verify the signature on the message by using the public key.

echo -n "eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLA0KICJhbGciOiJNTC1EU0EtNjUifQ.eyJpc3MiOiJqb2UiLA0KICJleHAiOjE3NDg5NTIwMDAsDQogImh0dHA6Ly9leGFtcGxlLmNvbS9pc19yb290Ijp0cnVlfQ" | \
	openssl dgst -verify public_key.der -signature ExampleSignature.bin

Successful verification will output: Verified OK

Conclusion

Today’s launch of ML-DSA support in AWS KMS marks an important milestone in our commitment to post-quantum cryptography. With three different security levels of ML-DSA in both raw and external digest modes, you have flexible options to meet your security requirements while preparing for the quantum computing era. The seamless integration with existing AWS KMS APIs makes it straightforward to incorporate quantum-resistant signatures into your applications today. This implementation is particularly valuable if you need to:

  • Meet FIPS 140-3 compliance requirements when using post-quantum cryptography.
  • Sign code, artifacts, documents or other data that need to remain trusted and verifiable for many years into the future, including the period after cryptographically relevant quantum computers exist.
  • Start post-quantum cryptography testing as part of your application development process using a cryptographic service such as AWS KMS that has previously been approved for use.

Learn more about post-quantum cryptography in general and the overall AWS plan to migrate to post-quantum cryptography.

Jake Massimo

Jake Massimo

Jake is an Applied Scientist on the AWS Cryptography team, where he bridges Amazon with the global cryptographic community through active participation in international conferences, academic research, and standards organizations. His work focuses on advancing the adoption of post-quantum cryptographic technology at cloud scale. Currently, he leads the development of optimized and formally verified post-quantum algorithms within the AWS cryptographic library.

Panos Kampanakis

Panos Kampanakis

Panos has extensive experience with cyber security, applied cryptography, security automation, and vulnerability management. In his professional career, he has trained and presented on various security topics at technical events for numerous years. He has co-authored cybersecurity publications and participated in various security standards bodies to provide common interoperable protocols and languages for security information sharing, cryptography, and PKI.

Mayank Ambaliya

Mayank Ambaliya

Mayank is a Software Development Manager at AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), where he leads development of AWS KMS cryptographic APIs and custom key stores. Mayank has experience developing customer facing cryptographic APIs and cryptographic SDKs for AWS CloudHSM. Recently, he has been working on post-quantum algorithm support in AWS KMS and adding new cryptographic APIs in AWS KMS.t

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

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

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

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

On leveraging AI to improve security outcomes

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

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

On the rise of agentic AI and its implications for security

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

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

On the importance of maintaining human oversight with AI

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

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

On building an AI-savvy security workforce

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

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

On advice for security leaders as AI accelerates

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

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

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

Danielle Ruderman

Danielle Ruderman

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

AWS CIRT announces the launch of the Threat Technique Catalog for AWS

Post Syndicated from Steve de Vera original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-cirt-announces-the-launch-of-the-threat-technique-catalog-for-aws/

Greetings from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (AWS CIRT). AWS CIRT is a 24/7, specialized global Amazon Web Services (AWS) team that provides support to customers during active security events on the customer side of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. We’re excited to announce the launch of the Threat Technique Catalog for AWS.

When the AWS CIRT assists customers with incident response during security investigations, we gather AWS service metadata on the types of tactics and techniques that threat actors have used against AWS customers. We use this information to build an internal dataset of indicators of compromise (IOCs) and threat patterns that provides insight into how threat actors are taking advantage of misconfigured AWS resources, overly permissive access, or the methods they use in attempting to achieve their objectives.

We capture this metadata and use it internally to continually improve AWS services to help make them more secure for our customers by making it more difficult for threat actors to perform unauthorized actions. For example, some of the metadata that the AWS CIRT has captured as a result of investigating security events where a threat actor has used the Amazon Bedrock service to consume tokens by invoking large language models (LLMs) has been used to supplement the Amazon GuardDuty IAM Anomalous Behavior finding. Earlier this year, the AWS CIRT identified an increase in data encryption events in Amazon S3 that used an encryption method known as server-side encryption using client-provided keys (SSE-C). AWS CIRT used the Threat Technique Catalog for AWS to classify the new techniques identified in these security events to communicate internally and with other Amazon security teams.

We’ve received feedback from AWS customers that information about the adversarial tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) observed by the AWS CIRT would be valuable and helpful if made available to them, so they could use the information to configure their AWS resources more securely. Over the previous year, we’ve been working with MITRE to make these techniques and sub-techniques available to the global security community. As a result of this collaboration, MITRE has updated and added some of these techniques to MITRE ATT&CK® as part of their October 2024 update cycle (for example, Data Destruction: Lifecycle-Triggered Deletion).

“We greatly appreciated the insight AWS shared with us, and it inspired improvements to a number of techniques in the October release of MITRE ATT&CK. For ATT&CK to keep up with the latest threats, community contributions that benefit the ecosystem are needed, and we value AWS being a part of the ATT&CK community.”
–Adam Pennington, project lead, MITRE ATT&CK, MITRE

Companies, entities, and organizations use ATT&CK to help them understand, prioritize and protect against the threats to their on-premises environments, and we believe that taking advantage of an already existing framework to present these adversarial techniques will provide AWS customers and the global security community with the ability to identify and categorize threats on their AWS infrastructure the same way that the AWS CIRT does.

The Threat Technique Catalog for AWS—based on MITRE ATT&CK Cloud—extends these contributions and includes categories of adversarial techniques that are specific to AWS and have been observed by the AWS CIRT; in addition to information on ways to mitigate those techniques and how to detect them. For example, you can go to the Threat Technique Catalog for AWS, filter by the AWS services in your account, and review the content that will help make your environment more secure. The Getting Started section includes additional ways that you can use the Threat Technique Catalog for AWS. We will continue to update and provide additional changes to the Threat Technique Catalog for AWS to help guide you into making your AWS environment more secure and will continue collaborating with MITRE to advise them of new and trending threat actor techniques.

To get started, visit the Threat Technique Catalog for AWS.

© 2025 The MITRE Corporation. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of The MITRE Corporation.

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

Steve de Vera

Steve de Vera

Steve is a manager in the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) with a focus on threat research and threat intelligence. He is passionate about American-style BBQ and is a certified competition BBQ judge. He has a dog named Brisket.

Cydney Stude

Cydney Stude

Cydney is a Security Engineer with the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT), specializing in incident response and cloud security. Cydney focuses on technical depth and real-world experience handling complex cloud challenges. Outside of work, Cydney enjoys salsa dancing and adventuring with her german shepherd.

Nathan Bates

Nathan Bates

Nathan is a Sr. Security Engineer within Global Services Security. He specializes in data, analytics, and reporting services for vulnerability management, policy compliance, asset assurance, incident response, and threat intelligence. Nathan is passionate about high performance driving, racing cars, playing guitar, and making music.

Introducing the AWS Security Champion Knowledge Path and digital badge

Post Syndicated from Sarah Currey original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/introducing-the-aws-security-champion-knowledge-path-and-digital-badge/

Today, Amazon Web Service (AWS) introduces the Security Champion Knowledge Path on AWS Skill Builder, featuring training and a digital badge. The Security Champion Knowledge path is a comprehensive educational framework designed to empower developers and software engineers with essential AWS cloud security knowledge and best practices. The structured learning path enables development teams to accelerate their delivery while maintaining robust security standards in cloud environments, addressing customers’ need for a structured curriculum to develop and validate security expertise across their organizations.

AWS Skill Builder logo

A new era of security education

The AWS Security Champion Knowledge Path complements the existing AWS security training offerings, providing a structured, self-paced journey to security expertise. Hart Rossman, Vice President of Global Services Security at AWS, emphasizes the program’s significance: “Security in the cloud isn’t a destination; it’s an ongoing journey. The AWS Security Champion Knowledge Path equips our customers with the tools and knowledge to navigate this journey confidently, fostering a culture where security is woven into every aspect of cloud operations.”

Designed for a diverse audience including software developers, solutions architects, technical leaders, and cloud practitioners, the training plan covers a wide range of topics that are critical for a strong security posture in the cloud. This AWS security learning journey begins with essential fundamentals and progressively builds toward advanced concepts across a well-structured curriculum. Starting with AWS Security Fundamentals and the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, learners establish core principles before diving into AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), including detailed troubleshooting scenarios. The curriculum advances to critical security elements such as encryption and comprehensive threat modeling through the AWS Builders Workshop. Security governance and auditing form the next tier, followed by practical implementations of monitoring, alerting, and network infrastructure best practices. The learning path then covers specialized areas including web-facing workload protection, network control, and incident response procedures. The knowledge path culminates with deep dives into container security and core security concepts through AWS SimuLearn, providing hands-on experience with real-world scenarios. This carefully orchestrated progression helps facilitate a thorough understanding of AWS security principles while maintaining a practical, implementation-focused approach.

AWS SimuLearn logo

What is a Security Champion?

A Security Champion is a bridge between security teams and development teams, promoting security best practices and making sure that security is embedded into every stage of the development lifecycle. However, Security Champion isn’t just a role—it’s a mindset. In today’s distributed and agile cloud environments, having Security Champions across different teams provides a competitive advantage for releasing products quickly and securely.

This distributed ownership of security brings numerous benefits: faster development cycles because teams can address security requirements proactively, reduced security incidents through early detection, and improved collaboration between security and development teams. Most importantly, it creates a culture of security where every team member understands their role in protecting the organization’s assets and data.

By becoming a Security Champion, you’ll gain valuable expertise, earn recognized credentials, and develop leadership skills that can accelerate your career growth. Most importantly, you’ll be empowered to make meaningful contributions to your organization’s security posture by promoting best practices, identifying potential vulnerabilities early in the development cycle, and fostering collaboration between teams—ultimately helping your organization deliver products that are both innovative and secure.

How can I become an AWS Security Champion?

Security enthusiasts can enroll into the AWS Security Champion Knowledge Badge Readiness Path on AWS Skill Builder and complete the assessment successfully to earn the AWS Security Champion digital badge available on Credly.

AWS Security Champion training is a self-paced, hands-on, and interactive approach to upskilling on security concepts. As a participant, you’re introduced to security best practices, performing basic audits, planning for governance at scale, incident response concepts and more. You can engage with real-world scenarios through hands-on labs, interactive game-based learning, gain access to AWS sandbox environments, and conduct practical security assessments. This applied learning helps make sure that knowledge isn’t just acquired, but truly internalized and ready for immediate application.

“The AWS Security Champion Knowledge Path represents a significant milestone in democratizing security expertise. We’ve designed this program to transform how organizations approach security training, making it accessible, practical, and immediately applicable. This isn’t just about learning security concepts—it’s about creating a culture where security becomes second nature to every team member.”
– Jenni Troutman, Training and Certification Director at AWS

Recognition and community

Upon successfully completing the assessment in this training path, participants earn the prestigious AWS Security Champion knowledge badge in Credly to showcase their accomplishment, such as on LinkedIn, and join a growing community of security professionals. This recognition not only validates individual expertise but also signals an organization’s commitment to security excellence, and helps organizations identify qualified security champions within their team.

Getting started

To begin your journey to becoming an AWS Security Champion, log in or create an account with AWS Skill Builder and enroll in the Security Champion Knowledge Badge Readiness Path. The training plan is available through flexible pricing options, including individual subscriptions at $29 per month and team subscriptions at $449 per month with enterprise volume pricing available.

Rossman concludes, “The AWS Security Champion Knowledge Path represents a paradigm shift in how organizations approach security education. It’s about creating a shared language of security across teams, enabling faster, more secure development cycles, and ultimately, delivering better outcomes for our customers.”

Ready to elevate your organization’s security capabilities? Visit AWS Skill Builder to enroll and start your journey towards becoming an AWS Security Champion. For enterprise inquiries, reach out to your AWS account team.

Stay tuned to the AWS Security Blog for more updates on AWS Security services, features, and best practices. Together, we’re building a more secure cloud for all.

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

Sarah Currey

Sarah Currey

As the Organization Excellence Leader for AWS Global Services Security, Sarah creates and optimizes security programs and solutions that protect AWS customers and internal teams. The initiatives foster a culture of security that encourages continuous improvement and innovation in our security practices while empowering everyone to champion security.

Alejandra Lopez

Alejandra Lopez

Alejandra is a Sr. Go-to-Market Leader at AWS Global Services Strategy and Operations and specializes in scaling AWS Training and Certification offerings through go-to-market strategies. Her expertise lies in creating scalable solutions for both enterprise customers and individual learners, with an emphasis on upskilling in AWS Cloud technologies, generative AI, and bridging the cloud skills gap.

Amar Meda

Amar Meda

Amar is a Sr. Technical Product Manager at AWS and leads the product strategy and delivery of digital training products available on AWS Skill Builder. With his expertise in cloud technologies and commitment to accessible learning experiences, Amar helps organizations, partners and individuals worldwide maximize their AWS capabilities through innovative training solutions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vishal Pabari

Vishal Pabari

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

Tea Jioshvili

Tea Jioshvili

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zero trust and principle of least privilege

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

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

Securing Identities in the AI era

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

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

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

Workforce identity management

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

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

Customer and Machine identity management

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

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

AWS identity foundation

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Rahul Sahni

Rahul Sahni

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

Apruva More

Apruva More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breakout sessions, chalk talks, and lightning talks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Register Now

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

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

Brandon Carroll

Brandon Carroll

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chinmaee Parulekar

Chinmaee Parulekar

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

How to use on-demand rotation for AWS KMS imported keys

Post Syndicated from Jeremy Stieglitz original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-use-on-demand-rotation-for-aws-kms-imported-keys/

Today, we’re announcing support for on-demand rotation of symmetric encryption AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys with imported key material (EXTERNAL origin). This new capability enables you to rotate the cryptographic key material of these keys without changing the key identifier (key ID or Amazon Resource Name (ARN)). Rotating keys helps you meet compliance requirements and security best practices that mandate periodic key rotation.

AWS KMS has long supported automatic key rotation for AWS KMS keys whose key material is generated by AWS KMS (AWS_KMS origin). Until now, AWS KMS customers who imported their own key material could not rotate that material without creating a new KMS key. This process called manual rotation required updating references to the older key identifiers. With today’s launch, the key ID of the imported key remains unchanged after rotation, so existing workloads are not disrupted. In this post, we tell you how the new capability works, look at key material expiry and deletion features unique to imported keys, and review pricing for this new feature.

How it works

When you create an AWS KMS key with EXTERNAL origin, AWS KMS assigns a fixed identifier to the key called the key ID. However, AWS KMS doesn’t generate key material for the cryptographic operations. You must import your own key material using the ImportKeyMaterial operation.

When you import key material, AWS KMS computes a unique key material identifier based on the key ID and the key material. Even if you import the same key material in different keys, AWS KMS will assign distinct key material identifiers. This computation uses a cryptographic hash so the key material identifier doesn’t reveal information about the key material itself. AWS KMS embeds this key material identifier in the ciphertext blob produced by symmetric encryption.

Until now, after you imported key material into an AWS KMS key, you could not import additional key material into that key to rotate the key. With this new feature launch, you can associate multiple imported key materials with a single, symmetric-encryption key. You can use the RotateKeyOnDemand operation to make the most recently imported key material the current key material. AWS KMS uses the current key material to generate new ciphertext. Unless deleted or expired, the other key materials remain available for decryption. When you present ciphertext for decryption, AWS KMS automatically selects the correct key material using the key material identifier embedded in the ciphertext.

To help improve the auditability that keys have rotated, we’ve added new identifiers in KMS API responses for the specific key material used. The KeyMaterialId is a new field that AWS KMS will return in addition to the KeyId. Similarly, the DescribeKey response for these keys now displays the identifier of the current key material as CurrentKeyMaterialId. The inclusion of the KeyMaterialId and CurrentKeyMaterialId in API responses makes key rotation more transparent.

Before we dive into the details, the following is an outline of the overall process to rotate an imported key:

  1. Create a symmetric encryption KMS key with EXTERNAL origin
  2. Import key material into the key using GetParametersForImport and ImportKeyMaterial APIs. The first key material becomes usable immediately. This part is unchanged and maintains backwards compatibility with the current behavior of AWS KMS.
  3. Use the key to create ciphertext and decrypt it. You’ll notice the key material ID matches the CurrentKeyMaterialId displayed in the DescribeKey response.
  4. When you want to rotate this key, import a second key material into the key. The ImportKeyMaterial API now has a new ImportType input parameter which lets you inform AWS KMS whether you are associating new key material with a key (--import-type NEW_KEY_MATERIAL) or re-importing previously associated key material (--import-type EXISTING_KEY_MATERIAL).
  5. Use ListKeyRotations with --include-key-material ALL_KEY_MATERIAL to view both key materials. The key material state of the second key material will be PENDING_ROTATION.
  6. Use the RotateKeyOnDemand operation to initiate on-demand key rotation.
  7. Optionally, you can use the GetKeyRotationStatus operation to monitor the in-progress rotation. The response will contain OnDemandRotationStartDate only while the rotation is in progress.
  8. Use ListKeyRotations with --include-key-material ALL_KEY_MATERIAL after rotation completes to view key materials associated with this key. The KeyMaterialState of the new key material you imported will change from PENDING_ROTATION to CURRENT. The key material state of the first key material will change from CURRENT to NON_CURRENT.
  9. Use the key to create ciphertext and decrypt it. You’ll notice the CurrentKeyMaterialId is used for creating ciphertext, but the key material used for decryption is automatically determined by AWS KMS.

Using the AWS CLI for rotating an imported key

The following is a sample sequence of AWS KMS commands to exercise the import key rotation functionality using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). The specific commands that follow work in Linux or MacOS environments and might need to be modified for use in a Windows environment. This functionality can also be exercised through the AWS SDKs. These operations, except for wrapping a key material for import, generate-data-key, and decrypt can be initiated in the AWS Management Console.

Step 1: Create a key and import key material

This section should be familiar to anyone who has used the existing import key functionality in AWS KMS.

  1. Create a symmetric encryption key with EXTERNAL origin and save the key ARN. The initial state of this key is PendingImport. 
    export EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN=$(aws kms create-key --origin EXTERNAL | tee /dev/stderr | jq -r .KeyMetadata.Arn)
{
    "KeyMetadata": {
        "AWSAccountId": "111122223333",
        "KeyId": "97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
        "Arn": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
        "CreationDate": "2025-05-08T13:55:04.605000-07:00",
        "Enabled": false,
        "Description": "",
        "KeyUsage": "ENCRYPT_DECRYPT",
        "KeyState": "PendingImport",
        "Origin": "EXTERNAL",
        "KeyManager": "CUSTOMER",
        "CustomerMasterKeySpec": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
        "KeySpec": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
        "EncryptionAlgorithms": [
            "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT"
        ],
        "MultiRegion": false
    }
}

  2. Generate a 256-bit (32-byte) key material to be imported. In the following command, we use OpenSSL to generate the imported key material. 
    openssl rand 32 > "KeyMaterial1.bin"

  3. Use the get-parameters-for-import command to create the wrapping key and import token and save them to files. AWS KMS supports multiple wrapping algorithms; we use RSAES_OAEP_SHA_256 with a 4096-bit RSA key in the following example. The value of the ImportToken and PublicKey fields in the response has been trimmed for brevity. 
    export WRAPPING_ALGORITHM="RSAES_OAEP_SHA_256"
export WRAPPING_KEY_SPEC="RSA_4096"
export KMS_PARAMETERS_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL1=$(aws kms get-parameters-for-import \
    --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" \
    --wrapping-algorithm "${WRAPPING_ALGORITHM}" \
    --wrapping-key-spec "${WRAPPING_KEY_SPEC}" | tee /dev/stderr)
{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "ImportToken": "AQECAHie/gkutEg+qLc1mscyCnHfNPS1aKVSxf6xd3PX05ny2wAADWIwgg1eBgkqhkiG9w0BBwaggg1PMIINSwIBADCCDUQGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMn8AovXPs/ 
…
O22maj4+9nDAgjVkxZQWhjA2VHEyORnw8Qb29X8gvjwmE8xhlNWbnM1zZlDcClDzfJriLVuoXAO92HK1Vihs5hiE8/9tu6DegtXfp28WVIVTttnGjkjdVmChC7cg7yZhs4xu1LzN39LLyR9Q1O/9EQYHbwYXgp6tpMt2JyGhH/lRt2kJl+BPUEfKNsWkoj0Cq3Y=",
    "PublicKey": "MIICIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAg8AMIICCgKCAgEAvXskfFFVoZVaZrEuN8UK3vckGww8tJHvsIxLmqKEbFt7D3dp/Jh8AoaVm2n/kdcGD5Hm8NwOQC40jsRjJKTqiTSr8/y8XEmpB0qi68EtKM8RyEmz7u1R5Vn6uoIZxKb/WMvVME/7tntyU4/uhVTGUlrfZItAV+
…
nuGzOptwcaprtT2iNthNZ38UQ2orETbfwdG6yZPt1qS8Jk/O0H+KtkcsNLHrDUE9XjQX4WDfkNbf/fyqaCLUpSTdONTLXqE16pVieLgrXr1845mECAwEAAQ==",
    "ParametersValidTo": "2025-05-09T13:56:45.632000-07:00"
}

export PUBLIC_KEY_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL1=$(echo "${KMS_PARAMETERS_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL1}" | jq -r .PublicKey) 
export IMPORT_TOKEN_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL1=$(echo "${KMS_PARAMETERS_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL1}" | jq -r .ImportToken) 

echo "${PUBLIC_KEY_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL1}" | base64 -d > "WrappingKeyForKeyMaterial1.bin"
echo "${IMPORT_TOKEN_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL1}" | base64 -d > "ImportTokenForKeyMaterial1.bin"

  4. Wrap the key material using the wrapping key. We use OpenSSL, a popular open source cryptographic library to illustrate this step. For a detailed explanation of this step, see the AWS KMS Developer Guide. 
    openssl pkeyutl -encrypt -in "KeyMaterial1.bin" -out "WrappedKeyMaterial1.bin" -inkey "WrappingKeyForKeyMaterial1.bin" -keyform DER -pubin -encrypt -pkeyopt rsa_padding_mode:oaep -pkeyopt rsa_oaep_md:sha256 -pkeyopt rsa_mgf1_md:sha256

  5. Import the key material. Optionally, you can assign a key material description. The description can be used to keep track of where the key material is durably maintained outside AWS KMS. This key material description is displayed alongside other information for this key material in the console and the ListKeyRotations API response. We also capture the key material ID from the response. In this example, the key material doesn’t expire. Optionally, you can set an expiration time. 
    export KEY_MATERIAL1_ID=$(aws kms import-key-material --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" --encrypted-key-material fileb://WrappedKeyMaterial1.bin --import-token fileb://ImportTokenForKeyMaterial1.bin --expiration-model KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE --key-material-description "Q1 2025 key from HSM1" | tee /dev/stderr | jq .KeyMaterialId | tr -d \")
{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "KeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241"
}

  6. The key is now be enabled for use in cryptographic operations and the CurrentKeyMaterialId in the DescribeKey response should match ${KEY_MATERIAL1_ID} 
    echo "${KEY_MATERIAL1_ID}"
04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241

aws kms describe-key --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}"
{
    "KeyMetadata": {
        "AWSAccountId": "111122223333",
        "KeyId": "97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
        "Arn": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
        "CreationDate": "2025-05-08T13:55:04.605000-07:00",
        "Enabled": true,
        "Description": "",
        "KeyUsage": "ENCRYPT_DECRYPT",
        "KeyState": "Enabled",
        "Origin": "EXTERNAL",
        "ExpirationModel": "KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE",
        "KeyManager": "CUSTOMER",
        "CustomerMasterKeySpec": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
        "KeySpec": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
        "EncryptionAlgorithms": [
            "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT"
        ],
        "MultiRegion": false,
        "CurrentKeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241"
    }
}

  7. Use ListKeyRotations to view key materials associated with the key. There should only be one key material with the same ID as in ${KEY_MATERIAL1_ID} and with a key material state of CURRENT. 
    aws kms list-key-rotations --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" --include-key-material ALL_KEY_MATERIAL
{
    "Rotations": [
        {
            "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
            "KeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241",
            "KeyMaterialDescription": "First key material",
            "ImportState": "IMPORTED",
            "KeyMaterialState": "CURRENT",
            "ExpirationModel": "KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE"
        }
    ],
    "Truncated": false
}

Step 2: Use the first key material to create and decrypt ciphertext

This step demonstrates how to verify the key material ID of your imported key in cryptographic operations.

  1. Use the GenerateDataKey operation and capture the ciphertext. This operation returns a data key in both plaintext and ciphertext form. The KeyMaterialId in the response matches the identifier for the first key material. 
    export KEY1_CIPHERTEXT_BLOB1=$(aws kms generate-data-key --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" --number-of-bytes 32 | tee /dev/stderr | jq -r .CiphertextBlob)
{
    "CiphertextBlob": "AQIBAHgE9c9Q7o8Ff5dLmCCrj6iDfSg2OoWo+O8GpGyTrcWyQQFGzFweTmSjHkrflCzUMvY+AAAAfjB8BgkqhkiG9w0BBwagbzBtAgEAMGgGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMdNV4KMSitkzp9j0pAgEQgDuXnjXR/KvDWjf3KfTAksjAyQJETPoC7zBq6ND2n2c7IUT/EUn+cbmBhXx5P/EI3l9drqsP/6NS5rRYSw==",
    "Plaintext": "3OQAOySTM3/E7QHH3a+GGzEz3HKS30rUcvUep+uueas=",
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "KeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241",
    "KeyOrigin": "EXTERNAL"
}

  2. Decrypt the ciphertext and compare it to the plaintext key. The KeyMaterialId in the response matches the identifier for the first key material. The plaintext in decrypt response matches the plaintext data key in the GenerateDataKey response. 
    aws kms decrypt --ciphertext-blob "${KEY1_CIPHERTEXT_BLOB1}"
{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "Plaintext": "3OQAOySTM3/E7QHH3a+GGzEz3HKS30rUcvUep+uueas=",
    "EncryptionAlgorithm": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
    "KeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241",
    "KeyOrigin": "EXTERNAL"
}

Step 3: Import a second key material into the key for on-demand rotation

Import key rotations start with importing new key material into this key.

  1. Generate a second key material (also 256 bits in length). 
    openssl rand 32 > "KeyMaterial2.bin"

  2. Use the get-parameters-for-import command to create the wrapping key and import token for the second key material to be imported. The value of the ImportToken and PublicKey fields in the response has been trimmed for brevity. 
    export WRAPPING_ALGORITHM="RSAES_OAEP_SHA_256"
export WRAPPING_KEY_SPEC="RSA_4096"
export KMS_PARAMETERS_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL2=$(aws kms get-parameters-for-import --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" --wrapping-algorithm "${WRAPPING_ALGORITHM}" --wrapping-key-spec "${WRAPPING_KEY_SPEC}" | tee /dev/stderr)
{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "ImportToken": "AQECAHie/gkutEg+qLc1mscyCnHfNPS1aKVSxf6xd3PX05ny2wAADWAwgg1cBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagIINE0aPHP5vUwaR6nukZvp8aGKeKcN3EDCsWtTNEF2RJFLazEeHItB84viBqlNIPpf8gNcCad+ODRrCyZeAisqeyIOPRoNn+vS3KMHIpMjhBUsLF6yys7FJts7P+ncF9n1bmTC4qYln5BaZ9FoI1P4NikEGiDakG8rtVJM7jWKJqVipifZvhlY8EKM8hE8e7zqR3C13TQhJXec0rVaqsFxSyjX/hbKkY55mDw36xMJaK6G9F3Fi9Pg5fKc/oOG4gUGXKSSZBoL3Jt3ssr7ACPuzFfhMOaqQ/
… /mfaCPAJN5dH0cmppKiOYqA7RSMsx2/sPMWekVLh6j38RMqZHHIq67jos0p0h8EseWpEmI2mnbJ/yoWLY/DkOEami+6scIPgvyvVzRM9d2hR7BCd0/9kwZxIN6WX0",
    "PublicKey": "MIICIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAg8AMIICCgKCAgEAiGzUXf7XWN5nN5GOo/5McrsIYfiLQrDjVdOen0v7QqQcQ04p+ozI5NDGLADYd0bLNn4cm2xrlxqUjTqrtW0U8k9A/5DurYprmNmF6M+Q+zj+EkR5XoLmcuLALifHXDMI0Af20L46NK6uVKYqDl7gP4xXOP+ka57NfHmWGWDGTOKUQNZSS0emBe0UGS
…
7AC0FuwndrShwNxiKEIWPi3NhJ70jkYCrle1mQqKHpsFe6bGKLvp1gdMWByy0fY9lOH9HfoQB0FonEDZjldWBn3YXtP/eUwrgyyCk/Po7i5pjA6cjf/mBTmwmVD/jBAxW45YHFaLaJGPillaQy0Xeu89Mdwq8uEh8AixwTKbQ9Jwk3RG5A33QFj6Qb67sCAwEAAQ==",
    "ParametersValidTo": "2025-05-09T14:10:08.028000-07:00"
}
export PUBLIC_KEY_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL2=$(echo "${KMS_PARAMETERS_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL2}" | jq -r .PublicKey)
export IMPORT_TOKEN_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL2=$(echo "${KMS_PARAMETERS_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL2}" | jq -r .ImportToken)

echo "${PUBLIC_KEY_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL2}" | base64 -d > "WrappingKeyForKeyMaterial2.bin"
echo "${IMPORT_TOKEN_FOR_IMPORTED_KEY_MATERIAL2}" | base64 -d > "ImportTokenForKeyMaterial2.bin"

  3. Wrap the second key material using the wrapping key. 
    openssl pkeyutl -encrypt -in "KeyMaterial2.bin" -out "WrappedKeyMaterial2.bin" -inkey "WrappingKeyForKeyMaterial2.bin" -keyform DER -pubin -encrypt -pkeyopt rsa_padding_mode:oaep -pkeyopt rsa_oaep_md:sha256 -pkeyopt rsa_mgf1_md:sha256

  4. Import the second key material. Optionally, you can assign a key material description. We also capture the key material ID from the response. In this example, the key material doesn’t expire. Optionally, you can set an expiration time.

    Note: This call will fail if you omit the import-type parameter or set it to EXISTING_KEY_MATERIAL. Specifying import-type as NEW_KEY_MATERIAL allows the API caller to associate additional key material with the imported key.

    export KEY_MATERIAL2_ID=$(aws kms import-key-material --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" --encrypted-key-material fileb://WrappedKeyMaterial2.bin --import-token fileb://ImportTokenForKeyMaterial2.bin --expiration-model KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE --key-material-description "Q2 2025 key from HSM1" --import-type NEW_KEY_MATERIAL | tee /dev/stderr | jq .KeyMaterialId | tr -d \")
{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "KeyMaterialId": "b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e"
}

  5. Use ListKeyRotations to view key materials associated with the key. There should now be two key materials. The key material state of the second key material should be PENDING_ROTATION. 
    aws kms list-key-rotations --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" --include-key-material ALL_KEY_MATERIAL
{
    "Rotations": [
        {
            "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
            "KeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241",
            "KeyMaterialDescription": "First key material",
            "ImportState": "IMPORTED",
            "KeyMaterialState": "CURRENT",
            "ExpirationModel": "KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE"
        },
        {
            "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
            "KeyMaterialId": "b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e",
            "KeyMaterialDescription": "Second key material",
            "ImportState": "IMPORTED",
            "KeyMaterialState": "PENDING_ROTATION",
            "ExpirationModel": "KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE"
        }
    ],
    "Truncated": false
}

  6. The CurrentKeyMaterialId in DescribeKey response should still be ${KEY_MATERIAL1_ID}. 
    echo "${KEY_MATERIAL1_ID}"
04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241

aws kms describe-key --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}"
{
    "KeyMetadata": {
        "AWSAccountId": "111122223333",
        "KeyId": "97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
        "Arn": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
        "CreationDate": "2025-05-08T13:55:04.605000-07:00",
        "Enabled": true,
        "Description": "",
        "KeyUsage": "ENCRYPT_DECRYPT",
        "KeyState": "Enabled",
        "Origin": "EXTERNAL",
        "ExpirationModel": "KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE",
        "KeyManager": "CUSTOMER",
        "CustomerMasterKeySpec": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
        "KeySpec": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
        "EncryptionAlgorithms": [
            "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT"
        ],
        "MultiRegion": false,
        "CurrentKeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241"
    }
}

Step 4: Use on-demand rotation to update the current key material

This step moves the current key material for this key to the newly imported key material.

  1. Use the RotateKeyOnDemand operation to initiate an on-demand key rotation. If the key material in PENDING_ROTATION state is deleted or expires before initiating on-demand rotation, this operation will fail. 
    aws kms rotate-key-on-demand --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}"
{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041"
}

  2. AWS KMS uses a background worker to perform the rotation, so there’s a delay between initiating the on-demand key rotation and its completion. Use the GetKeyRotationStatus command to monitor the rotation status. Until the rotation is completed, the GetKeyRotationStatus response will include the OnDemandRotationStartDate field. When this field disappears, the on-demand key rotation is complete. 
    aws kms get-key-rotation-status --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}"
{
    "KeyRotationEnabled": false,
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "OnDemandRotationStartDate": "2025-05-08T14:12:23.096000-07:00"
}

  3. Use ListKeyRotations when rotation completes. The second key material changes state from PENDING_ROTATION to CURRENT. 
    aws kms list-key-rotations --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" --include-key-material ALL_KEY_MATERIAL
{
    "Rotations": [
        {
            "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
            "KeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241",
            "KeyMaterialDescription": "First key material",
            "ImportState": "IMPORTED",
            "KeyMaterialState": "NON_CURRENT",
            "ExpirationModel": "KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE"
        },
        {
            "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
            "KeyMaterialId": "b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e",
            "KeyMaterialDescription": "Second key material",
            "ImportState": "IMPORTED",
            "KeyMaterialState": "CURRENT",
            "ExpirationModel": "KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE",
            "RotationDate": "2025-05-08T14:12:30.890000-07:00",
            "RotationType": "ON_DEMAND"
        }
    ],
    "Truncated": false
}

  4. Rotation changes the current key material, which is reflected in the CurrentKeymaterialId field in the DescribeKey response. It should now match ${KEY_MATERIAL2_ID}. 
    echo "${KEY_MATERIAL1_ID}"
04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241

echo "${KEY_MATERIAL2_ID}"
b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e

aws kms describe-key --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}"
{
    "KeyMetadata": {
        "AWSAccountId": "111122223333",
        "KeyId": "97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
        "Arn": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
        "CreationDate": "2025-05-08T13:55:04.605000-07:00",
        "Enabled": true,
        "Description": "",
        "KeyUsage": "ENCRYPT_DECRYPT",
        "KeyState": "Enabled",
        "Origin": "EXTERNAL",
        "ExpirationModel": "KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE",
        "KeyManager": "CUSTOMER",
        "CustomerMasterKeySpec": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
        "KeySpec": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
        "EncryptionAlgorithms": [
            "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT"
        ],
        "MultiRegion": false,
        "CurrentKeyMaterialId": "b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e"
    }
}

Step 5: Use the second key material to create and decrypt ciphertext

Similar to Step 2, this step demonstrates how to verify that the key material ID of your imported key in cryptographic operations has been rotated.

  1. Use the GenerateDataKey operation and capture the ciphertext. This operation returns a data key in both plaintext and ciphertext forms. Note that the KeyMaterialId returned in the response matches the identifier of the second key material. 
    echo "${KEY_MATERIAL2_ID}"
b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e

export KEY1_CIPHERTEXT_BLOB2=$(aws kms generate-data-key --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" --number-of-bytes 32 | tee /dev/stderr | jq -r .CiphertextBlob)
{
    "CiphertextBlob": "AQIBAHi0dJw62Bc3nKmyJkln/nkfyz/pKmoUygZlfDsebq/rTgGjuxQDA9WWHvqF6ZipVLZZAAAAfjB8BgkqhkiG9w0BBwagbzBtAgEAMGgGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMdXVYuY1Sa/Jb/SvrAgEQgDtQUp2gClGPBOuxFO89oAZmmkDghEKM6rXgCeS5A/NCLyX7UPdcpsJG/cJAFdjPE9sCfWjOUXCv9JTWmQ==",
    "Plaintext": "acSB+a6W2TQ3dsb2c78yDaZLi9HcuHSubeQkFaAdl1Y=",
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "KeyMaterialId": "b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e",
    "KeyOrigin": "EXTERNAL"
}

  2. Decrypt the ciphertext and compare it to the plaintext key. The KeyMaterialId returned in the response matches the identifier of the second key material. The plaintext in decrypt response matches the plaintext data key in the previous GenerateDataKey response. 
    echo "${KEY_MATERIAL2_ID}"
b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e

aws kms decrypt --ciphertext-blob "${KEY1_CIPHERTEXT_BLOB2}"
{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "Plaintext": "acSB+a6W2TQ3dsb2c78yDaZLi9HcuHSubeQkFaAdl1Y=",
    "EncryptionAlgorithm": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
    "KeyMaterialId": "b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e",
    "KeyOrigin": "EXTERNAL"
}

  3. AWS KMS automatically uses the correct key material based on the ciphertext. When you decrypt the ciphertext produced in Step 2, AWS KMS uses the first key material. 
    echo "${KEY_MATERIAL1_ID}"
04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241

aws kms decrypt --ciphertext-blob "${KEY1_CIPHERTEXT_BLOB1}"
{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "Plaintext": "3OQAOySTM3/E7QHH3a+GGzEz3HKS30rUcvUep+uueas=",
    "EncryptionAlgorithm": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
    "KeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241",
    "KeyOrigin": "EXTERNAL"
}

Step 6: Delete key material, make the key unusable

With the launch of this feature, the DeleteImportedKeyMaterial operation takes an optional KeyMaterialId parameter. If no KeyMaterialId is specified, AWS KMS deletes the current key material. This maintains backwards compatibility with existing behavior.

  1. Delete the first imported key material by specifying its identifier. 
    aws kms delete-imported-key-material --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" --key-material-id "${KEY_MATERIAL1_ID}"
{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "KeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241"
}

  2. Deleting the key material causes the key state to change to PendingImport. 
    aws kms describe-key --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}"
{
    "KeyMetadata": {
        "AWSAccountId": "111122223333",
        "KeyId": "97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
        "Arn": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
        "CreationDate": "2025-05-08T13:55:04.605000-07:00",
        "Enabled": false,
        "Description": "",
        "KeyUsage": "ENCRYPT_DECRYPT",
        "KeyState": "PendingImport",
        "Origin": "EXTERNAL",
        "KeyManager": "CUSTOMER",
        "CustomerMasterKeySpec": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
        "KeySpec": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
        "EncryptionAlgorithms": [
            "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT"
        ],
        "MultiRegion": false,
        "CurrentKeyMaterialId": "b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e"
    }
}

  3. ListKeyRotations also reflects the first key material as PendingImport. 
    aws kms list-key-rotations --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" --include-key-material ALL_KEY_MATERIAL
{
    "Rotations": [
        {
            "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
            "KeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241",
            "KeyMaterialDescription": "First key material",
            "ImportState": "PENDING_IMPORT",
            "KeyMaterialState": "NON_CURRENT"
        },
        {
            "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
            "KeyMaterialId": "b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e",
            "KeyMaterialDescription": "Second key material",
            "ImportState": "IMPORTED",
            "KeyMaterialState": "CURRENT",
            "ExpirationModel": "KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE",
            "RotationDate": "2025-05-08T14:12:30.890000-07:00",
            "RotationType": "ON_DEMAND"
        }
    ],
    "Truncated": false
}

  4. Cryptographic operations fail with a KMSInvalidStateException when a key is in PendingImport state even though the key material required to decrypt the specific ciphertext blob is imported into AWS KMS. 
    aws kms decrypt --ciphertext-blob "${KEY1_CIPHERTEXT_BLOB2}"

An error occurred (KMSInvalidStateException) when calling the Decrypt operation: arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041 is pending import.

Step 7: Reimport key material to enable the key

You need to re-import all expired or deleted key materials associated with a key for the key to become usable again.

  1. Re-import the missing key material. For this example, we reused the wrapped key and import token we already have. This is an optimization. Optionally, you can get new parameters for wrapping and importing the key material. 
    aws kms import-key-material --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" --encrypted-key-material fileb://WrappedKeyMaterial1.bin --import-token fileb://ImportTokenForKeyMaterial1.bin --expiration-model KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE
{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "KeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241"
}


aws kms list-key-rotations --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}" --include-key-material ALL_KEY_MATERIAL
{
    "Rotations": [
        {
            "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
            "KeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241",
            "KeyMaterialDescription": "First key material",
            "ImportState": "IMPORTED",
            "KeyMaterialState": "NON_CURRENT",
            "ExpirationModel": "KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE"
        },
        {
            "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
            "KeyMaterialId": "b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e",
            "KeyMaterialDescription": "Second key material",
            "ImportState": "IMPORTED",
            "KeyMaterialState": "CURRENT",
            "ExpirationModel": "KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE",
            "RotationDate": "2025-05-08T14:12:30.890000-07:00",
            "RotationType": "ON_DEMAND"
        }
    ],
    "Truncated": false
}

  2. Use DescribeKey to validate the key is now enabled. 
    aws kms describe-key --key-id "${EXTERNAL_KEY1_ARN}"
{
    "KeyMetadata": {
        "AWSAccountId": "111122223333",
        "KeyId": "97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
        "Arn": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
        "CreationDate": "2025-05-08T13:55:04.605000-07:00",
        "Enabled": true,
        "Description": "",
        "KeyUsage": "ENCRYPT_DECRYPT",
        "KeyState": "Enabled",
        "Origin": "EXTERNAL",
        "ExpirationModel": "KEY_MATERIAL_DOES_NOT_EXPIRE",
        "KeyManager": "CUSTOMER",
        "CustomerMasterKeySpec": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
        "KeySpec": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
        "EncryptionAlgorithms": [
            "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT"
        ],
        "MultiRegion": false,
        "CurrentKeyMaterialId": "b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e"
    }
}

  3. You can use the following commands to validate that the key works: 
    aws kms decrypt --ciphertext-blob "${KEY1_CIPHERTEXT_BLOB1}"
{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "Plaintext": "3OQAOySTM3/E7QHH3a+GGzEz3HKS30rUcvUep+uueas=",
    "EncryptionAlgorithm": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
    "KeyMaterialId": "04f5cf50ee8f057f974b9820ab8fa8837d28363a85a8f8ef06a46c93adc5b241",
    "KeyOrigin": "EXTERNAL"
}

aws kms decrypt --ciphertext-blob "${KEY1_CIPHERTEXT_BLOB2}"
{
    "KeyId": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041",
    "Plaintext": "acSB+a6W2TQ3dsb2c78yDaZLi9HcuHSubeQkFaAdl1Y=",
    "EncryptionAlgorithm": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT",
    "KeyMaterialId": "b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e",
    "KeyOrigin": "EXTERNAL"
}

CloudTrail logging

AWS CloudTrail now includes the key material ID in the additionalEventData field for operations using symmetric-encryption keys (both AWS_KMS and EXTERNAL origin). The following is a sample CloudTrail event for the AWS KMS decrypt operation:

{
    "eventVersion": "1.11",
    "userIdentity": {
        "type": "AssumedRole",
        "principalId": "AROAEXAMPLE:alice",
        "arn": "arn:aws:sts::111122223333:assumed-role/key-user/alice",
        "accountId": "111122223333",
        "accessKeyId": "ACCESSKEY",
        "sessionContext": {
            "sessionIssuer": {
                "type": "Role",
                "principalId": "AROAEXAMPLE",
                "arn": "arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/key-user",
                "accountId": "111122223333",
                "userName": "key-user"
            },
            "attributes": {
                "creationDate": "2025-05-09T18:12:33Z",
                "mfaAuthenticated": "false"
            }
        }
    },
    "eventTime": "2025-05-09T18:15:02Z",
    "eventSource": "kms.amazonaws.com",
    "eventName": "Decrypt",
    "awsRegion": "us-east-1",
    "sourceIPAddress": "1.2.3.4",
    "userAgent": "aws-cli/2.9.19 Python/3.9.11 Darwin/24.4.0 exe/x86_64 prompt/off command/kms.decrypt",
    "requestParameters": {
        "encryptionAlgorithm": "SYMMETRIC_DEFAULT"
    },
    "responseElements": null,
    "additionalEventData": { "keyMaterialId": "b4749c3ad817379ca9b2264967fe791fcb3fe92a6a14ca06657c3b1e6eafeb4e" },
    "requestID": "68c6013e-24af-4a66-aa88-64cdb27d693d",
    "eventID": "1feca1a6-cbf0-491d-897f-31c52c54c783",
    "readOnly": true,
    "resources": [{
        "accountId": "111122223333",
        "type": "AWS::KMS::Key",
        "ARN": "arn:aws:kms:us-east-1:111122223333:key/97c8e55d-5b04-45a1-8a01-1febde0dd041"
    }],
    "eventType": "AwsApiCall",
    "managementEvent": true,
    "recipientAccountId": "111122223333",
    "eventCategory": "Management",
    "tlsDetails": {
        "tlsVersion": "TLSv1.3",
        "cipherSuite": "TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384",
        "clientProvidedHostHeader": "kms.us-east-1.amazonaws.com"
    }
}

Key expiry and key deletion capabilities unique to imported keys

Unlike standard KMS keys that you create within AWS KMS, imported keys offer two unique capabilities for enhanced controls over key material within AWS.

  • When importing key material into a KMS key, you can optionally set an expiration date and time, up to 365 days from the import date. If you don’t specify an expiration, the key material doesn’t expire. When the expiration time is reached, AWS KMS immediately deletes the key material and the KMS key becomes unusable. This is in contrast to the 7–30 day waiting period required for KMS keys whose key material is generated by AWS KMS. To re-enable the key, you must reimport the key material. With key rotation, you can continue to set expiration periods for new key material that you import.
  • Unique to KMS imported keys, you can also delete specific key material without deleting the entire KMS key. Deleting the key material of a KMS imported key is temporary and reversible. To restore the key, reimport its key material.

Key expiry and import key material deletion can be useful if you need to demonstrate immediate key suspension in the cloud or when you want to temporarily seed AWS KMS with key material that can be inserted and repeatedly removed from cloud access (hydration and re-hydration of keys for improved digital sovereignty).

Special considerations

AWS KMS is designed to keep imported key material highly available. But AWS KMS doesn’t maintain the durability of imported key material at the same level as key material that AWS KMS generates. You must retain a copy of the imported key material outside of AWS KMS in a system that you control. We recommend that you store an exportable copy of the imported key material in a key management system, such as an HSM. As a best practice, you should store a reference to the KMS key ARN and key material description alongside the exportable copy of the key material.

The deletion or expiration of any key material associated with a KMS key makes that key unusable. You must re-import all the key materials associated with a key before it can be used for cryptographic operations.

The following types of KMS keys with imported key material do not support on-demand key rotation, but you can continue to use manual rotation with these keys.

  • Asymmetric keys
  • HMAC keys
  • Multi-AWS Region keys

Features and benefits

This new capability includes several important features:

  • Maintain key identifiers: Rotate key material while keeping the same AWS KMS key ID and ARN.
  • Flexible rotation: Rotate keys on-demand to meet your security requirements or use an external key manager to set a rotation schedule that can drive new key rotations into AWS KMS.
  • Audit trail: Track key material usage through CloudTrail logs.
  • Metadata management: Add unique descriptions to each key material version.
  • Retains support for key expiry and import key deletion (features unique to KMS imported keys)

Pricing

For AWS KMS keys that rotate automatically or on-demand, each key incurs a base cost, and the first two rotations add $1 per month (prorated hourly) in additional charges. The pricing is capped after the second rotation, meaning subsequent rotations beyond the second one aren’t billed. This simplified pricing provides you with more predictable costs while maintaining the flexibility to rotate keys frequently to meet your compliance and security audit requirements.

Getting started

You can start using this feature today in all AWS Regions where AWS KMS is available. To learn more, visit the AWS KMS Developer Guide.

We’re excited to see how you use this new capability to enhance your key management practices. Leave a comment below or on the AWS re:Post community forum to let us know what you think.

Author

Jeremy Stieglitz

Jeremy is the Principal Product Manager for AWS KMS, where he drives global product strategy and roadmap. Jeremy has more than 25 years of experience defining security products and platforms across large companies (RSA, Entrust, Cisco, and Imperva) and start-up environments (Dataguise, Voltage, and Centrify). Jeremy is the author or co-author of 23 patents in network security, user authentication, and network automation and control.

Vipul Gupta

Vipul Gupta

Dr. Vipul Gupta is a Principal Engineer at AWS KMS, where he leads engineering initiatives to deliver innovative customer-facing features. He has more than 25 years of teaching, research and development experience in distributed systems, networking, and security protocols. Vipul holds six patents and has authored more than twenty peer-reviewed publications, including two best-paper awards and RFC4492, in these areas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agentic AI

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

Separating hype from reality

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

Figure 1: Generative AI agents

Figure 1: Generative AI agents

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 2: 2025 OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications

Figure 2: 2025 OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications

Agentic AI wins Cybersecurity Startup Accelerator

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

Addressing AI risks

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

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

Cryptography

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

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

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

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

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

Post-quantum encryption

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

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

Figure 4: Post-quantum encryption algorithms

Figure 4: Post-quantum encryption algorithms

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

RSAC Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics

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

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

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

End-to-end encryption

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

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

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

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

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

Public-private collaboration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The value of combined perspectives

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

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

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

Anne Grahn

Anne Grahn

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

Implementing just-in-time privileged access to AWS with Microsoft Entra and AWS IAM Identity Center

Post Syndicated from Rodney Underkoffler original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/implementing-just-in-time-privileged-access-to-aws-with-microsoft-entra-and-aws-iam-identity-center/

Controlling access to your privileged and sensitive resources is critical for all AWS customers. Preventing direct human interaction with services and systems through automation is the primary means of accomplishing this. For those infrequent times when automation is not yet possible or implemented, providing a secure method for temporary elevated access is the next best option. In a privileged access management solution, there are several elements that should be included:

  • User access should follow the principle of least privileged
  • Users should be granted only the minimum amount of access required to perform their job duties
  • Access granted should persist only for the time necessary to perform the assigned tasks
  • The solution should include:
    • An eligibility process for granting access
    • An approval process for granting access
    • Auditing of the access grants and activities taken

Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM) is a third-party solution that provides dynamic group management, access control, and audit capabilities that integrate with AWS IAM Identity Center.

In this post, we show you how to configure just-in-time access to AWS using Entra PIM’s integration with IAM Identity Center.

Just-in-time privileged access with Entra PIM and IAM Identity Center

Privileged Identity Management is a Microsoft Entra ID feature that enables management, control, and access monitoring of your important cloud resources. There are many different configuration options when it comes to eligibility and assignment to privileged security groups, including time-bound access with start and end dates, multi-factor authentication (MFA) enforcement, justification tracking, and so on. You can read more about those options in Microsoft’s product documentation.

Figure 1 shows the just-in-time access solution powered by Entra PIM group activation requests. In this solution, Entra PIM is integrated with IAM Identity Center to provide temporary, limited access to AWS resources based on user requests and approvals. Entra ID users can submit requests for specific access to specific AWS permissions sets, which are then automatically granted for a set duration.

Figure 1 – Entra PIM solution integrated with IAM Identity Center

Figure 1 – Entra PIM solution integrated with IAM Identity Center

Prerequisites

To try the solution described in this post, you need to have the following in place:

Step-by-step configuration

In the following steps, you create configurations to enable Entra PIM for Groups to automatically assign users to groups based on approval criteria. The groups will be Entra ID security groups that use direct assignment. Note that, at the time of this writing, dynamic groups and groups that you have synchronized from a self-managed Active Directory cannot be used with Microsoft Entra PIM. While it might be possible to also populate these groups using a third-party synchronization tool, for the purposes of this exercise, we assume that administration is occurring solely within Entra ID.

In the example scenario, the role corresponds to a specific job function within your organization. We use a group called AWS – Amazon EC2 Admin, which corresponds to a DevOps on-call site reliability engineer (SRE) lead.

Step 1: Create a group representing a specific privilege level.

Create a group in Entra ID that represents a specific privilege level that your employees can request for access to the AWS Management Console.

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center with your credentials.
  2. Select Groups and then All groups.
  3. Choose New group.
  4. Specify Security in the Group type dropdown list.
    • In the Group name field, enter AWS - Amazon EC2 Admin.
    • In the Group description field, enter Amazon EC2 administrator permissions.
    • Choose Create.

Step 2: Assign access for the group in Entra ID

Now you need to assign the newly created group to your enterprise application.

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center with your credentials
  2. Select Applications and then Enterprise applications and select the IAM Identity Center application that you created.
  3. Select Users and groups from the Manage menu group and select + Add user/group.
  4. Select the None selected option from the Users and groups section.
  5. Select the AWS – Amazon EC2 Admin group checkbox.
  6. Choose Select and then choose Assign.
  7. Select Provisioning from the Manage menu group and begin synchronizing the empty group by selecting the Start provisioning option.

When you first enable provisioning, the initial Microsoft Entra ID sync is triggered immediately. After that, subsequent syncs are triggered every 40 minutes, with the exact frequency depending on the number of users and groups in the application.

When the initial sync completes, the AWS – Amazon EC2 Admin group will be ready for configuration in IAM Identity Center.

Step 3: Create permission sets in IAM Identity Center

As you prepare to configure your permission set, let’s consider session duration from both the AWS and Entra PIM perspectives. There are two session durations on the AWS side: AWS access portal session duration and permission set session duration. The AWS access portal session duration defines the maximum length of time that a user can be signed in to the AWS access portal without reauthenticating. The default session duration is 8 hours but can be configured anywhere between 15 minutes and 7 days.

Note: Entra does not pass the SessionNotOnOrAfter attribute to IAM Identity Center as part of the SAML assertion. Meaning the duration of the AWS access portal session is controlled by the duration set in IAM Identity Center.

The session duration defined within a permission set specifies the length of time that a user can have a session for an AWS account. The default and minimum value is 1 hour (with a maximum value of 12). Entra PIM allows you to configure an activation maximum duration. The activation maximum duration is the length of time that the specified group will contain the activated user account. The activation maximum duration has a default value of 8 hours but can be configured between 30 minutes and 24 hours.

You should carefully consider the values that you provide for each of these durations. The AWS access portal will display permission sets that the user had access to at the time that they signed in for the duration of the active AWS access portal session.

When you set the permission set session duration, you need to keep in mind that active sessions are not terminated when the Entra PIM activation maximum duration has been reached. Let’s look at an example:

  • AWS access portal session duration: default (8 hours)
  • Session duration defined in the permission set: 1 hour
  • Entra PIM group activation maximum duration: 1 hour

You might be inclined to think that an hour after being added to the group in Entra, the user would no longer have access to AWS resources. This is not necessarily the case. A user could authenticate to the AWS access portal, wait up to 8 hours, and still successfully access AWS through the permission set link. Their session would be active for the duration of the session setting defined in the permission set, which is 1 hour in this case. In this example, we have a potential window of access of 10 hours, as shown in Figure 2 that follows.

Figure 2 – Calculating session duration

Figure 2 – Calculating session duration

With this in mind, configure your test environment with the default setting of 8 hours for the AWS access portal and 1 hour for the permission set session duration value.

  1. Open the IAM Identity Center console.
  2. Under Multi-account permissions, choose Permission sets.
  3. Choose Create permission set.
  4. On the Select permission set type page, under Permission set type, select Custom permission set, and then choose Next.
  5. On the Specify policies and permissions boundary page, expand AWS managed policies.
  6. Search for and select AmazonEC2FullAccess policy, and then choose Next.
  7. On the Specify permission set details page, enter EC2AdminAccess for the Permission set name and choose Next.
  8. On the Review and create page, review the selections, and choose Create.

Step 4: Assign group access in your organization

At this point, you’re ready to assign the Microsoft Entra group to the corresponding permission set in IAM Identity Center. This allows users who are members of the group to be granted the appropriate access level in AWS.

  1. In the navigation pane, under Multi-account permissions, choose AWS accounts.
  2. On the AWS accounts page, select the check box next to one or more AWS accounts to which you want to assign access.
  3. Choose Assign users or groups.
  4. On the Groups tab, select AWS – Amazon EC2 Admin and choose Next
  5. On the Assign permission sets to “<AWS-account-name>” page, select the EC2AdminAccess permission set.
  6. Check that the correct permission set was selected and choose Next.
  7. On the Review and submit page, verify that the correct group and permission set are selected, and choose Submit.

Step 5: Configure Entra PIM

To use this Microsoft Entra group with Entra PIM, you bring the group under the management of PIM by using the Entra admin console to activate the group. You can read more about group management with PIM in the Microsoft documentation. Begin by activating the Entra group that you created.

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center with your credentials.
  2. Select Groups and then All groups
  3. Select the AWS – Amazon EC2 Admin group.
    Figure 3 – Selecting groups for PIM enablement

    Figure 3 – Selecting groups for PIM enablement

  4. Select Privileged Identity Management under the Activity menu list.
  5. Choose Enable PIM for this group.
    Figure 4 – Enable PIM for this group

    Figure 4 – Enable PIM for this group

Now, you will configure the PIM settings for the group. These settings define Member or Owner properties and requirements. It’s here that you can establish MFA requirements, configure notifications, conditional access, approvals, durations, and so on. The Owner role can elevate their permissions using just-in-time access to manage a group, while the Member role is limited to requesting just-in-time membership within the group. In this example, you use the Member properties to demonstrate group membership level temporary elevated access and set a 1-hour duration for the group assignment.

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center with your credentials.
  2. Select Identity Governance, Privileged Identity Management, and then Groups.
  3. Select the AWS – Amazon EC2 Admin group.
    Figure 5 – Selecting groups for PIM configuration

    Figure 5 – Selecting groups for PIM configuration

  4. From the Manage menu select Settings.
  5. Choose Member to view the default role setting details.
    Figure 6 – Settings option for the Member role

    Figure 6 – Settings option for the Member role

  6. Review the default settings. The activation maximum duration should be set to 1 hour and require a justification from the user.
  7. Close the Role setting details – Member blade.
    Figure 7 – Closing the Role setting details – Member blade

    Figure 7 – Closing the Role setting details – Member blade

  8. From the Manage menu select Assignments and choose + Add assignments.
    Figure 8 – Adding eligibility assignments to the PIM enabled groups

    Figure 8 – Adding eligibility assignments to the PIM enabled groups

  9. Select Member from the Select role dropdown menu and choose No member selected. Select the test account, Rich Roe in this example, and then choose Select.
    Figure 9 – Adding the test user as an eligible identity for PIM activation to the group

    Figure 9 – Adding the test user as an eligible identity for PIM activation to the group

  10. Choose Next and leave the default setting of 1 year of eligibility. Duration eligibility defines the period that the user can request activation for the group. Depending on your use case, you will define this as permanent or for a set period. For testing purposes, keep the default setting. Choose Assign.
    Figure 10 – Completing the eligibility assignment

    Figure 10 – Completing the eligibility assignment

Test the configuration

You should now have a test configuration of Entra PIM and IAM Identity Center. Use the test account to verify just-in-time access.

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center using the test account (Rich Roe in this example).
  2. Select Identity Governance, Privileged Identity Management, and then My roles.
    Figure 11 – Browsing to the My Roles section of the Entra admin center

    Figure 11 – Browsing to the My Roles section of the Entra admin center

  3. From the Activate menu list, select Groups. Your eligible group assignments should be listed.
  4. Choose Activate for the AWS – Amazon EC2 Admin group.
    Figure 12 – Activating the just-in-time group membership

    Figure 12 – Activating the just-in-time group membership

  5. In the Activate – Member blade, enter a justification for the access request and choose Activate.
    Figure 13 – Providing a justification for access

    Figure 13 – Providing a justification for access

In this example, there are no approval workflow processes configured for the group, so Entra validates the eligibility requirements and adds the test account to the AWS – Amazon EC2 Admin group. If you want to dive deeper into the approval workflow process, you can read more about it on the Configure PIM for Groups settings page. Because the group is assigned to the enterprise application and configured for provisioning, the updated group membership is automatically synchronized using the SCIM protocol with the connected IAM Identity Center instance. The provisioning time can vary based on the number of PIM enabled users that are activating their memberships within a given 10-second period. In most situations, group memberships are synchronized within 2–10 minutes, but can revert to the standard 40-minute interval if activity runs up against Entra PIM throttling limits. IAM Identity Center responds to SCIM requests as they arrive from Entra ID.

To test access with the newly activated group assignment, use a separate browser or a private window.

  1. Sign in to the My Apps portal with the test user credentials and select the IAM Identity Center app that you created for testing. If you experience an error or don’t see the expected permission set, wait a few minutes until the group membership has synchronized to IAM Identity Center and try again.
    Figure 14 – Accessing IAM Identity Center through the My apps portal

    Figure 14 – Accessing IAM Identity Center through the My apps portal

  2. Expand the associated AWS account and confirm the EC2ReadOnly permission set has been granted.
  3. Close the AWS tab. Wait for the access to be revoked, which has been set to 60 minutes in this example.
    Figure 15 – Just-in-time access to the EC2AdminAccess permission set

    Figure 15 – Just-in-time access to the EC2AdminAccess permission set

  4. Sign back in to the My Apps portal and select the AWS IAM Identity Center app. Notice that the EC2ReadOnly permission set has been revoked.

Conclusion

The combination of AWS IAM Identity Center and Entra PIM provides a robust solution for managing just-in-time elevated access to AWS. By using security groups in Entra and mapping them to permission sets in IAM Identity Center, you can automate the provisioning and deprovisioning of privileged access based on defined policies and approval workflows. This approach helps to make sure the principle of least privilege is enforced, with access granted only for the duration required to complete a task. The detailed auditing capabilities of both services also provide comprehensive visibility into privileged access activities.

For AWS customers seeking a comprehensive, secure, and scalable privileged access management solution, the Entra PIM and IAM Identity Center integration is a common option that’s worth investigating to see if it’s a good fit for your use case.

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

Rodney Underkoffler

Rodney Underkoffler

Rodney is a Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, focused on guiding enterprise customers on their cloud journey. He has a background in infrastructure, security, and IT business practices. He is passionate about technology and enjoys building and exploring new solutions and methodologies.

Aidan Keane

Aidan Keane

Aidan is a Senior Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, focused on Microsoft Workloads. He partners with enterprise customers to optimize their Microsoft environments on AWS and accelerate their cloud journey. Outside of work, he is a sports enthusiast who enjoys golf, biking, and watching Liverpool FC, while also enjoying family time and travelling to Ireland and South America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data access and management

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

Cryptography and post-quantum

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

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

Data migration and modernization

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

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

Data protection for AI

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

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

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

Data protection and compliance at scale

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

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

Advanced seat reservation

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

Conclusion

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

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

Rahul Sahni

Rahul Sahni

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

Application security at re:Inforce 2025

Post Syndicated from Daniel Begimher original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/application-security-at-reinforce-2025/

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

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

Join us in Philadelphia on June 16–18, 2025, for AWS re:Inforce, where you can enhance your skills and confidence in cloud security, compliance, identity, and privacy. As an attendee, you will 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 sessions led by industry leaders. AWS re:Inforce offers a comprehensive focus on key security areas, including application security (AppSec).

Key AppSec themes for 2025

The AppSec track helps you understand and implement best practices for securing your applications throughout the development lifecycle. For 2025, we’re focusing on several key themes:

Organizational strategies to ship quickly and securely

Learn about security ownership, partnerships like DevSecOps, comprehensive application security programs, and scaling application security expertise into workload teams. These sessions explore how organizations can build security into their development processes without sacrificing speed, focusing on practical approaches that distribute security responsibility effectively.

Secure by design

Make embedding security principles into the early stages of software architecture and design to mitigate vulnerabilities early, minimize risks, and recognize security as a core business requirement. Learn how leading organizations implement security as a foundational element rather than an add-on consideration.

Security of the pipeline

Security of the pipeline includes tooling, reference architectures, and best practices for securing the pipeline, including Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA), Supply Chain Integrity, Transparency, and Trust (SCITT), and code signing. Discover how to protect the systems and processes that build and deploy your applications.

Security in the pipeline

Security in the pipeline is achieved in part through testing methodologies including static analysis, dynamic analysis, responsible AI testing, software composition analysis, formal methods (automated reasoning), and dependency tracking. These sessions demonstrate how to integrate comprehensive security testing throughout your development lifecycle.

In the following sections, you’ll find a subset of some of the most exciting sessions happening in our AppSec track this year. For the full list, visit the re:inforce 2025 catalog.

Breakout sessions, chalk talks, lightning talks, and code talks

APS204 | Breakout session | Scaling security with Sportsbet’s Security Guardians program
The Security Guardians program helps scale security across application teams by building and embedding security expertise. We dive deep on Sportsbet’s program where you will learn how to get started, key phases to consider, and the first learning steps for new guardians. Discover lessons learned, common challenges, and how to refine the program for long-term success. By integrating security into application teams early, Sportsbet fosters a culture of shared responsibility, improving security posture without slowing down development. We provide practical insights on launching and evolving a Security Guardians program to drive real impact across your organization.

APS301 | Breakout session | Improve code quality with Amazon Q Developer
Amazon Q Developer is a generative AI assistant that goes beyond writing code—it can also improve documentation, generate unit tests, and automate code reviews. In this session, discover how to integrate Amazon Q Developer into your software development lifecycle to detect security issues using software composition analysis (SCA), static application security testing (SAST), and other code quality checks. Learn how to improve your codebase quality using the capabilities of Amazon Q Developer within the integrated development environment (IDE) and DevSecOps tooling.

APS401 | Breakout session | Build verifiable apps using automated reasoning and generative AI
Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating creative solutions, while automated reasoning tools enable rigorous verification. This session explores methodologies for combining these complementary strengths to create more reliable AI systems. In this session, we introduce automated reasoning and demonstrate how formal methods can guide and constrain generative AI. By combining probabilistic and symbolic approaches, we show you how to build hybrid systems that maintain creative capabilities while ensuring verifiable outputs. We demonstrate how Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Bedrock Guardrails use automated reasoning to generate safe and logically correct output, free from hallucinations.

APS431 | Chalk talk | DevSecOps in action with Visual Studio Code & AWS IAM Access Analyzer
Organizations face a critical balance between developer productivity and security compliance when managing AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. In this session, discover how integrating AWS IAM Access Analyzer with Visual Studio Code empowers developers to create secure IAM policies during development. Learn to implement automated policy checks that catch overly permissive permissions early, validate against organizational standards, and provide real-time feedback. This proactive approach helps security teams maintain control while giving developers the autonomy they need, ultimately reducing deployment risks and saving valuable development time.

APS341 | Code talk | Move fast and stay secure: Lessons learned from the AWS prototyping team
When building prototypes and applications with technologies such as generative AI and serverless, it’s critical to move quickly and securely. In this code talk, learn how the AWS prototyping team successfully balances these goals. To meet user demand, AWS builds prototypes over a short amount of time while meeting a high bar for security expectations. Learn pointers, tips, and tricks to build quickly and securely, from threat modeling to using AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) features, custom constructs, and blueprints to harden the security of your infrastructure and improve productivity.

APS441 | Code talk | Supercharge IaC security with AI: From commit to auto-remediation
Dive deep into building an automated security feedback loop that combines Git commit signatures, static analysis, and generative AI to revolutionize infrastructure as code (IaC) security. Through live coding, we’ll demonstrate how to use Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Bedrock to analyze IaC templates, automatically detect and resolve issues, and generate contextual fix recommendations. Learn how to implement commit-based tracking for security findings, automate issue creation, and integrate with continuous integration and delivery CI/CD pipelines. Watch as we build a complete system that reduces the time from vulnerability detection to remediation from days to minutes.

APS442 | Code talk | Create memory safe applications using open source verification tools
Memory-safety errors pose a significant security risk, enabling various attack vectors. At AWS, we prioritize memory-safety for unmanaged code handling customer data and processes. This talk presents two efforts to reduce memory-safety errors in Rust and C code. Both efforts involve developing verification tools for Rust and C code to check memory safety at scale that you can use. Our first effort verifies the Rust standard library, a core software resource, used by millions of developers. Our second effort uses a C model checker to verify C code for safety and correctness.

APS221 | Lightning talk | Building secure development into Amazon stores
Amazon.com has long been at the forefront of investing in robust security measures to protect customer data. As the digital landscape evolves, so do our strategies. This session explores our journey of continuous improvement in security practices, focusing on integration throughout the software development lifecycle using AWS services. We’ll share the cutting-edge methods used by Amazon.com for embedding security at every development stage and discuss successes and learnings. Join us to discover how we’ve adapted our tactics to meet changing developer and customer needs and to ensure our commitment to protecting customer data remains stronger than ever.

APS222 | Lightning talk | Transform threat modeling using generative AI
Discover how CRED, one of the biggest Fintech companies in India has used generative AI to automate threat modeling across their applications. Learn architectural patterns that enabled CRED to scale security analysis, improve risk identification, and enhance decision-making. See practical examples of integrating AI into security modeling workflows using Amazon Bedrock.

SEC221 | Lightning talk | Raising the tide: How AWS is shaping the future of secure AI for all
AI security is a top priority for AWS. By building AI solutions that are secure by design, AWS helps you innovate quickly with confidence while mitigating emerging threats. But securing AI goes beyond individual organizations—it requires industry-wide standards and best practices. AWS actively contributes to global AI security efforts, including participation in industry standards bodies such as The Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI), to help ensure that AI technologies are safe, resilient, and trustworthy. This session will explore how AWS is leading AI security innovation, protecting customers, and collaborating to help shape the future of AI security for the entire industry.

Workshops and builders sessions

APS351 | Securing generative AI agents using AWS Well-Architected Framework
Learn hands-on how to build secure generative AI agent solutions following the AWS Well-Architected Framework Generative AI Lens security best practices. Work through practical implementations of endpoint security, prompt engineering guardrails, monitoring systems, and protection against excessive agency while building a production-ready generative AI agent. Through hands-on exercises, build a secure generative AI agent solution incorporating these controls on AWS, using Amazon Bedrock, Amazon CloudWatch, IAM, and more. You must bring your laptop to participate.

APS353 | Red-teaming your LLM security at scale
Step into the shoes of an AI-powered red team adversary in the GenAI Red Team Challenge. In this intensive workshop, you’ll deploy an AI security agent to orchestrate sophisticated attack chains against generative AI applications, systematically discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities from prompt injection to boundary testing while mastering automated security testing workflows. In addition, you’ll learn how to apply countermeasures, from prompt templating to guardrails. This hands-on, gamified experience helps you think like a threat actor and equips you with practical skills in automated vulnerability testing and risk mitigation against common MITRE and OWASP vulnerabilities for LLM-based applications. You must bring your laptop to participate.

APS354 | Secure your application using AWS services and open source tooling
AWS, open source, and partner tooling work together to accelerate your software development lifecycle. Learn how to use the Automated Security Helper (ASH), an open source application security tool, to quickly integrate various security testing tools into your software build and deployment flows. AWS experts guide you through the process of security testing locally on your machines and within a simulated pipeline using a sample generative AI application. Discover how to identify potential security issues in your applications through static analysis, software composition analysis, and infrastructure-as-code testing, and use Amazon Q Developer to review the results and generate remediation. You must bring your laptop to participate.

APS271 | Threat modeling for builders
In this workshop, you will learn threat modeling core concepts and how to apply them through a series of group exercises. Key topics include threat modeling personas, key phases, data flow diagrams, STRIDE (spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, and elevation of privilege), and risk response strategies. We introduce a threat grammar rule and an associated tool. Exercises will have you identify threats and mitigations through the lens of each of the threat modeling personas. You will assemble in groups and walk through a case study. AWS threat modeling subject matter experts will be on hand to guide you and provide feedback. You must bring your laptop to participate.

APS371 | Securing your generative AI applications on AWS
In this workshop, discover how to secure generative AI applications using AWS services and features. Explore how to deploy a vulnerable sample generative AI application and then layer security controls to protect, detect, and respond to security issues. Learn how to apply similar controls to the generative AI applications in your organization. You must bring your laptop to participate.

APS471 | Boost developer productivity with Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Bedrock
Accelerate development and drive innovation with Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Bedrock. Discover how AI-powered automation and intelligent code assistance can reduce friction, speed up development cycles, and improve code quality. Explore real-world use cases such as AI-driven code reviews, automated testing, and smart documentation generation. Learn how to seamlessly integrate these tools into your workflows to boost efficiency, enhance collaboration, and elevate the developer experience—all while making sure of security and compliance. Whether optimizing existing processes or adopting AI for the first time, this session provides actionable insights to supercharge your development teams. You must bring your laptop to participate.

Conclusion

This post showcases a subset of the exciting AppSec sessions available at the upcoming AWS re:Inforce 2025 conference. If you’re interested in these topics, we encourage you to register for re:Inforce 2025, where you can attend these sessions and many more across the other security domain tracks. To discover the full range of sessions across all security tracks, check out the complete AWS re:Inforce catalog.

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

Daniel Begimher

Daniel Begimher

Daniel is a Senior Security Engineer specializing in cloud security and incident response solutions. He co-leads the Application Security focus area within the AWS Security and Compliance Technical Field Community, holds all AWS certifications, and authored Automated Security Helper (ASH), an open source code scanning tool. In his free time, Daniel enjoys gadgets, video games, and traveling.

Danny Cortegaca

Danny Cortegaca

Danny is a Security Specialist Solutions Architect and co-leads the Application Security focus area within the AWS Security and Compliance Technical Field Community. He joined AWS in 2021 and partners with some of the largest organizations in the world to help them navigate complex security and regulatory environments. He loves talking about application security with customers and has helped many adopt threat modeling into their practices.

Introducing new regional implementations of Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS to support digital sovereignty

Post Syndicated from Max Peterson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/introducing-new-regional-implementations-of-landing-zone-accelerator-on-aws-to-support-digital-sovereignty/

Customers often tell me that they want a simpler path to meet the compliance and industry regulatory mandates they have in their geographic regions. In our deep engagements with partners and customers, we have learned that one of the greatest challenges for customers is the translation of security and compliance requirements into distinct technical controls. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), security is our top priority, and we understand that protecting your data in a world with changing regulations, technology, and risks takes teamwork. As we’ve said, security is foundational to sovereignty.

AWS helps organizations to develop and evolve security, identity, and compliance into key business enablers; that’s why we’re committed to working with national cyber authorities and regulators to help define and establish how their compliance standards can be translated into security best practices in the cloud. We’re responding to customer requests to create locally tailored approaches aligned to their own regional standards and guidance as established by in-region authorities.

Architectural best practice, locally tailored

Since its launch in 2022, Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS has been instrumental in helping thousands of customers deploy cloud foundations that align with multiple global compliance frameworks and AWS best practices, including the Baseline Informatiebeveiliging Overheid (BIO) in the Netherlands, and the Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS) in Spain. AWS is committed to expanding our regional implementations to help customers meet specific national and regional standards and digital sovereignty goals.

In March, I was proud to share the news of the cooperation agreement between the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and AWS, where AWS committed to help advance digital sovereignty and cybersecurity best practices and standards in Germany and across the European Union. With that in mind, I’m excited to share that our next regional implementation of Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS will support customers with workloads in Germany. The C5-ready Landing Zone Accelerator is designed to help customers meet their Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalogue (C5) compliance objectives in the cloud. This will be available to our customers in Q3-2025, and at launch, our regional implementations will also be available in AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

The C5 attestation scheme is backed by the German government and was introduced by the BSI in 2016. AWS has adhered to the C5 requirements since their inception. C5 helps organizations demonstrate operational security against common cybersecurity threats when using cloud services through the German government’s Security Recommendations for Cloud Computing Providers.

For many customers in Germany, adherence to C5 is a requirement, and this is evidenced through a compliance assessment by an authorized assessor. Preparing for this assessment is critical for a successful outcome and is why AWS has partnered with AWS Global Security & Compliance (GSCA) Partner Schellman to provide the assessor insight as to how the C5-ready Landing Zone Accelerator can accelerate and simplify the path to C5 adoption for AWS customers.

AWS Partner Schellman: Proven Track Record in C5 Assessments

As one of the few firms with deep expertise and experience in C5 assessments, Schellman has completed several dozen evaluations across a wide range of clients—from agile startups to global enterprises. This diverse portfolio underscores Schellman’s capabilities, deep technical expertise, and unwavering commitment to security assurance.

“Our team has seen firsthand how the C5 standard fosters transparency and builds trust in cloud services. We’re proud to support our clients not just in understanding C5, but in strategically leveraging it to improve security and competitiveness on a global scale.”
Jeff Schiess, Managing Director, Schellman

Lowering the Barrier to Entry – Schellman recognizes that achieving C5 compliance can sometimes be intimidating, particularly for organizations new to the framework. To that end, Schellman has performed an assessment against the foundational infrastructure provided by LZA on AWS, designed to simplify the C5 journey. The LZA provides preconfigured infrastructure templates and security baselines that significantly reduce the complexity of establishing C5-compliant cloud environments.

“With the Landing Zone Accelerator, organizations can build on a C5-ready foundation right from the start. It’s a practical, scalable solution for companies that might otherwise find the C5 standard overwhelming.”
Kristen Wilbur, Principal, Schellman

Sovereign by design

Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS automatically implements hundreds of security capabilities that map to control requirements across geographic compliance frameworks. This saves customers hundreds of hours in planning and implementing secure networking and account configurations by providing them with a foundation based on the AWS Well-Architected Security Pillar and AWS security best practices. Meeting compliance requirements, having verifiable access controls and data transfer restrictions, independence and choice over the technology stack, and surviving large-scale disruptions are some of the key capabilities that customers require of a sovereign-by-design workload. However, for many customers, translating regulatory requirements into a set of discrete technical controls and applying them consistently across one or more AWS accounts and AWS Regions can be time-intensive and challenging.

We provide customers and partners with detailed guidance on how to configure Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS in accordance with their local security and compliance requirements, including digital sovereignty requirements. This includes control mapping to local regulations or policies that shows customers how controls implemented in a landing zone are mapped to the specific requirements, calling out where customers are required to do more to meet these as part of our shared responsibility model—this includes organizational policies and procedures where customers must implement additional controls within their application or workload to meet local requirements.

Control over the location of your data

Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS provides customers with a choice of configurable preventative, detective, and proactive controls to help customers meet their data residency, security, and compliance objectives, whether you’re a public sector customer wanting to keep data in a single Region or navigating the complex needs of multi-national organizations with operations subject to differing digital sovereignty requirements.

Verifiable control over data access

Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS goes beyond just provisioning a secure, multi-account environment. It establishes a well-structured, multi-account architecture using AWS Organizations. This logically isolates workloads, management functions, and security controls into dedicated organizational units (OUs). This not only enhances security and operational efficiency, but also helps customers to enforce consistent data residency, access management, and compliance policies across their entire cloud footprint. These powerful guardrails empower customers to quickly harness the innovative potential of cloud technologies, whilst delivering business value from an established security and compliance baseline.

By providing this automated approach, AWS empowers organizations to rapidly deploy cloud environments tailored to their specific local requirements in days instead of weeks; with robust security, compliance, and operational guardrails in place from the outset. Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS is designed to simplify the path to cloud adoption and compliance for organizations, particularly those in regulated industries or with sovereignty requirements. This approach marks a shift from the previous heavy lift required for organizations to migrate workloads to the cloud while meeting their needs.

Partners at the core

There is a lot of complexity involved with navigating the evolving digital sovereignty landscape—but you don’t have to do it alone. Our AWS Digital Sovereignty Competency connects customers with trusted partners with demonstrated expertise to advise and architect for their customers’ digital sovereignty needs while taking advantage of the full potential of the AWS Cloud. As part of the competency, AWS is supporting partners to navigate customer challenges across four pillars: data residency, data protection, access control, and survivability.

Customers have told me about how challenging it can be to architect to address their sovereignty needs, often requiring manual iteration and longer time to value. Using Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS is one of the ways AWS and AWS Partners can work together to address customers’ sovereignty needs with a repeatable approach that helps our customers and partners move faster. I’m excited by how regional implementations of Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS is helping AWS Sovereignty Partners, such as Atos and SVA, to move faster without compromise.

“Compliance with regulations like C5 is essential for customers in the public sector and regulated industries, who prioritize digital sovereignty, and this is central to our Cloud for Clinics initiative with AWS in the German Healthcare market. The availability of the C5 LZA significantly reduces the technical complexity, giving us a common technical platform to build on reducing time to market. Atos is driving the operational rollout and expanding the scope of compliance mappings to further streamline customer compliance. At the same time, we are incorporating essential managed services like SOC/SIEM which we believe will make compliant cloud adoption easier to drive innovation by the Public Sector, Healthcare institutions or customers in regulated industries like Financial Services and Utilities.”
Boris Hecker, Managing Director, ATOS Germany

“Compliance with BSI C5 criteria for customers from the public sector and regulated industries is a basic requirement for the use of public cloud services. Implementing the regulations is often complex, time-consuming and resource-intensive. For this reason, customers are looking for solutions that they can tailor to the specific requirements of their industry; while ensuring they meet compliance standards. SVA supports customers in maintaining the balance between innovation and compliance with customized, C5-certified, managed services. We rely on solutions such as the Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS to reconcile the use of market-leading public cloud infrastructure with regulatory requirements.”
Patrick Glawe, Hyperscaler Lead at SVA

For more information, see Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS and AWS Digital Sovereignty Competency Partners

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.

How to use the new AWS Secrets Manager Cost Allocation Tags feature

Post Syndicated from Jirka Fajfr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-use-the-new-aws-secrets-manager-cost-allocation-tags-feature/

AWS Secrets Manager is a service that you can use to manage, retrieve, and rotate database credentials, application credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycles. You can use Secrets Manager to replace hard-coded credentials in application source code with a runtime call to the Secrets Manager service to retrieve credentials dynamically when you need them. Storing the credentials in Secrets Manager helps avoid unintended access by anyone who inspects your application’s source code, configuration, or components.

Until today, your AWS bill would reflect the total cost of Secrets Manager in any given account, and you had no option to break out the cost per secret to a given cost center or organization.

In this post, we introduce a new feature—Secrets Manager Costs Allocation Tags—and walk through how you can use them for improved visibility into your Secrets Manager costs. Before getting into the details of this new feature, we want to give you primer about cost allocation tags.

A tag is a key-value pair that you assign to an AWS resource. In AWS Cost Explorer, you can activate tags as cost allocation tags. With tags activated, you can categorize and track costs by cost allocation tags. For example, you can create a tag named Group with value Engineering and assign it to resources owned by the engineering team of your company. After activating the Group tag as a cost allocation tag, you can track charges with this tag, filter or group by tags in Cost Explorer, and add tags to reports such as cost and usage reports for further analysis and visualization.

Cost allocation in AWS is a four step process:

  1. Create the required cost allocation tags
  2. Attach cost allocation tags to your resources
  3. Activate your tags in the Cost Allocation Tags section of the AWS Billing console
  4. Filter the tags, group by tags in Cost Explorer, and create cost categories

After you create and attach the tags to resources, they appear in the AWS Billing console Cost Allocation Tags section under User-defined cost allocation tags within 24 hours. You must activate these tags for AWS to start tracking them for your resources and for the tags to show up in Cost Explorer. When the tags appear under Tags in the Filter or Group by fields in Cost Explorer, you can start filtering or grouping by tag to view usage and charges by tag.

AWS Secrets Manager now supports cost allocation tags

Secrets Manager now supports cost allocation tags, giving you more granular control and visibility into your Secrets Manager costs. You can use this feature to categorize and track your Secrets Manager usage charges at a more detailed level, helping you to better understand and manage your AWS spending and assign costs per secret back to cost centers or organizations.

Solution overview: Enhanced cost visibility and management

With this new capability, you can:

  • Break down Secrets Manager costs by department, project, environment, or other dimensions important to your organization
  • View itemized Secrets Manager usage in Cost Explorer as well as in cost and usage reports
  • Improve cost allocation and chargeback processes across your business units and organizations

Prerequisites

To walk through the examples in this post, you need to have the following:

  1. An AWS account
  2. Access to the AWS Management Console or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) version 2
  3. An existing tagging and cost allocation strategy
  4. Existing secrets inside Secrets Manager

Create user-defined tags for cost allocation purposes using the console

In this example, we assume that you want to manage the cost of your secrets by different cost centers in your organization. Here, we create a tag with CostCenter as a key and the value equal to the cost center codes of the teams that are using secrets.

You’ll walk through two examples, the first one with a cost center for Engineering and a second one with a cost center for Finance. You will reuse those examples throughout this post.

In this example, start by creating and assigning a tag called cost allocation center with the key name: CostCenter and assign a cost center value of 7263 for the engineering department to an existing or new secret.

To assign a user-defined tag to a new or existing secret:

  1. In the Secrets Manager console, choose Secrets from the navigation pane.
  2. In the list of available secrets, select the secret to edit the tags or choose Store A New Secret to create a new secret.
  3. When the secret is displayed, select the Tags option and choose Edit Tags to add new or edit existing tags.
    Figure 1: Assign a user-defined tag to an existing secret

    Figure 1: Assign a user-defined tag to an existing secret

  4. Repeat the process, but assign the cost center value of 7263 for the engineering department and 1121 for the finance department to a second secret.

Create user-defined tags for cost allocation purposes using the AWS CLI

Optionally, you can use the AWS CLI to create the same tags as in the preceding example.

To use the AWS CLI to create tags:

  1. Use the following AWS CLI command to create the first tag: 
    aws secretsmanager tag-resource \
    --secret-id prod/mastersecret \
    --tags Key=Role,Value=admin

  2. Create the second tag using the following AWS CLI command: 
    aws secretsmanager tag-resource \
    --secret-id prod/mastersecret \
    --tags Key=CostCenter,Value=7263

    This command produces no output in case of a successful execution.

  3. Use the second AWS CLI command with a value of 1121 for the second secret.

Turn tags into cost allocation tags using the AWS Billing and Cost Management console

The next step is to activate the user-defined tags within the AWS Billing and Cost Management console so they can be used.

To activate cost allocation tags:

  1. Go to the AWS Billing and Cost Management console and choose Cost allocation tags in the navigation pane.
  2. Select the option for user-defined cost allocation tags.
  3. Select the tag keys that you want to activate.
  4. Choose Activate.

Note: After you create and apply user-defined tags to your resources, it can take up to 24 hours for the tag keys to appear on your cost allocation tags page for activation. It can then take up to 24 hours for tag keys to activate.

Figure 2: Activate cost allocation tags

Figure 2: Activate cost allocation tags

Turn tags into cost allocation tags using the AWS CLI

You can also activate user-defined tags within the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console using the AWS CLI.

To activate tags using the AWS CLI:

  1. For activation of the first user-defined tag use the following AWS CLI command: 
    aws ce update-cost-allocation-tags-status \
    --cost-allocation-tags-status TagKey=Role,Status=Active

  2. To activate the second user-defined tag use the following AWS CLI command: 
    aws ce update-cost-allocation-tags-status \
    --cost-allocation-tags-status TagKey=CostCenter,Status=Active

View the results in Cost Explorer

The last step is to view the results for secrets in Cost Explorer. When the tag CostCenter shows up under Tags in the Filter or Group By fields in Cost Explorer, you can start filtering or grouping by the tag to view usage and charges by tag.

When applying the tag filter for Secrets Manager, Cost Explorer displays charges only for resources tagged with the selected tag values. And when grouped by a particular tag, the charges are grouped by each value of the selected tag.

To view results:

As an example, use the following parameters to view results.

  1. In the Cost Center console, select the right arrow (>) icon to open the report parameters options to the right of the billing dashboard.
  2. On the Report parameters window:
    1. For Date Range, enter the desired time range.
    2. Under Group by, for Dimension, select Tag, and for Tag select Cost Center.
    3. For Filters, Service, select Secrets Manager.
      Figure 3: Configure report parameters

      Figure 3: Configure report parameters

You can use the resulting report to clearly identify the cost and usage of the two secrets, broken down into the two cost centers: engineering 7263 and finance 1121. Now, you can cross-charge secrets to the corresponding cost centers in your organization and provide a report similar to Figure 4.

Figure 4: Cost and usage report

Figure 4: Cost and usage report

Conclusion

In this post, we introduced the AWS Secrets Manager Cost Allocation Tags feature and showed you how to use AWS Cost Explorer Costs and Usage Reports to gain secrets usage insights. You can now allocate the cost for every secret to one or more cost centers and charge them accordingly. See the AWS Secrets Manager Cost Allocation Tag documentation to learn more about how you can use Secrets Manager Cost Allocation Tags in your accounts.

Go to the AWS Secrets Manager console to get started. For more information, see AWS Secrets Manager.

To learn more about how to build an effective tagging strategy for cost allocation and financial management, see the Tags for cost allocation and financial management whitepaper.

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Jirka Fajfr

Jirka Fajfr

Jirka is a Software Engineer at AWS working in the Cryptography organization focusing on AWS Secrets Manager. He’s passionate about helping customers secure their applications and manage sensitive information and contributes to building and improving secure, scalable solutions for secrets management in the cloud. Before joining AWS, he applied neural networks to predict electricity load demand and price, bringing together data science and utility infrastructure.

Marc Luescher

Marc Luescher

Marc is a Senior Solutions Architect helping enterprise customers be successful, focusing strongly on threat detection, incident response, and data protection. His background is in networking, security, and observability. Previously, he worked in technical architecture and security hands-on positions within the healthcare sector as an AWS customer. Outside of work, Marc enjoys his two dogs, three cats, twenty chickens, and his huge yard.