As organizations expand their Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment and migrate workloads to the cloud, they find themselves dealing with many AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and policies. These roles and policies multiply because IAM fills a crucial role in securing and controlling access to AWS resources. Imagine you have a team creating an application. You create an IAM role to grant them access to the necessary AWS resources, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, Amazon Key Management Service (Amazon KMS) keys, and Amazon Elastic File Service (Amazon EFS) shares. With additional workloads and new data access patterns, the number of IAM roles and policies naturally increases. With the growing complexity of resources and data access patterns, it becomes crucial to streamline access and simplify the management of IAM policies and roles
In this blog post, we illustrate how you can use IAM paths to organize IAM policies and roles and provide examples you can use as a foundation for your own use cases.
How to use paths with your IAM roles and policies
When you create a role or policy, you create it with a default path. In IAM, the default path for resources is “/”. Instead of using a default path, you can create and use paths and nested paths as a structure to manage IAM resources. The following example shows an IAM role named S3Access in the path developer:
arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/developer/S3Access
Service-linked roles are created in a reserved path /aws-service-role/. The following is an example of a service-linked role path.
By using IAM paths with roles and policies, you can create groupings and design a logical separation to simplify management. You can use these groupings to grant access to teams, delegate permissions, and control what roles can be passed to AWS services. In the following sections, we illustrate how to use IAM paths to create groupings of roles and policies by referencing a fictional company and its expansion of AWS resources.
The following is an example of an AWS CLI command that creates a role in an IAM path.
aws iam create-role --role-name <ROLE-NAME> --assume-role-policy-document file://assume-role-doc.json --path <PATH>
Replace <ROLE-NAME> and <PATH> in the command with your role name and role path respectively. Use a trust policy for the trust document that matches your use case. An example trust policy that allows Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to assume this role on your behalf is below:
The following is an example of an AWS CLI command that creates a policy in an IAM path.
aws iam create-policy --policy-name <POLICY-NAME> --path <PATH> --policy-document file://policy.json
IAM paths sample implementation
Let’s assume you’re a cloud platform architect at AnyCompany, a startup that’s planning to expand its AWS environment. By the end of the year, AnyCompany is going to expand from one team of developers to multiple teams, all of which require access to AWS. You want to design a scalable way to manage IAM roles and policies to simplify the administrative process to give permissions to each team’s roles. To do that, you create groupings of roles and policies based on teams.
Organize IAM roles with paths
AnyCompany decided to create the following roles based on teams.
Team name
Role name
IAM path
Has access to
Security
universal-security-readonly
/security/
All resources
Team A database administrators
DBA-role-A
/teamA/
TeamA’s databases
Team B database administrators
DBA-role-B
/teamB/
TeamB’s databases
The following are example Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) for the roles listed above. In this example, you define IAM paths to create a grouping based on team names.
Note: Role names must be unique within your AWS account regardless of their IAM paths. You cannot have two roles named DBA-role, even if they’re in separate paths.
Organize IAM policies with paths
After you’ve created roles in IAM paths, you will create policies to provide permissions to these roles. The same path structure that was defined in the IAM roles is used for the IAM policies. The following is an example of how to create a policy with an IAM path. After you create the policy, you can attach the policy to a role using the attach-role-policy command.
aws iam create-policy --policy-name <POLICY-NAME> --policy-document file://policy-doc.json --path <PATH>
Grant access to groupings of IAM roles with resource-based policies
Now that you’ve created roles and policies in paths, you can more readily define which groups of principals can access a resource. In this deny statement example, you allow only the roles in the IAM path /teamA/ to act on your bucket, and you deny access to all other IAM principals. Rather than use individual roles to deny access to the bucket, which would require you to list every role, you can deny access to an entire group of principals by path. If you create a new role in your AWS account in the specified path, you don’t need to modify the policy to include them. The path-based deny statement will apply automatically.
IAM paths can also enable teams to more safely create IAM roles and policies and allow teams to only use the roles and policies contained by the paths. Paths can help prevent teams from privilege escalation by denying the use of roles that don’t belong to their team.
Continuing the example above, AnyCompany established a process that allows each team to create their own IAM roles and policies, providing they’re in a specified IAM path. For example, AnyCompany allows team A to create IAM roles and policies for team A in the path /teamA/:
Using IAM paths, AnyCompany can allow team A to more safely create and manage their own IAM roles and policies and safely pass those roles to AWS services using the iam:PassRole permission.
At AnyCompany, four IAM policies using IAM paths allow teams to more safely create and manage their own IAM roles and policies. Following recommended best practices, AnyCompany uses infrastructure as code (IaC) for all IAM role and policy creation. The four path-based policies that follow will be attached to each team’s CI/CD pipeline role, which has permissions to create roles. The following example focuses on team A, and how these policies enable them to self-manage their IAM credentials.
Create a role in the path and modify inline policies on the role: This policy allows three actions: iam:CreateRole, iam:PutRolePolicy, and iam:DeleteRolePolicy. When this policy is attached to a principal, that principal is allowed to create roles in the IAM path /teamA/ and add and delete inline policies on roles in that IAM path.
Add and remove managed policies: The second policy example allows two actions: iam:AttachRolePolicy and iam:DetachRolePolicy. This policy allows a principal to attach and detach managed policies in the /teamA/ path to roles that are created in the /teamA/ path.
Delete roles, tag and untag roles, read roles: The third policy allows a principal to delete roles, tag and untag roles, and retrieve information about roles that are created in the /teamA/ path.
Policy management in IAM path: The final policy example allows access to create, modify, get, and delete policies that are created in the /teamA/ path. This includes creating, deleting, and tagging policies.
To pass a role to an AWS service, a principal must have the iam:PassRole permission. IAM paths are the recommended option to restrict which roles a principal can pass when granted the iam:PassRole permission. IAM paths help verify principals can only pass specific roles or groupings of roles to an AWS service.
At AnyCompany, the security team wants to allow team A to add IAM roles to an instance profile and attach it to Amazon EC2 instances, but only if the roles are in the /teamA/ path. The IAM action that allows team A to provide the role to the instance is iam:PassRole. The security team doesn’t want team A to be able to pass other roles in the account, such as an administrator role.
The policy that follows allows passing of a role that was created in the /teamA/ path and does not allow the passing of other roles such as an administrator role.
How to create preventative guardrails for sensitive IAM paths
You can use service control policies (SCP) to restrict access to sensitive roles and policies within specific IAM paths. You can use an SCP to prevent the modification of sensitive roles and policies that are created in a defined path.
You will see the IAM path under the resource and condition portion of the statement. Only the role named IAMAdministrator created in the /security/ path can create or modify roles in the security path. This SCP allows you to delegate IAM role and policy management to developers with confidence that they won’t be able to create, modify, or delete any roles or policies in the security path.
This next example shows you how you can safely exempt IAM roles created in the security path from specific controls in your organization. The policy denies all roles except the roles created in the /security/ IAM path to close member accounts.
You should be aware of some additional considerations when you start using IAM paths.
Paths are immutable for IAM roles and policies. To change a path, you must delete the IAM resource and recreate the IAM resource in the alternative path. Deleting roles or instance profiles has step-by-step instructions to delete an IAM resource.
You can only create IAM paths using AWS API or command line tools. You cannot create IAM paths with the AWS console.
IAM paths aren’t added to the uniqueness of the role name. Role names must be unique within your account without the path taken into consideration.
AWS reserves several paths including /aws-service-role/ and you cannot create roles in this path.
Conclusion
IAM paths provide a powerful mechanism for effectively grouping IAM resources. Path-based groupings can streamline access management across AWS services. In this post, you learned how to use paths with IAM principals to create structured access with IAM roles, how to delegate and segregate access within an account, and safely pass roles using iam:PassRole. These techniques can empower you to fine-tune your AWS access management and help improve security while streamlining operational workflows.
You can use the following references to help extend your knowledge of IAM paths. This post references the processes outlined in the user guides and blog post, and sources the IAM policies from the GitHub repositories.
Recently, AWS launched a new feature that allows deployment of account instances of AWS IAM Identity Center . With this launch, you can now have two types of IAM Identity Center instances: organization instances and account instances. An organization instance is the IAM Identity Center instance that’s enabled in the management account of your organization created with AWS Organizations. This instance is used to manage access to AWS accounts and applications across your entire organization. Organization instances are the best practice when deploying IAM Identity Center. Many customers have requested a way to enable AWS applications using test or sandbox identities. The new account instances are intended to support sand-boxed deployments of AWS managed applications such as Amazon CodeCatalyst and are only usable from within the account and AWS Region in which they were created. They can exist in a standalone account or in a member account within AWS Organizations.
In this blog post, we show you when to use each instance type, how to control the deployment of account instances, and how you can monitor, manage, and audit these instances at scale using the enhanced IAM Identity Center APIs.
IAM Identity Center instance types
IAM Identity Center now offers two deployment types, the traditional organization instance and an account instance, shown in Figure 1. In this section, we show you the differences between the two.
Figure 1: IAM Identity Center instance types
Organization instance of IAM Identity Center
An organization instance of IAM Identity Center is the fully featured version that’s available with AWS Organizations. This type of instance helps you securely create or connect your workforce identities and manage their access centrally across AWS accounts and applications in your organization. The recommended use of an organization instance of Identity Center is for workforce authentication and authorization on AWS for organizations of any size and type.
Using the organization instance of IAM Identity Center, your identity center administrator can create and manage user identities in the Identity Center directory, or connect your existing identity source, including Microsoft Active Directory, Okta, Ping Identity, JumpCloud, Google Workspace, and Azure Active Directory (Entra ID). There is only one organization instance of IAM Identity Center at the organization level. If you have enabled IAM Identity Center before November 15, 2023, you have an organization instance.
Account instances of IAM Identity Center
Account instances of IAM Identity Center provide a subset of the features of the organization instance. Specifically, account instances support user and group assignments initially only to Amazon CodeCatalyst. They are bound to a single AWS account, and you can deploy them in either member accounts of an organization or in standalone AWS accounts. You can only deploy one account instance per AWS account regardless of Region.
You can use account instances of IAM Identity Center to provide access to supported Identity Center enabled application if the application is in the same account and Region.
When should I use account instances of IAM Identity Center?
Account instances are intended for use in specific situations where organization instances are unavailable or impractical, including:
You want to run a temporary trial of a supported AWS managed application to determine if it suits your business needs. See Additional Considerations.
You are unable to deploy IAM Identity Center across your organization, but still want to experiment with one or more AWS managed applications. See Additional Considerations.
You have an organization instance of IAM Identity Center, but you want to deploy a supported AWS managed application to an isolated set of users that are distinct from those in your organization instance.
Additional considerations
When working with multiple instances of IAM Identity Center, you want to keep a number of things in mind:
Each instance of IAM Identity Center is separate and distinct from other Identity Center instances. That is, users and assignments are managed separately in each instance without a means to keep them in sync.
Migration between instances isn’t possible. This means that migrating an application between instances requires setting up that application from scratch in the new instance.
Account instances have the same considerations when changing your identity source as an organization instance. In general, you want to set up with the right identity source before adding assignments.
Automating assigning users to applications through the IAM Identity Center public APIs also requires using the applications APIs to ensure that those users and groups have the right permissions within the application. For example, if you assign groups to CodeCatalyst using Identity Center, you still have to assign the groups to the CodeCatalyst space from the Amazon CodeCatalyst page in the AWS Management Console. See the Setting up a space that supports identity federation documentation.
By default, account instances require newly added users to register a multi-factor authentication (MFA) device when they first sign in. This can be altered in the AWS Management Console for Identity Center for a specific instance.
Controlling IAM Identity Center instance deployments
If you’ve enabled IAM Identity Center prior to November 15, 2023 then account instance creation is off by default. If you want to allow account instance creation, you must enable this feature from the Identity Center console in your organization’s management account. This includes scenarios where you’re using IAM Identity Center centrally and want to allow deployment and management of account instances. See Enable account instances in the AWS Management Console documentation.
If you enable IAM Identity Center after November 15, 2023 or if you haven’t enabled Identity Center at all, you can control the creation of account instances of Identity Center through a service control policy (SCP). We recommend applying the following sample policy to restrict the use of account instances to all but a select set of AWS accounts. The sample SCP that follows will help you deny creation of account instances of Identity Center to accounts in the organization unless the account ID matches the one you specified in the policy. Replace <ALLOWED-ACCOUNT_ID> with the ID of the account that is allowed to create account instances of Identity Center:
If your organization has an existing log ingestion pipeline solution to collect logs and generate reports through AWS CloudTrail, then IAM Identity Center supported CloudTrail operations will automatically be present in your pipeline, including additional account instances of IAM Identity Center actions such as sso:CreateInstance.
To create a monitoring solution for IAM Identity Center events in your organization, you should set up monitoring through AWS CloudTrail. CloudTrail is a service that records events from AWS services to facilitate monitoring activity from those services in your accounts. You can create a CloudTrail trail that captures events across all accounts and all Regions in your organization and persists them to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
After creating a trail for your organization, you can use it in several ways. You can send events to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and set up monitoring and alarms for Identity Center events, which enables immediate notification of supported IAM Identity Center CloudTrail operations. With multiple instances of Identity Center deployed within your organization, you can also enable notification of instance activity, including new instance creation, deletion, application registration, user authentication, or other supported actions.
The following is an example of a simple query that shows you a list of the Identity Center instances created and deleted, the account where they were created, and the user that created them. Replace <Event_data_store_ID> with your store ID.
SELECT
userIdentity.arn AS userARN, eventName, userIdentity.accountId
FROM
<Event_data_store_ID>
WHERE
userIdentity.arn IS NOT NULL
AND eventName = 'DeleteInstance'
OR eventName = 'CreateInstance'
You can save your query result to an S3 bucket and download a copy of the results in CSV format. To learn more, follow the steps in Download your CloudTrail Lake saved query results. Figure 2 shows the CloudTrail Lake query results.
Figure 2: AWS CloudTrail Lake query results
If you want to automate the sourcing, aggregation, normalization, and data management of security data across your organization using the Open Cyber Security Framework (OCSF) standard, you will benefit from using Amazon Security Lake. This service helps make your organization’s security data broadly accessible to your preferred security analytics solutions to power use cases such like threat detection, investigation, and incident response. Learn more in What is Amazon Security Lake?
Instance management and discovery within an organization
You can create account instances of IAM Identity Center in a standalone account or in an account that belongs to your organization. Creation can happen from an API call (CreateInstance) from the Identity Center console in a member account or from the setup experience of a supported AWS managed application. Learn more about Supported AWS managed applications.
If you decide to apply the DenyCreateAccountInstances SCP shown earlier to accounts in your organization, you will no longer be able to create account instances of IAM Identity Center in those accounts. However, you should also consider that when you invite a standalone AWS account to join your organization, the account might have an existing account instance of Identity Center.
To identify existing instances, who’s using them, and what they’re using them for, you can audit your organization to search for new instances. The following script shows how to discover all IAM Identity Center instances in your organization and export a .csv summary to an S3 bucket. This script is designed to run on the account where Identity Center was enabled. Click here to see instructions on how to use this script.
. . .
. . .
accounts_and_instances_dict={}
duplicated_users ={}
main_session = boto3.session.Session()
sso_admin_client = main_session.client('sso-admin')
identity_store_client = main_session.client('identitystore')
organizations_client = main_session.client('organizations')
s3_client = boto3.client('s3')
logger = logging.getLogger()
logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)
#create function to list all Identity Center instances in your organization
def lambda_handler(event, context):
application_assignment = []
user_dict={}
current_account = os.environ['CurrentAccountId']
logger.info("Current account %s", current_account)
paginator = organizations_client.get_paginator('list_accounts')
page_iterator = paginator.paginate()
for page in page_iterator:
for account in page['Accounts']:
get_credentials(account['Id'],current_account)
#get all instances per account - returns dictionary of instance id and instances ARN per account
accounts_and_instances_dict = get_accounts_and_instances(account['Id'], current_account)
def get_accounts_and_instances(account_id, current_account):
global accounts_and_instances_dict
instance_paginator = sso_admin_client.get_paginator('list_instances')
instance_page_iterator = instance_paginator.paginate()
for page in instance_page_iterator:
for instance in page['Instances']:
#send back all instances and identity centers
if account_id == current_account:
accounts_and_instances_dict = {current_account:[instance['IdentityStoreId'],instance['InstanceArn']]}
elif instance['OwnerAccountId'] != current_account:
accounts_and_instances_dict[account_id]= ([instance['IdentityStoreId'],instance['InstanceArn']])
return accounts_and_instances_dict
. . .
. . .
. . .
The following table shows the resulting IAM Identity Center instance summary report with all of the accounts in your organization and their corresponding Identity Center instances.
AccountId
IdentityCenterInstance
111122223333
d-111122223333
111122224444
d-111122223333
111122221111
d-111111111111
Duplicate user detection across multiple instances
A consideration of having multiple IAM Identity Center instances is the possibility of having the same person existing in two or more instances. In this situation, each instance creates a unique identifier for the same person and the identifier associates application-related data to the user. Create a user management process for incoming and outgoing users that is similar to the process you use at the organization level. For example, if a user leaves your organization, you need to revoke access in all Identity Center instances where that user exists.
The code that follows can be added to the previous script to help detect where duplicates might exist so you can take appropriate action. If you find a lot of duplication across account instances, you should consider adopting an organization instance to reduce your management overhead.
...
#determine if the member in IdentityStore have duplicate
def get_users(identityStoreId, user_dict):
global duplicated_users
paginator = identity_store_client.get_paginator('list_users')
page_iterator = paginator.paginate(IdentityStoreId=identityStoreId)
for page in page_iterator:
for user in page['Users']:
if ( 'Emails' not in user ):
print("user has no email")
else:
for email in user['Emails']:
if email['Value'] not in user_dict:
user_dict[email['Value']] = identityStoreId
else:
print("Duplicate user found " + user['UserName'])
user_dict[email['Value']] = user_dict[email['Value']] + "," + identityStoreId
duplicated_users[email['Value']] = user_dict[email['Value']]
return user_dict
...
The following table shows the resulting report with duplicated users in your organization and their corresponding IAM identity Center instances.
The full script for all of the above use cases is available in the multiple-instance-management-iam-identity-center GitHub repository. The repository includes instructions to deploy the script using AWS Lambda within the management account. After deployment, you can invoke the Lambda function to get .csv files of every IAM Identity center instance in your organization, the applications assigned to each instance, and the users that have access to those applications. With this function, you also get a report of users that exist in more than one local instance.
Conclusion
In this post, you learned the differences between an IAM Identity Center organization instance and an account instance, considerations for when to use an account instance, and how to use Identity Center APIs to automate discovery of Identity Center account instances in your organization.
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, start a new thread on AWS IAM Identity Center re:Post or contact AWS Support.
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At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we are committed to providing continued assurance to our customers through assessments, certifications, and attestations that support the adoption of current and new AWS services and features. We are pleased to announce the availability of the 2023 Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) assessment summary report for AWS. With this assessment, a total of 150 AWS services and features are assessed in the Canada (Central) Region, including 20 additional AWS services and features. The assessment report is available for review and download on demand through AWS Artifact.
The full list of services in scope for the CCCS assessment is available on the Services in Scope page. The 20 new services and features are the following:
The CCCS is Canada’s authoritative source of cyber security expert guidance for the Canadian government, industry, and the general public. Public and commercial sector organizations across Canada rely on CCCS’s rigorous Cloud Service Provider (CSP) IT Security (ITS) assessment in their decision to use CSP services. In addition, CCCS’s ITS assessment process is a mandatory requirement for AWS to provide cloud services to Canadian federal government departments and agencies.
The CCCS cloud service provider information technology security assessment process determines if the Government of Canada (GC) ITS requirements for the CCCS Medium cloud security profile (previously referred to as GC’s PROTECTED B/Medium Integrity/Medium Availability [PBMM] profile) are met as described in ITSG-33 (IT security risk management: A lifecycle approach, Annex 3 – Security control catalogue). As of November 2023, 150 AWS services in the Canada (Central) Region have been assessed by CCCS and meet the requirements for the Medium cloud security profile. Meeting the Medium cloud security profile is required to host workloads that are classified up to and including Medium categorization. On a periodic basis, CCCS assesses new or previously unassessed services and re-assesses the AWS services that were previously assessed to verify that they continue to meet the GC’s requirements. CCCS prioritizes the assessment of new AWS services based on their availability in Canada, and customer demand for the AWS services. The full list of AWS services that have been assessed by CCCS is available on our Services in Scope for CCCS Assessment page.
To learn more about the CCCS assessment or our other compliance and security programs, visit AWS Compliance Programs. As always, we value your feedback and questions; reach out to the AWS Compliance team through the Contact Us page.
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.
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Early-feedback loops exist to provide developers with ongoing feedback through automated checks. This enables developers to take early remedial action while increasing the efficiency of the code review process and, in turn, their productivity.
Early-feedback loops help provide confidence to reviewers that fundamental security and compliance requirements were validated before review. As part of this process, common expectations of code standards and quality can be established, while shifting governance mechanisms to the left.
In this post, we will show you how to use AWS developer tools to implement a shift-left approach to security that empowers your developers with early feedback loops within their development practices. You will use AWS CodeCommit to securely host Git repositories, AWS CodePipeline to automate continuous delivery pipelines, AWS CodeBuild to build and test code, and Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer to detect potential code defects.
Why the shift-left approach is important
Developers today are an integral part of organizations, building and maintaining the most critical customer-facing applications. Developers must have the knowledge, tools, and processes in place to help them identify potential security issues before they release a product to production.
This is why the shift-left approach is important. Shift left is the process of checking for vulnerabilities and issues in the earlier stages of software development. By following the shift-left process (which should be part of a wider application security review and threat modelling process), software teams can help prevent undetected security issues when they build an application. The modern DevSecOps workflow continues to shift left towards the developer and their practices with the aim to achieve the following:
Drive accountability among developers for the security of their code
Empower development teams to remediate issues up front and at their own pace
Improve risk management by enabling early visibility of potential security issues through early feedback loops
You can use AWS developer tools to help provide this continual early feedback for developers upon each commit of code.
Solution prerequisites
To follow along with this solution, make sure that you have the following prerequisites in place:
Make sure that you have a general working knowledge of the listed services and DevOps practices.
Solution overview
The following diagram illustrates the architecture of the solution.
Figure 1: Solution overview
We will show you how to set up a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline by using AWS developer tools—CodeCommit, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and CodeGuru—that you will integrate with the code repository to detect code security vulnerabilities. As shown in Figure 1, the solution has the following steps:
The developer commits the new branch into the code repository.
The developer creates a pull request to the main branch.
CodeGuru Reviewer uses program analysis and machine learning to help detect potential defects in your Java and Python code, and provides recommendations to improve the code. CodeGuru Reviewer helps detect security vulnerabilities, secrets, resource leaks, concurrency issues, incorrect input validation, and deviation from best practices for using AWS APIs and SDKs.
You can configure the CodeBuild deployment with third-party tools, such as Bandit for Python to help detect security issues in your Python code.
CodeGuru Reviewer or CodeBuild writes back the findings of the code scans to the pull request to provide a single common place for developers to review the findings that are relevant to their specific code updates.
The following table presents some other tools that you can integrate into the early-feedback toolchain, depending on the type of code or artefacts that you are evaluating:
When you deploy the solution in your AWS account, you can review how Bandit for Python has been built into the deployment pipeline by using AWS CodeBuild with a configured buildspec file, as shown in Figure 2. You can implement the other tools in the table by using a similar approach.
Figure 2: Bandit configured in CodeBuild
Walkthrough
To deploy the solution, you will complete the following steps:
The first step is to deploy the required resources into your AWS environment by using CloudFormation.
To deploy the solution
Choose the following Launch Stack button to deploy the solution’s CloudFormation template:
The solution deploys in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) Region (us-east-1) by default because each service listed in the Prerequisites section is available in this Region. To deploy the solution in a different Region, use the Region selector in the console navigation bar and make sure that the services required for this walkthrough are supported in your newly selected Region. For service availability by Region, see AWS Services by Region.
On the Quick Create Stack screen, do the following:
Leave the provided parameter defaults in place.
Scroll to the bottom, and in the Capabilities section, select I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names.
Choose Create Stack.
When the CloudFormation template has completed, open the AWS Cloud9 console.
In the Environments table, for the provisioned shift-left-blog-cloud9-ide environment, choose Open, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Cloud9 environments
The provisioned Cloud9 environment opens in a new tab. Wait for Cloud9 to initialize the two sample code repositories: shift-left-sample-app-java and shift-left-sample-app-python, as shown in Figure 4. For this post, you will work only with the Python sample repository shift-left-sample-app-python, but the procedures we outline will also work for the Java repository.
Figure 4: Cloud9 IDE
Associate CodeGuru Reviewer with a code repository
The next step is to associate the Python code repository with CodeGuru Reviewer. After you associate the repository, CodeGuru Reviewer analyzes and comments on issues that it finds when you create a pull request.
To associate CodeGuru Reviewer with a repository
Open the CodeGuru console, and in the left navigation pane, under Reviewer, choose Repositories.
In the Repositories section, choose Associate repository and run analysis.
In the Associate repository section, do the following:
For Select source provider, select AWS CodeCommit.
For Repository location,select shift-left-sample-app-python.
In the Run a repository analysis section, do the following, as shown in Figure 5:
For Source branch, select main.
For Code review name – optional, enter a name.
For Tags – optional, leave the default settings.
Choose Associate repository and run analysis.
Figure 5: CodeGuru repository configuration
CodeGuru initiates the Full repository analysis and the status is Pending, as shown in Figure 6. The full analysis takes about 5 minutes to complete. Wait for the status to change from Pending to Completed.
Figure 6: CodeGuru full analysis pending
Create a pull request
The next step is to create a new branch and to push sample code to the repository by creating a pull request so that the code scan can be initiated by CodeGuru Reviewer and the CodeBuild job.
To create a new branch
In the Cloud9 IDE, locate the terminal and create a new branch by running the following commands.
cd ~/environment/shift-left-sample-app-python
git checkout -b python-test
Confirm that you are working from the new branch, which will be highlighted in the Cloud9 IDE terminal, as shown in Figure 7.
git branch -v
Figure 7: Cloud9 IDE terminal
To create a new file and push it to the code repository
Create a new file called sample.py.
touch sample.py
Copy the following sample code, paste it into the sample.py file, and save the changes, as shown in Figure 8.
import requests
data = requests.get("https://www.example.org/", verify = False)
print(data.status_code)
Figure 8: Cloud9 IDE noncompliant code
Commit the changes to the repository.
git status
git add -A
git commit -m "shift left blog python sample app update"
Note: if you receive a message to set your name and email address, you can ignore it because Git will automatically set these for you, and the Git commit will complete successfully.
Push the changes to the code repository, as shown in Figure 9.
git push origin python-test
Figure 9: Git push
To create a new pull request
Open the CodeCommit console and select the code repository called shift-left-sample-app-python.
From the Branches dropdown, select the new branch that you created and pushed, as shown in Figure 10.
Figure 10: CodeCommit branch selection
In your new branch, select the file sample.py, confirm that the file has the changes that you made, and then choose Create pull request, as shown in Figure 11.
Figure 11: CodeCommit pull request
A notification appears stating that the new code updates can be merged.
In the Source dropdown, choose the new branch python-test. In the Destination dropdown, choose the main branch where you intend to merge your code changes when the pull request is closed.
To have CodeCommit run a comparison between the main branch and your new branch python-test, choose Compare. To see the differences between the two branches, choose the Changes tab at the bottom of the page. CodeCommit also assesses whether the two branches can be merged automatically when the pull request is closed.
When you’re satisfied with the comparison results for the pull request, enter a Title and an optional Description, and then choose Create pull request. Your pull request appears in the list of pull requests for the CodeCommit repository, as shown in Figure 12.
Figure 12: Pull request
The creation of this pull request has automatically started two separate code scans. The first is a CodeGuru incremental code review and the second uses CodeBuild, which utilizes Bandit to perform a security code scan of the Python code.
Review code scan results and resolve detected security vulnerabilities
The next step is to review the code scan results to identify security vulnerabilities and the recommendations on how to fix them.
To review the code scan results
Open the CodeGuru console, and in the left navigation pane, under Reviewer, select Code reviews.
On the Incremental code reviews tab, make sure that you see a new code review item created for the preceding pull request.
Figure 13: CodeGuru Code review
After a few minutes, when CodeGuru completes the incremental analysis, choose the code review to review the CodeGuru recommendations on the pull request. Figure 14 shows the CodeGuru recommendations for our example.
Figure 14: CodeGuru recommendations
Open the CodeBuild console and select the CodeBuild job called shift-left-blog-pr-Python. In our example, this job should be in a Failed state.
Open the CodeBuild run, and under the Build history tab, select the CodeBuild job, which is in Failed state. Under the Build Logs tab, scroll down until you see the following errors in the logs. Note that the severity of the finding is High, which is why the CodeBuild job failed. You can review the Bandit scanning options in the Bandit documentation.
Test results:
>> Issue: [B501:request_with_no_cert_validation] Call to requests with verify=False disabling SSL certificate checks, security issue.
Severity: High Confidence: High
CWE: CWE-295 (https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/295.html)
More Info: https://bandit.readthedocs.io/en/1.7.5/plugins/b501_request_with_no_cert_validation.html
Location: sample.py:3:7
2
3 data = requests.get("https://www.example.org/", verify = False)
4 print(data.status_code)
Navigate to the CodeCommit console, and on the Activity tab of the pull request, review the CodeGuru recommendations. You can also review the results of the CodeBuild jobs that Bandit performed, as shown in Figure 15.
Figure 15: CodeGuru recommendations and CodeBuild logs
This demonstrates how developers can directly link the relevant information relating to security code scans with their code development and associated pull requests, hence shifting to the left the required security awareness for developers.
To resolve the detected security vulnerabilities
In the Cloud9 IDE, navigate to the file sample.py in the Python sample repository, as shown in Figure 16.
Figure 16: Cloud9 IDE sample.py
Copy the following code and paste it in the sample.py file, overwriting the existing code. Save the update.
import requests
data = requests.get("https://www.example.org", timeout=5)
print(data.status_code)
Commit the changes by running the following commands.
git status
git add -A
git commit -m "shift left python sample.py resolve security errors"
git push origin python-test
Open the CodeCommit console and choose the Activity tab on the pull request that you created earlier. You will see a banner indicating that the pull request was updated. You will also see new comments indicating that new code scans using CodeGuru and CodeBuild were initiated for the new pull request update.
In the CodeGuru console, on the Incremental code reviews page, check that a new code scan has begun. When the scans are finished, review the results in the CodeGuru console and the CodeBuild build logs, as described previously. The previously detected security vulnerability should now be resolved.
In the CodeCommit console, on the Activity tab, under Activity history, review the comments to verify that each of the code scans has a status of Passing, as shown in Figure 17.
Figure 17: CodeCommit activity history
Now that the security issue has been resolved, merge the pull request into the main branch of the code repository. Choose Merge, and under Merge strategy, select Fast Forward merge.
AWS account clean-up
Clean up the resources created by this solution to avoid incurring future charges.
To clean up your account
Start by deleting the CloudFormation stacks for the Java and Python sample applications that you deployed. In the CloudFormation console, in the Stacks section, select one of these stacks and choose Delete; then select the other stack and choose Delete.
Figure 18: Delete repository stack
To initiate deletion of the Cloud9 CloudFormation stack, select it and choose Delete.
Open the Amazon S3 console, and in the search box, enter shift-left to search for the S3 bucket that CodePipeline used.
Figure 19: Select CodePipeline S3 bucket
Select the S3 bucket, select all of the object folders in the bucket, and choose Delete
Figure 20: Select CodePipeline S3 objects
To confirm deletion of the objects, in the section Permanently delete objects?, enter permanently delete, and then choose Delete objects. A banner message that states Successfully deleted objects appears at the top confirming the object deletion.
Navigate back to the CloudFormation console, select the stack named shift-left-blog, and choose Delete.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we showed you how to implement a solution that enables early feedback on code development through status comments in the CodeCommit pull request activity tab by using Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer and CodeBuild to perform automated code security scans on the creation of a code repository pull request.
We configured CodeBuild with Bandit for Python to demonstrate how you can integrate third-party or open-source tools into the development cycle. You can use this approach to integrate other tools into the workflow.
Shifting security left early in the development cycle can help you identify potential security issues earlier and empower teams to remediate issues earlier, helping to prevent the need to refactor code towards the end of a build.
This solution provides a simple method that you can use to view and understand potential security issues with your newly developed code and thus enhances your awareness of the security requirements within your organization.
It’s simple to get started. Sign up for an AWS account, deploy the provided CloudFormation template through the Launch Stack button, commit your code, and start scanning for vulnerabilities.
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, start a new thread on AWS re:Post or contact AWS Support.
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Sometimes you want to configure an AWS service to access your resource in another service. For example, you can configure AWS CloudTrail, a service that monitors account activity across your AWS infrastructure, to write log data to your bucket in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). When you do this, you want assurance that the service will only access your resource on your behalf—you don’t want an untrusted entity to be able to use the service to access your resource. Before today, you could achieve this by using the two AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) condition keys, aws:SourceAccount and aws:SourceArn. You can use these condition keys to help make sure that a service accesses your resource only on behalf of specific accounts or resources that you trust. However, because these condition keys require you to specify individual accounts and resources, they can be difficult to manage at scale, especially in larger organizations.
Recently, IAM launched two new condition keys that can help you achieve this in a more scalable way that is simpler to manage within your organization:
aws:SourceOrgID — use this condition key to make sure that an AWS service can access your resources only when the request originates from a particular organization ID in AWS Organizations.
aws:SourceOrgPaths — use this condition key to make sure that an AWS service can access your resources only when the request originates from one or more organizational units (OUs) in your organization.
In this blog post, we describe how you can use the four available condition keys, including the two new ones, to help you control how AWS services access your resources.
Background
Imagine a scenario where you configure an AWS service to access your resource in another service. Let’s say you’re using Amazon CloudWatch to observe resources in your AWS environment, and you create an alarm that activates when certain conditions occur. When the alarm activates, you want it to publish messages to a topic that you create in Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to generate notifications.
Figure 1 depicts this process.
Figure 1: Amazon CloudWatch publishing messages to an SNS topic
In this scenario, there’s a resource-based policy controlling access to your SNS topic. For CloudWatch to publish messages to it, you must configure the policy to allow access by CloudWatch. When you do this, you identify CloudWatch using an AWS service principal, in this case cloudwatch.amazonaws.com.
Cross-service access
This is an example of a common pattern known as cross-service access. With cross-service access, a calling service accesses your resource in a called service, and a resource-based policy attached to your resource grants access to the calling service. The calling service is identified using an AWS service principal in the form <SERVICE-NAME>.amazonaws.com, and it accesses your resource on behalf of an originating resource, such as a CloudWatch alarm.
Figure 2 shows cross-service access.
Figure 2: Cross-service access
When you configure cross-service access, you want to make sure that the calling service will access your resource only on your behalf. That means you want the originating resource to be controlled by someone whom you trust. If an untrusted entity creates their own CloudWatch alarm in their AWS environment, for example, then their alarm should not be able to publish messages to your SNS topic.
If an untrusted entity could use a calling service to access your resource on their behalf, it would be an example of what’s known as the confused deputy problem. The confused deputy problem is a security issue in which an entity that doesn’t have permission to perform an action coerces a more privileged entity (in this case, a calling service) to perform the action instead.
Use condition keys to help prevent cross-service confused deputy issues
AWS provides global condition keys to help you prevent cross-service confused deputy issues. You can use these condition keys to control how AWS services access your resources.
Before today, you could use the aws:SourceAccount or aws:SourceArn condition keys to make sure that a calling service accesses your resource only when the request originates from a specific account (with aws:SourceAccount) or a specific originating resource (with aws:SourceArn). However, there are situations where you might want to allow multiple resources or accounts to use a calling service to access your resource. For example, you might want to create many VPC flow logs in an organization that publish to a central S3 bucket. To achieve this using the aws:SourceAccount or aws:SourceArn condition keys, you must enumerate all the originating accounts or resources individually in your resource-based policies. This can be difficult to manage, especially in large organizations, and can potentially cause your resource-based policy documents to reach size limits.
Now, you can use the new aws:SourceOrgID or aws:SourceOrgPaths condition keys to make sure that a calling service accesses your resource only when the request originates from a specific organization (with aws:SourceOrgID) or a specific organizational unit (with aws:SourceOrgPaths). This helps avoid the need to update policies when accounts are added or removed, reduces the size of policy documents, and makes it simpler to create and review policy statements.
The following table summarizes the four condition keys that you can use to help prevent cross-service confused deputy issues. These keys work in a similar way, but with different levels of granularity.
Use case
Condition key
Value
Allowed operators
Single/multi valued
Example value
Allow a calling service to access your resource only on behalf of an organization that you trust.
Note: Only use these condition keys in resource-based policies that allow access by an AWS service. Don’t use them in other use cases, including identity-based policies and service control policies (SCPs), where these condition keys won’t be populated.
Use condition keys for defense in depth
AWS services use a variety of mechanisms to help prevent cross-service confused deputy issues, and the details vary by service. For example, where a calling service accesses an S3 bucket, some services use S3 prefixes to help prevent confused deputy issues. For more information, see the relevant service documentation.
Where supported by the service, AWS recommends that you use the condition keys we describe in this post regardless of whether the service has another mechanism in place to help prevent cross-service confused deputy issues. This helps to make your intentions explicit, provide defense in depth, and guard against misconfigurations.
Example use cases
Let’s walk through some example use cases to learn how to use these condition keys in practice.
First, imagine you’re using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to manage logically isolated virtual networks. In Amazon VPC, you can configure flow logs, which capture information about your network traffic. Let’s say you want a flow log to write data into an S3 bucket for later analysis. This process is depicted in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Amazon VPC writing flow logs to an S3 bucket
This constitutes another cross-service access scenario. In this case, Amazon VPC is the calling service, Amazon S3 is the called service, the VPC flow log is the originating resource, and the S3 bucket is your resource in the called service.
To allow access, the resource-based policy for your S3 bucket (known as a bucket policy) must allow Amazon VPC to put objects there. The Principal element in this policy specifies the AWS service principal of the service that will access the resource, which for VPC flow logs is delivery.logs.amazonaws.com.
Initial policy without confused deputy prevention
The following is an initial version of the bucket policy that allows Amazon VPC to put objects in the bucket but doesn’t yet provide confused deputy prevention. We’re showing this policy for illustration purposes; don’t use it in its current form.
Note: For simplicity, we only show one of the policy statements that you need to allow VPC flow logs to write to a bucket. In a real-life bucket policy for flow logs, you need two policy statements: one allowing actions on the bucket, and one allowing actions on the bucket contents. These are described in Publish flow logs to Amazon S3. Both policy statements work in the same way with respect to confused deputy prevention.
This policy statement allows Amazon VPC to put objects in the bucket. However, it allows Amazon VPC to do that on behalf of any flow log in any account. There’s nothing in the policy to tell Amazon VPC that it should access this bucket only if the flow log belongs to a specific organization, OU, account, or resource that you trust.
Let’s now update the policy to help prevent cross-service confused deputy issues. For the rest of this post, the remaining policy samples provide confused deputy protection, but at different levels of granularity.
Specify a trusted organization
Continuing with the previous example, imagine that you now have an organization in AWS Organizations, and you want to create VPC flow logs in various accounts within your organization that publish to a central S3 bucket. You want Amazon VPC to put objects in the bucket only if the request originates from a flow log that resides in your organization.
You can achieve this by using the new aws:SourceOrgID condition key. In a cross-service access scenario, this condition key evaluates to the ID of the organization that the request came from. You can use this condition key in the Condition element of a resource-based policy to allow actions only if aws:SourceOrgID matches the ID of a specific organization, as shown in the following example. In your own policy, make sure to replace <DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET> and <MY-ORGANIZATION-ID> with your own information.
The revised policy states that Amazon VPC can put objects in the bucket only if the request originates from a flow log in your organization. Now, if someone creates a flow log outside your organization and configures it to access your bucket, they will get an access denied error.
You can use aws:SourceOrgID in this way to allow a calling service to access your resource only if the request originates from a specific organization, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Specify a trusted organization using aws:SourceOrgID
Specify a trusted OU
What if you don’t want to trust your entire organization, but only part of it? Let’s consider a different scenario. Imagine that you want to send messages from Amazon SNS into a queue in Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) so they can be processed by consumers. This is depicted in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Amazon SNS sending messages to an SQS queue
Now imagine that you want your SQS queue to receive messages only if they originate from an SNS topic that resides in a specific organizational unit (OU) in your organization. For example, you might want to allow messages only if they originate from a production OU that is subject to change control.
You can achieve this by using the new aws:SourceOrgPaths condition key. As before, you use this condition key in a resource-based policy attached to your resource. In a cross-service access scenario, this condition key evaluates to the AWS Organizations entity path that the request came from. An entity path is a text representation of an entity within an organization.
You build an entity path for an OU by using the IDs of the organization, root, and all OUs in the path down to and including the OU. For example, consider the organizational structure shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6: Example organization structure
In this example, you can specify the Prod OU by using the following entity path:
Let’s now match the aws:SourceOrgPaths condition key against a specific entity path in the Condition element of a resource-based policy for an SQS queue. In your own policy, make sure to replace <MY-QUEUE-ARN> and <MY-ENTITY-PATH> with your own information.
Note:aws:SourceOrgPaths is a multivalued condition key, which means it’s capable of having multiple values in the request context. At the time of writing, it contains a single entity path if the request originates from an account in an organization, and a null value if the request originates from an account that’s not in an organization. Because this key is multivalued, you need to use both a set operator and a string operator to compare values.
In this policy, there are two conditions in the Condition block. The first uses the Null condition operator and compares with a false value to confirm that the condition key’s value is not null. The second uses set operator ForAllValues, which returns true if every condition key value in the request matches at least one value in your policy condition, and string operator StringEquals, which requires an exact match with a value specified in your policy condition.
Note: The reason for the null check is that set operator ForAllValuesreturns true when a condition key resolves to null. With an Allow effect and the null check in place, access is denied if the request originates from an account that’s not in an organization.
With this policy applied to your SQS queue, Amazon SNS can send messages to your queue only if the message came from an SNS topic in a specific OU.
You can use aws:SourceOrgPaths in this way to allow a calling service to access your resource only if the request originates from a specific organizational unit, as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Specify a trusted OU using aws:SourceOrgPaths
Specify a trusted OU and its children
In the previous example, we specified a trusted OU, but that didn’t include its child OUs. What if you want to include its children as well?
You can achieve this by replacing the string operator StringEquals with StringLike. This allows you to use wildcards in the entity path. Using the organization structure from the previous example, the following Condition evaluates to true only if the condition key value is not null and the request originates from the Prod OU or any of its child OUs.
If you want to be more granular, you can allow a service to access your resource only if the request originates from a specific account. You can achieve this by using the aws:SourceAccount condition key. In a cross-service access scenario, this condition key evaluates to the ID of the account that the request came from.
The following Condition evaluates to true only if the request originates from the account that you specify in the policy. In your own policy, make sure to replace <MY-ACCOUNT-ID> with your own information.
You can use this condition element within a resource-based policy to allow a calling service to access your resource only if the request originates from a specific account, as shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Specify a trusted account using aws:SourceAccount
Specify a trusted resource
If you want to be even more granular, you can allow a service to access your resource only if the request originates from a specific resource. For example, you can allow Amazon SNS to send messages to your SQS queue only if the request originates from a specific topic within Amazon SNS.
You can achieve this by using the aws:SourceArn condition key. In a cross-service access scenario, this condition key evaluates to the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the originating resource. This provides the most granular form of cross-service confused deputy prevention.
The following Condition evaluates to true only if the request originates from the resource that you specify in the policy. In your own policy, make sure to replace <MY-RESOURCE-ARN> with your own information.
Note: AWS recommends that you use an ARN operator rather than a string operator when comparing ARNs. This example uses ArnEquals to match the condition key value against the ARN specified in the policy.
You can use this condition element within a resource-based policy to allow a calling service to access your resource only if the request comes from a specific originating resource, as shown in Figure 9.
Figure 9: Specify a trusted resource using aws:SourceArn
Specify multiple trusted resources, accounts, OUs, or organizations
The four condition keys allow you to specify multiple trusted entities by matching against an array of values. This allows you to specify multiple trusted resources, accounts, OUs, or organizations in your policies.
Conclusion
In this post, you learned about cross-service access, in which an AWS service communicates with another AWS service to access your resource. You saw that it’s important to make sure that such services access your resources only on your behalf in order to help avoid cross-service confused deputy issues.
We showed you how to help prevent cross-service confused deputy issues by using two new condition keys aws:SourceOrgID and aws:SourceOrgPaths, as well as the other available condition keys aws:SourceAccount and aws:SourceArn. You learned that you should use these condition keys in any resource-based policy statements that allow access by an AWS service, if the condition key is supported by the service. This helps make sure that a calling service can access your resource only when the request originates from a specific organization, OU, account, or resource that you trust.
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, start a new thread on AWS IAM re:Post or contact AWS Support.
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Organizations are increasingly embracing a shift-left approach when it comes to security, actively integrating security considerations into their software development lifecycle (SDLC). This shift aligns seamlessly with modern software development practices such as DevSecOps and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), making it a vital strategy in today’s rapidly evolving software development landscape. At its core, shift left promotes a security-as-code culture, where security becomes an integral part of the entire application lifecycle, starting from the initial design phase and extending all the way through to deployment. This proactive approach to security involves seamlessly integrating security measures into the CI/CD pipeline, enabling automated security testing and checks at every stage of development. Consequently, it accelerates the process of identifying and remediating security issues.
By identifying security vulnerabilities early in the development process, you can promptly address them, leading to significant reductions in the time and effort required for mitigation. Amazon Web Services (AWS) encourages this shift-left mindset, providing services that enable a seamless integration of security into your DevOps processes, fostering a more robust, secure, and efficient system. In this blog post we share how you can use Amazon CodeWhisperer, Amazon CodeGuru, and Amazon Inspector to automate and enhance code security.
CodeWhisperer is a versatile, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered code generation service that delivers real-time code recommendations. This innovative service plays a pivotal role in the shift-left strategy by automating the integration of crucial security best practices during the early stages of code development. CodeWhisperer is equipped to generate code in Python, Java, and JavaScript, effectively mitigating vulnerabilities outlined in the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) Top 10. It uses cryptographic libraries aligned with industry best practices, promoting robust security measures. Additionally, as you develop your code, CodeWhisperer scans for potential security vulnerabilities, offering actionable suggestions for remediation. This is achieved through generative AI, which creates code alternatives to replace identified vulnerable sections, enhancing the overall security posture of your applications.
Next, you can perform further vulnerability scanning of code repositories and supported integrated development environments (IDEs) with Amazon CodeGuru Security. CodeGuru Security is a static application security tool that uses machine learning to detect security policy violations and vulnerabilities. It provides recommendations for addressing security risks and generates metrics so you can track the security health of your applications. Examples of security vulnerabilities it can detect include resource leaks, hardcoded credentials, and cross-site scripting.
Finally, you can use Amazon Inspector to address vulnerabilities in workloads that are deployed. Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability management service that continually scans AWS workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. Amazon Inspector calculates a highly contextualized risk score for each finding by correlating common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) information with factors such as network access and exploitability. This score is used to prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities to improve remediation response efficiency. When started, it automatically discovers Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, container images residing in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and AWS Lambda functions, at scale, and immediately starts assessing them for known vulnerabilities.
Figure 1: An architecture workflow of a developer’s code workflow
Amazon CodeWhisperer
CodeWhisperer is powered by a large language model (LLM) trained on billions of lines of code, including code owned by Amazon and open-source code. This makes it a highly effective AI coding companion that can generate real-time code suggestions in your IDE to help you quickly build secure software with prompts in natural language. CodeWhisperer can be used with four IDEs including AWS Toolkit for JetBrains, AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, AWS Lambda, and AWS Cloud9.
As you use CodeWhisperer it filters out code suggestions that include toxic phrases (profanity, hate speech, and so on) and suggestions that contain commonly known code structures that indicate bias. These filters help CodeWhisperer generate more inclusive and ethical code suggestions by proactively avoiding known problematic content. The goal is to make AI assistance more beneficial and safer for all developers.
CodeWhisperer can also scan your code to highlight and define security issues in real time. For example, using Python and JetBrains, if you write code that would write unencrypted AWS credentials to a log — a bad security practice — CodeWhisperer will raise an alert. Security scans operate at the project level, analyzing files within a user’s local project or workspace and then truncating them to create a payload for transmission to the server side.
Figure 2: CodeWhisperer performing a security scan in Visual Studio Code
Furthermore, the CodeWhisperer reference tracker detects whether a code suggestion might be similar to particular CodeWhisperer open source training data. The reference tracker can flag such suggestions with a repository URL and project license information or optionally filter them out. Using CodeWhisperer, you improve productivity while embracing the shift-left approach by implementing automated security best practices at one of the principal layers—code development.
CodeGuru Security
Amazon CodeGuru Security significantly bolsters code security by harnessing the power of machine learning to proactively pinpoint security policy violations and vulnerabilities. This intelligent tool conducts a thorough scan of your codebase and offers actionable recommendations to address identified issues. This approach verifies that potential security concerns are corrected early in the development lifecycle, contributing to an overall more robust application security posture.
CodeGuru Security relies on a set of security and code quality detectors crafted to identify security risks and policy violations. These detectors empower developers to spot and resolve potential issues efficiently.
CodeGuru Security allows manual scanning of existing code and automating integration with popular code repositories like GitHub and GitLab. It establishes an automated security check pipeline through either AWS CodePipeline or Bitbucket Pipeline. Moreover, CodeGuru Security integrates with Amazon Inspector Lambda code scanning, enabling automated code scans for your Lambda functions.
Notably, CodeGuru Security doesn’t just uncover security vulnerabilities; it also offers insights to optimize code efficiency. It identifies areas where code improvements can be made, enhancing both security and performance aspects within your applications.
Initiating CodeGuru Security is a straightforward process, accessible through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS SDKs, and multiple integrations. This allows you to run code scans, review recommendations, and implement necessary updates, fostering a continuous improvement cycle that bolsters the security stance of your applications.
Use Amazon CodeGuru to scan code directly and in a pipeline
Use the following steps to create a scan in CodeGuru to scan code directly and to integrate CodeGuru with AWS CodePipeline.
Note: You must provide sample code to scan.
Scan code directly
Open the AWS Management Console using your organization management account and go to Amazon CodeGuru.
In the navigation pane, select Security and then select Scans.
Choose Create new scan to start your manual code scan.
Figure 3: Scans overview
On the Create Scan page:
Choose Choose file to upload your code.
Note: The file must be in .zip format and cannot exceed 5 GB.
Enter a unique name to identify your scan.
Choose Create scan.
Figure 4: Create scan
After you create the scan, the configured scan will automatically appear in the Scans table, where you see the Scan name, Status, Open findings, Date of last scan, and Revision number (you review these findings later in the Findings section of this post).
Figure 5: Scan update
Automated scan using AWS CodePipeline integration
Still in the CodeGuru console, in the navigation pane under Security, select Integrations. On the Integrations page, select Integration with AWS CodePipeline. This will allow you to have an automated security scan inside your CI/CD pipeline.
Figure 6: CodeGuru integrations
Next, choose Open template in CloudFormation to create a CodeBuild project to allow discovery of your repositories and run security scans.
Figure 7: CodeGuru and CodePipeline integration
The CloudFormation template is already entered. Select the acknowledge box, and then choose Create stack.
Figure 8: CloudFormation quick create stack
If you already have a pipeline integration, go to Step 2 and select CodePipeline console. If this is your first time using CodePipeline, this blog post explains how to integrate it with AWS CI/CD services.
Figure 9: Integrate with AWS CodePipeline
Choose Edit.
Figure 10: CodePipeline with CodeGuru integration
Choose Add stage.
Figure 11: Add Stage in CodePipeline
On the Edit action page:
Enter a stage name.
For the stage you just created, choose Add action group.
For Action provider, select CodeBuild.
For Input artifacts, select SourceArtifact.
For Project name, select CodeGuruSecurity.
Choose Done, and then choose Save.
Figure 12: Add action group
Test CodeGuru Security
You have now created a security check stage for your CI/CD pipeline. To test the pipeline, choose Release change.
Figure 13: CodePipeline with successful security scan
If your code was successfully scanned, you will see Succeeded in the Most recent execution column for your pipeline.
Figure 14: CodePipeline dashboard with successful security scan
Findings
To analyze the findings of your scan, select Findings under Security, and you will see the findings for the scans whether manually done or through integrations. Each finding will show the vulnerability, the scan it belongs to, the severity level, the status of an open case or closed case, the age, and the time of detection.
Figure 15: Findings inside CodeGuru security
Dashboard
To view a summary of the insights and findings from your scan, select Dashboard, under Security, and you will see high level summary of your findings overview and a vulnerability fix overview.
Figure 16:Findings inside CodeGuru dashboard
Amazon Inspector
Your journey with the shift-left model extends beyond code deployment. After scanning your code repositories and using tools like CodeWhisperer and CodeGuru Security to proactively reduce security risks before code commits to a repository, your code might still encounter potential vulnerabilities after being deployed to production. For instance, faulty software updates can introduce risks to your application. Continuous vigilance and monitoring after deployment are crucial.
This is where Amazon Inspector offers ongoing assessment throughout your resource lifecycle, automatically rescanning resources in response to changes. Amazon Inspector seamlessly complements the shift-left model by identifying vulnerabilities as your workload operates in a production environment.
Amazon Inspector continuously scans various components, including Amazon EC2, Lambda functions, and container workloads, seeking out software vulnerabilities and inadvertent network exposure. Its user-friendly features include enablement in a few clicks, continuous and automated scanning, and robust support for multi-account environments through AWS Organizations. After activation, it autonomously identifies workloads and presents real-time coverage details, consolidating findings across accounts and resources.
Distinguishing itself from traditional security scanning software, Amazon Inspector has minimal impact on your fleet’s performance. When vulnerabilities or open network paths are uncovered, it generates detailed findings, including comprehensive information about the vulnerability, the affected resource, and recommended remediation. When you address a finding appropriately, Amazon Inspector autonomously detects the remediation and closes the finding.
The findings you receive are prioritized according to a contextualized Inspector risk score, facilitating prompt analysis and allowing for automated remediation.
Additionally, Amazon Inspector provides robust management APIs for comprehensive programmatic access to the Amazon Inspector service and resources. You can also access detailed findings through Amazon EventBridge and seamlessly integrate them into AWS Security Hub for a comprehensive security overview.
Scan workloads with Amazon Inspector
Use the following examples to learn how to use Amazon Inspector to scan AWS workloads.
Open the Amazon Inspector console in your AWS Organizations management account. In the navigation pane, select Activate Inspector.
Under Delegated administrator, enter the account number for your desired account to grant it all the permissions required to manage Amazon Inspector for your organization. Consider using your Security Tooling account as delegated administrator for Amazon Inspector. Choose Delegate. Then, in the confirmation window, choose Delegate again. When you select a delegated administrator, Amazon Inspector is activated for that account. Now, choose Activate Inspector to activate the service in your management account.
Figure 17: Set the delegated administrator account ID for Amazon Inspector
You will see a green success message near the top of your browser window and the Amazon Inspector dashboard, showing a summary of data from the accounts.
Figure 18: Amazon Inspector dashboard after activation
Explore Amazon Inspector
From the Amazon Inspector console in your delegated administrator account, in the navigation pane, select Account management. Because you’re signed in as the delegated administrator, you can enable and disable Amazon Inspector in the other accounts that are part of your organization. You can also automatically enable Amazon Inspector for new member accounts.
In the navigation pane, select Findings. Using the contextualized Amazon Inspector risk score, these findings are sorted into several severity ratings.
The contextualized Amazon Inspector risk score is calculated by correlating CVE information with findings such as network access and exploitability.
This score is used to derive severity of a finding and prioritize the most critical findings to improve remediation response efficiency.
Figure 20: Findings in Amazon Inspector sorted by severity (default)
When you enable Amazon Inspector, it automatically discovers all of your Amazon EC2 and Amazon ECR resources. It scans these workloads to detect vulnerabilities that pose risks to the security of your compute workloads. After the initial scan, Amazon Inspector continues to monitor your environment. It automatically scans new resources and re-scans existing resources when changes are detected. As vulnerabilities are remediated or resources are removed from service, Amazon Inspector automatically updates the associated security findings.
In order to successfully scan EC2 instances, Amazon Inspector requires inventory collected by AWS Systems Manager and the Systems Manager agent. This is installed by default on many EC2 instances. If you find some instances aren’t being scanned by Amazon Inspector, this might be because they aren’t being managed by Systems Manager.
Select a findings title to see the associated report.
Each finding provides a description, severity rating, information about the affected resource, and additional details such as resource tags and how to remediate the reported vulnerability.
Amazon Inspector stores active findings until they are closed by remediation. Findings that are closed are displayed for 30 days.
Integrate CodeGuru Security with Amazon Inspector to scan Lambda functions
Amazon Inspector and CodeGuru Security work harmoniously together. CodeGuru Security is available through Amazon Inspector Lambda code scanning. After activating Lambda code scanning, you can configure automated code scans to be performed on your Lambda functions.
Use the following steps to configure Amazon CodeGuru Security with Amazon Inspector Lambda code scanning to evaluate Lambda functions.
Open the Amazon Inspector console and select Account management from the navigation pane.
Select the AWS account you want to activate Lambda code scanning in.
Figure 22: Activating AWS Lambda code scanning from the Amazon Inspector Account management console
Choose Activate and select AWS Lambda code scanning.
With Lambda code scanning activated, security findings for your Lambda function code will appear in the All findings section of Amazon Inspector.
Amazon Inspector plays a crucial role in maintaining the highest security standards for your resources. Whether you’re installing a new package on an EC2 instance, applying a software patch, or when a new CVE affecting a specific resource is disclosed, Amazon Inspector can assist with quick identification and remediation.
Conclusion
Incorporating security at every stage of the software development lifecycle is paramount and requires that security be a consideration from the outset. Shifting left enables security teams to reduce overall application security risks.
Using these AWS services — Amazon CodeWhisperer, Amazon CodeGuru and Amazon Inspector — not only aids in early risk identification and mitigation, it empowers your development and security teams, leading to more efficient and secure business outcomes.
In the AWS Security Profile series, we feature the people who work in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security and help keep our customers safe and secure. This interview is with Tom Scholl, VP and Distinguished Engineer for AWS.
What do you do in your current role and how long have you been at AWS?
I’m currently a vice president and distinguished engineer in the infrastructure organization at AWS. My role includes working on the AWS global network backbone, as well as focusing on denial-of-service detection and mitigation systems. I’ve been with AWS for over 12 years.
What initially got you interested in networking and how did that lead you to the anti-abuse and distributed denial of service (DDoS) space?
My interest in large global network infrastructure started when I was a teenager in the 1990s. I remember reading a magazine at the time that cataloged all the large IP transit providers on the internet, complete with network topology maps and sizes of links. It inspired me to want to work on the engineering teams that supported that. Over time, I was fortunate enough to move from working at a small ISP to a telecom carrier where I was able to work on their POP and backbone designs. It was there that I learned about the internet peering ecosystem and started collaborating with network operators from around the globe.
For the last 20-plus years, DDoS was always something I had to deal with to some extent. Namely, from the networking lens of preventing network congestion through traffic-engineering and capacity planning, as well as supporting the integration of DDoS traffic scrubbers into network infrastructure.
About three years ago, I became especially intrigued by the network abuse and DDoS space after using AWS network telemetry to observe the size of malicious events in the wild. I started to be interested in how mitigation could be improved, and how to break down the problem into smaller pieces to better understand the true sources of attack traffic. Instead of merely being an observer, I wanted to be a part of the solution and make it better. This required me to immerse myself into the domain, both from the perspective of learning the technical details and by getting hands-on and understanding the DDoS industry and environment as a whole. Part of how I did this was by engaging with my peers in the industry at other companies and absorbing years of knowledge from them.
How do you explain your job to your non-technical friends and family?
I try to explain both areas that I work on. First, that I help build the global network infrastructure that connects AWS and its customers to the rest of the world. I explain that for a home user to reach popular destinations hosted on AWS, data has to traverse a series of networks and physical cables that are interconnected so that the user’s home computer or mobile phone can send packets to another part of the world in less than a second. All that requires coordination with external networks, which have their own practices and policies on how they handle traffic. AWS has to navigate that complexity and build and operate our infrastructure with customer availability and security in mind. Second, when it comes to DDoS and network abuse, I explain that there are bad actors on the internet that use DDoS to cause impairment for a variety of reasons. It could be someone wanting to disrupt online gaming, video conferencing, or regular business operations for any given website or company. I work to prevent those events from causing any sort of impairment and trace back the source to disrupt that infrastructure launching them to prevent it from being effective in the future.
Recently, you were awarded the J.D. Falk Award by the Messaging Malware Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) for IP Spoofing Mitigation. Congratulations! Please tell us more about the efforts that led to this.
Basically, there are three main types of DDoS attacks we observe: botnet-based unicast floods, spoofed amplification/reflection attacks, and proxy-driven HTTP request floods. The amplification/reflection aspect is interesting because it requires DDoS infrastructure providers to acquire compute resources behind providers that permit IP spoofing. IP spoofing itself has a long history on the internet, with a request for comment/best current practice (RFC/BCP) first written back in 2000 recommending that providers prevent this from occurring. However, adoption of this practice is still spotty on the internet.
At NANOG76, there was a proposal that these sorts of spoofed attacks could be traced by network operators in the path of the pre-amplification/reflection traffic (before it bounced off the reflectors). I personally started getting involved in this effort about two years ago. AWS operates a large global network and has network telemetry data that would help me identify pre-amplification/reflection traffic entering our network. This would allow me to triangulate the source network generating this. I then started engaging various networks directly that we connect to and provided them timestamps, spoofed source IP addresses, and specific protocols and ports involved with the traffic, hoping they could use their network telemetry to identify the customer generating it. From there, they’d engage with their customer to get the source shutdown or, failing that, implement packet filters on their customer to prevent spoofing.
Initially, only a few networks were capable of doing this well. This meant I had to spend a fair amount of energy in educating various networks around the globe on what spoofed traffic is, how to use their network telemetry to find it, and how to handle it. This was the most complicated and challenging part because this wasn’t on the radar of many networks out there. Up to this time, frontline network operations and abuse teams at various networks, including some very large ones, were not proficient in dealing with this.
The education I did included a variety of engagements, including sharing drawings with the day-in-the-life of a spoofed packet in a reflection attack, providing instructions on how to use their network telemetry tools, connecting them with their network telemetry vendors to help them, and even going so far as using other more exotic methods to identify which of their customers were spoofing and pointing out who they needed to analyze more deeply. In the end, it’s about getting other networks to be responsive and take action and, in the best cases, find spoofing on their own and act upon it.
Incredible! How did it feel accepting the award at the M3AAWG General Meeting in Brooklyn?
It was an honor to accept it and see some acknowledgement for the behind-the-scenes work that goes on to make the internet a better place.
What’s next for you in your work to suppress IP spoofing?
Continue tracing exercises and engaging with external providers. In particular, some of the network providers that experience challenges in dealing with spoofing and how we can improve their operations. Also, determining more effective ways to educate the hosting providers where IP spoofing is a common issue and making them implement proper default controls to not allow this behavior. Another aspect is being a force multiplier to enable others to spread the word and be part of the education process.
Looking ahead, what are some of your other goals for improving users’ online experiences and security?
Continually focusing on improving our DDoS defense strategies and working with customers to build tailored solutions that address some of their unique requirements. Across AWS, we have many services that are architected in different ways, so a key part of this is how do we raise the bar from a DDoS defense perspective across each of them. AWS customers also have their own unique architecture and protocols that can require developing new solutions to address their specific needs. On the disruption front, we will continue to focus on disrupting DDoS-as-a-service provider infrastructure beyond disrupting spoofing to disrupting botnets and the infrastructure associated with HTTP request floods.
With HTTP request floods being much more popular than byte-heavy and packet-heavy threat methods, it’s important to highlight the risks open proxies on the internet pose. Some of this emphasizes why there need to be some defaults in software packages to prevent misuse, in addition to network operators proactively identifying open proxies and taking appropriate action. Hosting providers should also recognize when their customer resources are communicating with large fleets of proxies and consider taking appropriate mitigations.
What are the most critical skills you would advise people need to be successful in network security?
I’m a huge proponent of being hands-on and diving into problems to truly understand how things are operating. Putting yourself outside your comfort zone, diving deep into the data to understand something, and translating that into outcomes and actions is something I highly encourage. After you immerse yourself in a particular domain, you can be much more effective at developing strategies and rapid prototyping to move forward. You can make incremental progress with small actions. You don’t have to wait for the perfect and complete solution to make some progress. I also encourage collaboration with others because there is incredible value in seeking out diverse opinions. There are resources out there to engage with, provided you’re willing to put in the work to learn and determine how you want to give back. The best people I’ve worked with don’t do it for public attention, blog posts, or social media status. They work in the background and don’t expect anything in return. They do it because of their desire to protect their customers and, where possible, the internet at large.
Lastly, if you had to pick an industry outside of security for your career, what would you be doing?
I’m over the maximum age allowed to start as an air traffic controller, so I suppose an air transport pilot or a locomotive engineer would be pretty neat.
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November 14, 2023: We’ve updated this post to use IAM Identity Center and follow updated IAM best practices.
In this post, we discuss the concept of folders in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and how to use policies to restrict access to these folders. The idea is that by properly managing permissions, you can allow federated users to have full access to their respective folders and no access to the rest of the folders.
Overview
Imagine you have a team of developers named Adele, Bob, and David. Each of them has a dedicated folder in a shared S3 bucket, and they should only have access to their respective folders. These users are authenticated through AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On).
In this post, you’ll focus on David. You’ll walk through the process of setting up these permissions for David using IAM Identity Center and Amazon S3. Before you get started, let’s first discuss what is meant by folders in Amazon S3, because it’s not as straightforward as it might seem. To learn how to create a policy with folder-level permissions, you’ll walk through a scenario similar to what many people have done on existing files shares, where every IAM Identity Center user has access to only their own home folder. With folder-level permissions, you can granularly control who has access to which objects in a specific bucket.
You’ll be shown a policy that grants IAM Identity Center users access to the same Amazon S3 bucket so that they can use the AWS Management Console to store their information. The policy allows users in the company to upload or download files from their department’s folder, but not to access any other department’s folder in the bucket.
After the policy is explained, you’ll see how to create an individual policy for each IAM Identity Center user.
Throughout the rest of this post, you will use a policy, which will be associated with an IAM Identity Center user named David. Also, you must have already created an S3 bucket.
Note: S3 buckets have a global namespace and you must change the bucket name to a unique name.
For this blog post, you will need an S3 bucket with the following structure (the example bucket name for the rest of the blog is “my-new-company-123456789”):
Figure 1: Screenshot of the root of the my-new-company-123456789 bucket
Your S3 bucket structure should have two folders, home and confidential, with a file root-file.txt in the main bucket directory. Inside confidential you will have no items or folders. Inside home there should be three sub-folders: Adele, Bob, and David.
Figure 2: Screenshot of the home/ directory of the my-new-company-123456789 bucket
A brief lesson about Amazon S3 objects
Before explaining the policy, it’s important to review how Amazon S3 objects are named. This brief description isn’t comprehensive, but will help you understand how the policy works. If you already know about Amazon S3 objects and prefixes, skip ahead to Creating David in Identity Center.
Amazon S3 stores data in a flat structure; you create a bucket, and the bucket stores objects. S3 doesn’t have a hierarchy of sub-buckets or folders; however, tools like the console can emulate a folder hierarchy to present folders in a bucket by using the names of objects (also known as keys). When you create a folder in S3, S3 creates a 0-byte object with a key that references the folder name that you provided. For example, if you create a folder named photos in your bucket, the S3 console creates a 0-byte object with the key photos/. The console creates this object to support the idea of folders. The S3 console treats all objects that have a forward slash (/) character as the last (trailing) character in the key name as a folder (for example, examplekeyname/)
To give you an example, for an object that’s named home/common/shared.txt, the console will show the shared.txt file in the common folder in the home folder. The names of these folders (such as home/ or home/common/) are called prefixes, and prefixes like these are what you use to specify David’s department folder in his policy. By the way, the slash (/) in a prefix like home/ isn’t a reserved character — you could name an object (using the Amazon S3 API) with prefixes such as home:common:shared.txt or home-common-shared.txt. However, the convention is to use a slash as the delimiter, and the Amazon S3 console (but not S3 itself) treats the slash as a special character for showing objects in folders. For more information on organizing objects in the S3 console using folders, see Organizing objects in the Amazon S3 console by using folders.
Creating David in Identity Center
IAM Identity Center helps you securely create or connect your workforce identities and manage their access centrally across AWS accounts and applications. Identity Center is the recommended approach for workforce authentication and authorization on AWS for organizations of any size and type. Using Identity Center, you can create and manage user identities in AWS, or connect your existing identity source, including Microsoft Active Directory, Okta, Ping Identity, JumpCloud, Google Workspace, and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). For further reading on IAM Identity Center, see the Identity Center getting started page.
Begin by setting up David as an IAM Identity Center user. To start, open the AWS Management Console and go to IAM Identity Center and create a user.
Note: The following steps are for Identity Center without System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) turned on, the add user option won’t be available if SCIM is turned on.
From the left pane of the Identity Center console, select Users, and then choose Add user.
Figure 3: Screenshot of IAM Identity Center Users page.
Enter David as the Username, enter an email address that you have access to as you will need this later to confirm your user, and then enter a First name, Last name, and Display name.
Leave the rest as default and choose Add user.
Select Users from the left navigation pane and verify you’ve created the user David.
Figure 4: Screenshot of adding users to group in Identity Center.
Now that you’re verified the user David has been created, use the left pane to navigate to Permission sets, then choose Create permission set.
Figure 5: Screenshot of permission sets in Identity Center.
Select Custom permission set as your Permission set type, then choose Next.
Figure 6: Screenshot of permission set types in Identity Center.
David’s policy
This is David’s complete policy, which will be associated with an IAM Identity Center federated user named David by using the console. This policy grants David full console access to only his folder (/home/David) and no one else’s. While you could grant each user access to their own bucket, keep in mind that an AWS account can have up to 100 buckets by default. By creating home folders and granting the appropriate permissions, you can instead allow thousands of users to share a single bucket.
Now, copy and paste the preceding IAM Policy into the inline policy editor. In this case, you use the JSON editor. For information on creating policies, see Creating IAM policies.
Figure 7: Screenshot of the inline policy inside the permissions set in Identity Center.
Give your permission set a name and a description, then leave the rest at the default settings and choose Next.
Verify that you modify the policies to have the bucket name you created earlier.
After your permission set has been created, navigate to AWS accounts on the left navigation pane, then select Assign users or groups.
Figure 8: Screenshot of the AWS accounts in Identity Center.
Select the user David and choose Next.
Figure 9: Screenshot of the AWS accounts in Identity Center.
Select the permission set you created earlier, choose Next, leave the rest at the default settings and choose Submit.
Figure 10: Screenshot of the permission sets in Identity Center.
You’ve now created and attached the permissions required for David to view his S3 bucket folder, but not to view the objects in other users’ folders. You can verify this by signing in as David through the AWS access portal.
Figure 11: Screenshot of the settings summary in Identity Center.
Navigate to the dashboard in IAM Identity Center and go to the Settings summary, then choose the AWS access portal URL.
Figure 12: Screenshot of David signing into the console via the Identity Center dashboard URL.
Sign in as the user David with the one-time password you received earlier when creating David.
Figure 13: Second screenshot of David signing into the console through the Identity Center dashboard URL.
Open the Amazon S3 console.
Search for the bucket you created earlier.
Figure 14: Screenshot of my-new-company-123456789 bucket in the AWS console.
Navigate to David’s folder and verify that you have read and write access to the folder. If you navigate to other users’ folders, you’ll find that you don’t have access to the objects inside their folders.
David’s policy consists of four blocks; let’s look at each individually.
Before you begin identifying the specific folders David can have access to, you must give him two permissions that are required for Amazon S3 console access: ListAllMyBuckets and GetBucketLocation.
The ListAllMyBuckets action grants David permission to list all the buckets in the AWS account, which is required for navigating to buckets in the Amazon S3 console (and as an aside, you currently can’t selectively filter out certain buckets, so users must have permission to list all buckets for console access). The console also does a GetBucketLocation call when users initially navigate to the Amazon S3 console, which is why David also requires permission for that action. Without these two actions, David will get an access denied error in the console.
Block 2: Allow listing objects in root and home folders
Although David should have access to only his home folder, he requires additional permissions so that he can navigate to his folder in the Amazon S3 console. David needs permission to list objects at the root level of the my-new-company-123456789 bucket and to the home/ folder. The following policy grants these permissions to David:
Without the ListBucket permission, David can’t navigate to his folder because he won’t have permissions to view the contents of the root and home folders. When David tries to use the console to view the contents of the my-new-company-123456789 bucket, the console will return an access denied error. Although this policy grants David permission to list all objects in the root and home folders, he won’t be able to view the contents of any files or folders except his own (you specify these permissions in the next block).
This block includes conditions, which let you limit under what conditions a request to AWS is valid. In this case, David can list objects in the my-new-company-123456789 bucket only when he requests objects without a prefix (objects at the root level) and objects with the home/ prefix (objects in the home folder). If David tries to navigate to other folders, such as confidential/, David is denied access. Additionally, David needs permissions to list prefix home/David to be able to use the search functionality of the console instead of scrolling down the list of users’ folders.
To set these root and home folder permissions, I used two conditions: s3:prefix and s3:delimiter. The s3:prefix condition specifies the folders that David has ListBucket permissions for. For example, David can list the following files and folders in the my-new-company-123456789 bucket:
But David cannot list files or subfolders in the confidential/, home/Adele, or home/Bob folders.
Although the s3:delimiter condition isn’t required for console access, it’s still a good practice to include it in case David makes requests by using the API. As previously noted, the delimiter is a character—such as a slash (/)—that identifies the folder that an object is in. The delimiter is useful when you want to list objects as if they were in a file system. For example, let’s assume the my-new-company-123456789 bucket stored thousands of objects. If David includes the delimiter in his requests, he can limit the number of returned objects to just the names of files and subfolders in the folder he specified. Without the delimiter, in addition to every file in the folder he specified, David would get a list of all files in any subfolders.
Block 3: Allow listing objects in David’s folder
In addition to the root and home folders, David requires access to all objects in the home/David/ folder and any subfolders that he might create. Here’s a policy that allows this:
In the condition above, you use a StringLike expression in combination with the asterisk (*) to represent an object in David’s folder, where the asterisk acts as a wildcard. That way, David can list files and folders in his folder (home/David/). You couldn’t include this condition in the previous block (AllowRootAndHomeListingOfCompanyBucket) because it used the StringEquals expression, which would interpret the asterisk (*) as an asterisk, not as a wildcard.
In the next section, the AllowAllS3ActionsInUserFolder block, you’ll see that the Resource element specifies my-new-company/home/David/*, which looks like the condition that I specified in this section. You might think that you can similarly use the Resource element to specify David’s folder in this block. However, the ListBucket action is a bucket-level operation, meaning the Resource element for the ListBucket action applies only to bucket names and doesn’t take folder names into account. So, to limit actions at the object level (files and folders), you must use conditions.
Block 4: Allow all Amazon S3 actions in David’s folder
Finally, you specify David’s actions (such as read, write, and delete permissions) and limit them to just his home folder, as shown in the following policy:
For the Action element, you specified s3:*, which means David has permission to do all Amazon S3 actions. In the Resource element, you specified David’s folder with an asterisk (*) (a wildcard) so that David can perform actions on the folder and inside the folder. For example, David has permission to change his folder’s storage class. David also has permission to upload files, delete files, and create subfolders in his folder (perform actions in the folder).
An easier way to manage policies with policy variables
In David’s folder-level policy you specified David’s home folder. If you wanted a similar policy for users like Bob and Adele, you’d have to create separate policies that specify their home folders. Instead of creating individual policies for each IAM Identity Center user, you can use policy variables and create a single policy that applies to multiple users (a group policy). Policy variables act as placeholders. When you make a request to a service in AWS, the placeholder is replaced by a value from the request when the policy is evaluated.
For example, you can use the previous policy and replace David’s user name with a variable that uses the requester’s user name through attributes and PrincipalTag as shown in the following policy (copy this policy to use in the procedure that follows):
To implement this policy with variables, begin by opening the IAM Identity Center console using the main AWS admin account (ensuring you’re not signed in as David).
Select Settings on the left-hand side, then select the Attributes for access control tab.
Figure 15: Screenshot of Settings inside Identity Center.
Create a new attribute for access control, entering userName as the Key and ${path:userName} as the Value, then choose Save changes. This will add a session tag to your Identity Center user and allow you to use that tag in an IAM policy.
Figure 16: Screenshot of managing attributes inside Identity Center settings.
To edit David’s permissions, go back to the IAM Identity Center console and select Permission sets.
Figure 17: Screenshot of permission sets inside Identity Center with Davids-Permissions selected.
Select David’s permission set that you created previously.
Select Inline policy and then choose Edit to update David’s policy by replacing it with the modified policy that you copied at the beginning of this section, which will resolve to David’s username.
Figure 18: Screenshot of David’s policy inside his permission set inside Identity Center.
You can validate that this is set up correctly by signing in to David’s user through the Identity Center dashboard as you did before and verifying you have access to the David folder and not the Bob or Adele folder.
Figure 19: Screenshot of David’s S3 folder with access to a .jpg file inside.
Whenever a user makes a request to AWS, the variable is replaced by the user name of whoever made the request. For example, when David makes a request, ${aws:PrincipalTag/userName} resolves to David; when Adele makes the request, ${aws:PrincipalTag/userName} resolves to Adele.
It’s important to note that, if this is the route you use to grant access, you must control and limit who can set this username tag on an IAM principal. Anyone who can set this tag can effectively read/write to any of these bucket prefixes. It’s important that you limit access and protect the bucket prefixes and who can set the tags. For more information, see What is ABAC for AWS, and the Attribute-based access control User Guide.
Conclusion
By using Amazon S3 folders, you can follow the principle of least privilege and verify that the right users have access to what they need, and only to what they need.
See the following example policy that only allows API access to the buckets, and only allows for adding, deleting, restoring, and listing objects inside the folders:
Graph modelling is a highly effective technique for representing and analysing complex and interconnected data across various domains. By deciphering relationships between entities, graph modelling can reveal insights that might be otherwise difficult to identify using traditional data modelling approaches. In this article, we will explore what graph modelling is and guide you through a step-by-step process of implementing graph modelling to create a social network graph.
What is graph modelling?
Graph modelling is a method for representing real-world entities and their relationships using nodes, edges, and properties. It employs graph theory, a branch of mathematics that studies graphs, to visualise and analyse the structure and patterns within complex datasets. Common applications of graph modelling include social network analysis, recommendation systems, and biological networks.
Graph modelling process
Step 1: Define your domain
Before diving into graph modelling, it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of the domain you’re working with. This involves getting acquainted with the relevant terms, concepts, and relationships that exist in your specific field. To create a social network graph, familiarise yourself with terms like users, friendships, posts, likes, and comments.
Step 2: Identify entities and relationships
After defining your domain, you need to determine the entities (nodes) and relationships (edges) that exist within it. Entities are the primary objects in your domain, while relationships represent how these entities interact with each other. In a social network graph, users are entities, and friendships are relationships.
Step 3: Establish properties
Each entity and relationship may have a set of properties that provide additional information. In this step, identify relevant properties based on their significance to the domain. A user entity might have properties like name, age, and location. A friendship relationship could have a ‘since’ property to denote the establishment of the friendship.
Step 4: Choose a graph model
Once you’ve identified the entities, relationships, and properties, it’s time to choose a suitable graph model. Two common models are:
Property graph: A versatile model that easily accommodates properties on both nodes and edges. It’s well-suited for most applications.
Resource Description Framework (RDF): A World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard model, using triples of subject-predicate-object to represent data. It is commonly used in semantic web applications.
For a social network graph, a property graph model is typically suitable. This is because user entities have many attributes and features. Property graphs provide a clear representation of the relationships between people and their attribute profiles.
Figure 1 – Social network graph
Step 5: Develop a schema
Although not required, developing a schema can be helpful for large-scale projects and team collaborations. A schema defines the structure of your graph, including entity types, relationships, and properties. In a social network graph, you might have a schema that specifies the types of nodes (users, posts) and the relationships between them (friendships, likes, comments).
Step 6: Import or generate data
Next, acquire the data needed to populate your graph. This can come in the form of existing datasets or generated data from your application. For a social network graph, you can import user information from a CSV file and generate simulated friendships, posts, likes, and comments.
Step 7: Implement the graph using a graph database or other storage options
Finally, you need to store your graph data using a suitable graph database. Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, or Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB are examples of graph databases. Alternatively, depending on your specific requirements, you can use a non-graph database or an in-memory data structure to store the graph.
Step 8: Analyse and visualise the graph
After implementing the graph, you can perform various analyses using graph algorithms, such as shortest path, centrality, or community detection. In addition, visualising your graph can help you gain insights and facilitate communication with others.
Conclusion
By following these steps, you can effectively create and analyse graph models for your specific domain. Remember to adjust the steps according to your unique domain and requirements, and always ensure that confidential and sensitive data is properly protected.
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AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) recently announced that its hardware security modules (HSMs) were given Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 Security Level 3 certification from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For organizations that rely on AWS cryptographic services, this higher security level validation has several benefits, including simpler set up and operation. In this post, we will share more details about the recent change in FIPS validation status for AWS KMS and explain the benefits to customers using AWS cryptographic services as a result of this change.
Background on NIST FIPS 140
The FIPS 140 framework provides guidelines and requirements for cryptographic modules that protect sensitive information. FIPS 140 is the industry standard in the US and Canada and is recognized around the world as providing authoritative certification and validation for the way that cryptographic modules are designed, implemented, and tested against NIST cryptographic security guidelines.
Organizations follow FIPS 140 to help ensure that their cryptographic security is aligned with government standards. FIPS 140 validation is also required in certain fields such as manufacturing, healthcare, and finance and is included in several industry and regulatory compliance frameworks, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), and the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) framework. FIPS 140 validation is recognized in many jurisdictions around the world, so organizations that operate globally can use FIPS 140 certification internationally.
What FIPS 140-2 Security Level 3 means for AWS KMS and you
Until recently, AWS KMS had been validated at Security Level 2 overall and at Security Level 3 in the following four sub-categories:
Cryptographic module specification
Roles, services, and authentication
Physical security
Design assurance
The latest certification from NIST means that AWS KMS is now validated at Security Level 3 overall in each sub-category. As a result, AWS assumes more of the shared responsibility model, which will benefit customers for certain use cases. Security Level 3 certification can assist organizations seeking compliance with several industry and regulatory standards. Even though FIPS 140 validation is not expressly required in a number of regulatory regimes, maintaining stronger, easier-to-use encryption can be a powerful tool for complying with FedRAMP, U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) Approved Product List (APL), HIPAA, PCI, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the ISO 27001 standard for security management best practices and comprehensive security controls.
Customers who previously needed to meet compliance requirements for FIPS 140-2 Level 3 on AWS were required to use AWS CloudHSM, a single-tenant HSM solution that provides dedicated HSMs instead of managed service HSMs. Now, customers who were using CloudHSM to help meet their compliance obligations for Level 3 validation can use AWS KMS by itself for key generation and usage. Compared to CloudHSM, AWS KMS is typically lower cost and easier to set up and operate as a managed service, and using AWS KMS shifts the responsibility for creating and controlling encryption keys and operating HSMs from the customer to AWS. This allows you to focus resources on your core business instead of on undifferentiated HSM infrastructure management tasks.
AWS KMS uses FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated HSMs to help protect your keys when you request the service to create keys on your behalf or when you import them. The HSMs in AWS KMS are designed so that no one, not even AWS employees, can retrieve your plaintext keys. Your plaintext keys are never written to disk and are only used in volatile memory of the HSMs while performing your requested cryptographic operation.
The FIPS 140-2 Level 3 certified HSMs in AWS KMS are deployed in all AWS Regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The China (Beijing) and China (Ningxia) Regions do not support the FIPS 140-2 Cryptographic Module Validation Program. AWS KMS uses Office of the State Commercial Cryptography Administration (OSCCA) certified HSMs to protect KMS keys in China Regions. The certificate for the AWS KMS FIPS 140-2 Security Level 3 validation is available on the NIST Cryptographic Module Validation Program website.
As with many industry and regulatory frameworks, FIPS 140 is evolving. NIST approved and published a new updated version of the 140 standard, FIPS 140-3, which supersedes FIPS 140-2. The U.S. government has begun transitioning to the FIPS 140-3 cryptography standard, with NIST announcing that they will retire all FIPS 140-2 certificates on September 22, 2026. NIST recently validated AWS-LC under FIPS 140-3 and is currently in the process of evaluating AWS KMS and certain instance types of AWS CloudHSM under the FIPS 140-3 standard. To check the status of these evaluations, see the NIST Modules In Process List.
This document is provided for the purposes of information only; it is not legal advice, and should not be relied on as legal advice. Customers are responsible for making their own independent assessment of the information in this document. This document: (a) is for informational purposes only, (b) represents current AWS product offerings and practices, which are subject to change without notice, and (c) does not create any commitments or assurances from AWS and its affiliates, suppliers or licensors. AWS products or services are provided “as is” without warranties, representations, or conditions of any kind, whether express or implied. The responsibilities and liabilities of AWS to its customers are controlled by AWS agreements, and this document is not part of, nor does it modify, any agreement between AWS and its customers.
AWS encourages its customers to obtain appropriate advice on their implementation of privacy and data protection environments, and more generally, applicable laws and other obligations relevant to their business.
AWS encourages its customers to obtain appropriate advice on their implementation of privacy and data protection environments, and more generally, applicable laws and other obligations relevant to their business.
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Customers using Amazon Web Services (AWS) can use a range of native and third-party tools to build workloads based on their specific use cases. Logs and metrics are foundational components in building effective insights into the health of your IT environment. In a distributed and agile AWS environment, customers need a centralized and holistic solution to visualize the health and security posture of their infrastructure.
You can effectively categorize the members of the teams involved using the following roles:
Executive stakeholder: Owns and operates with their support staff and has total financial and risk accountability.
Data custodian: Aggregates related data sources while managing cost, access, and compliance.
Operator or analyst: Uses security tooling to monitor, assess, and respond to related events such as service disruptions.
In this blog post, we focus on the data custodian role. We show you how you can visualize metrics and logs centrally with Amazon QuickSight irrespective of the service or tool generating them. We use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage, AWS Glue for cataloguing, and Amazon Athena for querying the data and creating structured query language (SQL) views for QuickSight to consume.
Target architecture
This post guides you towards building a target architecture in line with the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The tiered and multi-account target architecture, shown in Figure 1, uses account-level isolation to separate responsibilities across the various roles identified above and makes access management more defined and specific to those roles. The workload accounts generate the telemetry around the applications and infrastructure. The data custodian account is where the data lake is deployed and collects the telemetry. The operator account is where the queries and visualizations are created.
Throughout the post, I mention AWS services that reduce the operational overhead in one or more stages of the architecture.
Figure 1: Data visualization architecture
Ingestion
Irrespective of the technology choices, applications and infrastructure configurations should generate metrics and logs that report on resource health and security. The format of the logs depends on which tool and which part of the stack is generating the logs. For example, the format of log data generated by application code can capture bespoke and additional metadata deemed useful from a workload perspective as compared to access logs generated by proxies or load balancers. For more information on types of logs and effective logging strategies, see Logging strategies for security incident response.
Amazon S3 is a scalable, highly available, durable, and secure object storage that you will use as the storage layer. To build a solution that captures events agnostic of the source, you must forward data as a stream to the S3 bucket. Based on the architecture, there are multiple tools you can use to capture and stream data into S3 buckets. Some tools support integration with S3 and directly stream data to S3. Resources like servers and virtual machines need forwarding agents such as Amazon Kinesis Agent, Amazon CloudWatch agent, or Fluent Bit.
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams provides a scalable data streaming environment. Using on-demand capacity mode eliminates the need for capacity provisioning and capacity management for streaming workloads. For log data and metric collection, you should use on-demand capacity mode, because log data generation can be unpredictable depending on the requests that are being handled by the environment. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose can convert the format of your input data from JSON to Apache Parquet before storing the data in Amazon S3. Parquet is naturally compressed, and using Parquet native partitioning and compression allows for faster queries compared to JSON formatted objects.
Amazon Security Lake is a fully managed security data lake service. You can use Security Lake to automatically centralize security data from AWS environments, SaaS providers, on-premises, and third-party sources into a purpose-built data lake that’s stored in your AWS account. Using Security Lake reduces the operational effort involved in building a scalable data lake, as the service automates the configuration and orchestration for the data lake with Lake Formation. Security Lake automatically transforms logs into a standard schema—the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) — and parses them into a standard directory structure, which allows for faster queries. For more information, see How to visualize Amazon Security Lake findings with Amazon QuickSight.
You can start with basic queries and visualizations as described in Query logs in S3 with Athena and Create a QuickSight visualization. Depending on the nature and origin of the logs and metrics that you want to query, you can use the examples published in Running SQL queries using Amazon Athena. To build custom analytics, you can create views with Athena. Views in Athena are logical tables that you can use to query a subset of data. Views help you to hide complexity and minimize maintenance when querying large tables. Use views as a source for new datasets to build specific health analytics and dashboards.
You can also use Amazon QuickSight Q to get started on your analytics journey. Powered by machine learning, Q uses natural language processing to provide insights into the datasets. After the dataset is configured, you can use Q to give you suggestions for questions to ask about the data. Q understands business language and generates results based on relevant phrases detected in the questions. For more information, see Working with Amazon QuickSight Q topics.
Conclusion
Logs and metrics offer insights into the health of your applications and infrastructure. It’s essential to build visibility into the health of your IT environment so that you can understand what good health looks like and identify outliers in your data. These outliers can be used to identify thresholds and feed into your incident response workflow to help identify security issues. This post helps you build out a scalable centralized visualization environment irrespective of the source of log and metric data.
This post is part 1 of a series that helps you dive deeper into the security analytics use case. In part 2, How to visualize Amazon Security Lake findings with Amazon QuickSight, you will learn how you can use Security Lake to reduce the operational overhead involved in building a scalable data lake and centralizing log data from SaaS providers, on-premises, AWS, and third-party sources into a purpose-built data lake. You will also learn how you can integrate Athena with Security Lake and create visualizations with QuickSight of the data and events captured by Security Lake.
When you build on Amazon Web Services (AWS) across accounts, you might use an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to allow an authenticated identity from outside your account—such as an IAM entity or a user from an external identity provider—to access the resources in your account. IAM roles have two types of policies attached to them: a trust policy that allows access to an external entity, and a permissions policy that defines what actions the role can take. This blog post focuses on how to use AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer cross-account access findings and IAM action last accessed information to refine the permissions policies of your IAM roles that have a trust policy.
IAM Access Analyzer helps you set, verify, and refine permissions. To learn more about how IAM Access Analyzer guides you toward least-privilege permissions, visit Using AWS IAM Access Analyzer. Action last accessed information helps you identify unused permissions and refine the access of your IAM roles to only the actions they use. IAM now provides action last accessed information for more than 140 services such as Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Data Firehose, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).
This blog post walks you through how to use IAM Access Analyzer and action last accessed to refine the required permissions for your IAM roles that have a trust policy, which allows entities outside of your account to assume a role and access your resources.
Use IAM roles to grant access to an external entity
You can create an IAM role that grants permissions for an entity outside your account to access the resources in your account. For example, if you’re an application developer, you might grant cross-account access to your AWS resources by using a role and attaching a trust policy to the role.
To allow an external entity access to your resources by using a role, you first create a role with a role trust policy to grant access to entities outside your account, and then grant permissions that specify which actions the role can take. The external entities can then assume the role in your account and access your resources based on the permissions you granted to the role. See Cross-account access using roles for more information.
You should restrict the access of roles that grant access outside of your account to just the permissions required to perform a specific task.
Use IAM Access Analyzer cross-account access findings to identify roles that grant access to external entities
When you use role trust policies to grant account access to entities outside your account, those entities can access and take the allowed actions on your resources. IAM Access Analyzer continuously monitors your account to identify the resources in your account that can be accessed from outside your account and helps you verify whether the access permissions meet your intent. For the example in this post, if you were to add a new trust policy to your ApplicationRole to grant permissions to an external account to access an application in your account, IAM Access Analyzer would let you know that ApplicationRole is accessible by entities from outside your account.
Use IAM action last accessed information to identify and remove unused permissions
After you’ve identified the IAM roles that grant access to entities outside your account, review what those roles can do and remove unused permissions. You can use action last accessed to show you the latest timestamp when your IAM role used an action, analyze its access permissions, and remove unused permissions.
Refine permissions for externally accessible roles by using IAM Access Analyzer cross-account access findings and action last accessed information
This example demonstrates how you can combine the information from IAM Access Analyzer cross-account access findings and IAM action last accessed information to identify roles that can be assumed from outside your account, review unused and unnecessary actions, and reduce the permissions available to external roles.
To view action last accessed information in the IAM console
Open the AWS Management Console and go to the IAM console, and then select Access analyzer in the navigation pane.
Review your findings on the IAM Access Analyzer tab.
Under Active findings, for Filter active findings, enter AWS::IAM::Role. The list of Active findings shows you the roles that can be accessed by entities outside your account.
Figure 1: Findings filtered by resource types
Under the Finding ID column, select a finding for a role (for example, ApplicationRole) that you want to review.
A new page for the Finding ID will appear. Choose the resource ARN link in the Resource field under the Details section.
Figure 2: Findings page
A new page for the role will appear. Select the Access Advisor tab to review the last accessed information of your services for this role. This tab displays the AWS services to which the role has permissions. Action last accessed reports the actions listed in the IAM action last accessed information services and actions. The tracking period for services is the last 400 days—fewer if your AWS Region began tracking within the last 400 days. Learn more about Where AWS tracks last accessed information.
Figure 3: Last accessed information of allowed services
In this exercise, we will use DynamoDB as an example. Under Allowed services, for Search, enter Amazon DynamoDB and under the Service column, choose Amazon DynamoDB. This will take you to a new section titled Allowed management actions for Amazon DynamoDB, which displays the action last accessed information of your role for DynamoDB. The Action column displays the action, the Last Accessed column displays the timestamp of when access was last attempted, and the Region accessed column displays in which region access was last attempted.
The Action column on the resulting Allowed management actions for Amazon DynamoDB section includes the actions to which the role has permissions, when the role last accessed each action, and the Region accessed. You can sort the actions by choosing the arrow next to Last accessed.
Figure 4: Action last accessed information for Amazon DynamoDB
Because you want to remove unused permissions, filter for all unused actions for the role by selecting Servicesnot accessed from the Last accessed dropdown list. This will show you the actions that haven’t been accessed during the tracking period.
Figure 5: Action last accessed information ordered by not accessed
To return to the service view, choose Back to Allowed services and then select the Permissions tab. Select the plus sign to the left of DynamoDBAccess to see the JSON of the customer managed policy.
Figure 6: The JSON code of the customer managed policy
Choose Next and then Save changes. Return to the Access Advisor tab to confirm that all the retained permissions have been used recently.
Conclusion
In this post, you learned how to use IAM Access Analyzer and action last accessed information to identify and refine permissions for externally accessible roles in your journey toward least privilege. You first used IAM Access Analyzer cross-account access findings to identify IAM roles that can be accessed from outside your account. You then used IAM action last accessed information to review the permissions those roles are using and to remove unused permissions.
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, start a new thread on the AWS re:Post or contact AWS Support.
In this blog post, we discuss some of the benefits and considerations organizations should think through when looking at a unified and global information technology and operational technology (IT/OT) security operations center (SOC). Although this post focuses on the IT/OT convergence within the SOC, you can use the concepts and ideas discussed here when thinking about other environments such as hybrid and multi-cloud, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and so on.
The scope of assets has vastly expanded as organizations transition to remote work, and from increased interconnectivity through the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge devices coming online from around the globe, such as cyber physical systems. For many organizations, the IT and OT SOCs were separate, but there is a strong argument for convergence, which provides better context for the business outcomes of being able to respond to unexpected activity. In the ten security golden rules for IIoT solutions, AWS recommends deploying security audit and monitoring mechanisms across OT and IIoT environments, collecting security logs, and analyzing them using security information and event management (SIEM) tools within a SOC. SOCs are used to monitor, detect, and respond; this has traditionally been done separately for each environment. In this blog post, we explore the benefits and potential trade-offs of the convergence of these environments for the SOC. Although organizations should carefully consider the points raised throughout this blog post, the benefits of a unified SOC outweigh the potential trade-offs—visibility into the full threat chain propagating from one environment to another is critical for organizations as daily operations become more connected across IT and OT.
Traditional IT SOC
Traditionally, the SOC was responsible for security monitoring, analysis, and incident management of the entire IT environment within an organization—whether on-premises or in a hybrid architecture. This traditional approach has worked well for many years and ensures the SOC has the visibility to effectively protect the IT environment from evolving threats.
Note: Organizations should be aware of the considerations for security operations in the cloud which are discussed in this blog post.
Traditional OT SOC
Traditionally, OT, IT, and cloud teams have worked on separate sides of the air gap as described in the Purdue model. This can result in siloed OT, IIoT, and cloud security monitoring solutions, creating potential gaps in coverage or missing context that could otherwise have improved the response capability. To realize the full benefits of IT/OT convergence, IIoT, IT and OT must collaborate effectively to provide a broad perspective and the most effective defense. The convergence trend applies to newly connected devices and to how security and operations work together.
As organizations explore how industrial digital transformation can give them a competitive advantage, they’re using IoT, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and other digital technologies. This increases the potential threat surface that organizations must protect and requires a broad, integrated, and automated defense-in-depth security approach delivered through a unified and global SOC.
Without full visibility and control of traffic entering and exiting OT networks, the operations function might not be able to get full context or information that can be used to identify unexpected events. If a control system or connected assets such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), operator workstations, or safety systems are compromised, threat actors could damage critical infrastructure and services or compromise data in IT systems. Even in cases where the OT system isn’t directly impacted, the secondary impacts can result in OT networks being shut down due to safety concerns over the ability to operate and monitor OT networks.
The SOC helps improve security and compliance by consolidating key security personnel and event data in a centralized location. Building a SOC is significant because it requires a substantial upfront and ongoing investment in people, processes, and technology. However, the value of an improved security posture is of great consideration compared to the costs.
In many OT organizations, operators and engineering teams may not be used to focusing on security; in some cases, organizations set up an OT SOC that’s independent from their IT SOC. Many of the capabilities, strategies, and technologies developed for enterprise and IT SOCs apply directly to the OT environment, such as security operations (SecOps) and standard operating procedures (SOPs). While there are clearly OT-specific considerations, the SOC model is a good starting point for a converged IT/OT cybersecurity approach. In addition, technologies such as a SIEM can help OT organizations monitor their environment with less effort and time to deliver maximum return on investment. For example, by bringing IT and OT security data into a SIEM, IT and OT stakeholders share access to the information needed to complete security work.
Benefits of a unified SOC
A unified SOC offers numerous benefits for organizations. It provides broad visibility across the entire IT and OT environments, enabling coordinated threat detection, faster incident response, and immediate sharing of indicators of compromise (IoCs) between environments. This allows for better understanding of threat paths and origins.
Consolidating data from IT and OT environments in a unified SOC can bring economies of scale with opportunities for discounted data ingestion and retention. Furthermore, managing a unified SOC can reduce overhead by centralizing data retention requirements, access models, and technical capabilities such as automation and machine learning.
Operational key performance indicators (KPIs) developed within one environment can be used to enhance another, promoting operational efficiency such as reducing mean time to detect security events (MTTD). A unified SOC enables integrated and unified security, operations, and performance, which supports comprehensive protection and visibility across technologies, locations, and deployments. Sharing lessons learned between IT and OT environments improves overall operational efficiency and security posture. A unified SOC also helps organizations adhere to regulatory requirements in a single place, streamlining compliance efforts and operational oversight.
By using a security data lake and advanced technologies like AI/ML, organizations can build resilient business operations, enhancing their detection and response to security threats.
Creating cross-functional teams of IT and OT subject matter experts (SMEs) help bridge the cultural divide and foster collaboration, enabling the development of a unified security strategy. Implementing an integrated and unified SOC can improve the maturity of industrial control systems (ICS) for IT and OT cybersecurity programs, bridging the gap between the domains and enhancing overall security capabilities.
Considerations for a unified SOC
There are several important aspects of a unified SOC for organizations to consider.
First, the separation of duty is crucial in a unified SOC environment. It’s essential to verify that specific duties are assigned to individuals based on their expertise and job function, allowing the most appropriate specialists to work on security events for their respective environments. Additionally, the sensitivity of data must be carefully managed. Robust access and permissions management is necessary to restrict access to specific types of data, maintaining that only authorized analysts can access and handle sensitive information. You should implement a clear AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategy following security best practices across your organization to verify that the separation of duties is enforced.
Another critical consideration is the potential disruption to operations during the unification of IT and OT environments. To promote a smooth transition, careful planning is required to minimize any loss of data, visibility, or disruptions to standard operations. It’s crucial to recognize the differences in IT and OT security. The unique nature of OT environments and their close ties to physical infrastructure require tailored cybersecurity strategies and tools that address the distinct missions, challenges, and threats faced by industrial organizations. A copy-and-paste approach from IT cybersecurity programs will not suffice.
Furthermore, the level of cybersecurity maturity often varies between IT and OT domains. Investment in cybersecurity measures might differ, resulting in OT cybersecurity being relatively less mature compared to IT cybersecurity. This discrepancy should be considered when designing and implementing a unified SOC. Baselining the technology stack from each environment, defining clear goals and carefully architecting the solution can help ensure this discrepancy has been accounted for. After the solution has moved into the proof-of-concept (PoC) phase, you can start to testing for readiness to move the convergence to production.
You also must address the cultural divide between IT and OT teams. Lack of alignment between an organization’s cybersecurity policies and procedures with ICS and OT security objectives can impact the ability to secure both environments effectively. Bridging this divide through collaboration and clear communication is essential. This has been discussed in more detail in the post on managing organizational transformation for successful IT/OT convergence.
Unified IT/OT SOC deployment:
Figure 1 shows the deployment that would be expected in a unified IT/OT SOC. This is a high-level view of a unified SOC. In part 2 of this post, we will provide prescriptive guidance on how to design and build a unified and global SOC on AWS using AWS services and AWS Partner Network (APN) solutions.
Figure 1: Unified IT/OT SOC architecture
The parts of the IT/OT unified SOC are the following:
Environment: There are multiple environments, including a traditional IT on-premises organization, OT environment, cloud environment, and so on. Each environment represents a collection of security events and log sources from assets.
Data lake: A centralized place for data collection, normalization, and enrichment to verify that raw data from the different environments is standardized into a common scheme. The data lake should support data retention and archiving for long term storage.
Visualize: The SOC includes multiple dashboards based on organizational and operational needs. Dashboards can cover scenarios for multiple environments including data flows between IT and OT environments. There are also specific dashboards for the individual environments to cover each stakeholder’s needs. Data should be indexed in a way that allows humans and machines to query the data to monitor for security and performance issues.
Security analytics: Security analytics are used to aggregate and analyze security signals and generate higher fidelity alerts and to contextualize OT signals against concurrent IT signals and against threat intelligence from reputable sources.
Detect, alert, and respond: Alerts can be set up for events of interest based on data across both individual and multiple environments. Machine learning should be used to help identify threat paths and events of interest across the data.
Conclusion
Throughout this blog post, we’ve talked through the convergence of IT and OT environments from the perspective of optimizing your security operations. We looked at the benefits and considerations of designing and implementing a unified SOC.
Visibility into the full threat chain propagating from one environment to another is critical for organizations as daily operations become more connected across IT and OT. A unified SOC is the nerve center for incident detection and response and can be one of the most critical components in improving your organization’s security posture and cyber resilience.
If unification is your organization’s goal, you must fully consider what this means and design a plan for what a unified SOC will look like in practice. Running a small proof of concept and migrating in steps often helps with this process.
In the next blog post, we will provide prescriptive guidance on how to design and build a unified and global SOC using AWS services and AWS Partner Network (APN) solutions.
Today, we’re announcing a new capability for Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) message data protection. In this post, we show you how you can use this new capability to create custom data identifiers to detect and protect domain-specific sensitive data, such as your company’s employee IDs. Previously, you could only use managed data identifiers to detect and protect common sensitive data, such as names, addresses, and credit card numbers.
Overview
Amazon SNS is a serverless messaging service that provides topics for push-based, many-to-many messaging for decoupling distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven serverless applications. As applications become more complex, it can become challenging for topic owners to manage the data flowing through their topics. These applications might inadvertently start sending sensitive data to topics, increasing regulatory risk. To mitigate the risk, you can use message data protection to protect sensitive application data using built-in, no-code, scalable capabilities.
To discover and protect data flowing through SNS topics with message data protection, you can associate data protection policies to your topics. Within these policies, you can write statements that define which types of sensitive data you want to discover and protect. Within each policy statement, you can then define whether you want to act on data flowing inbound to an SNS topic or outbound to an SNS subscription, the AWS accounts or specific AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) principals the statement applies to, and the actions you want to take on the sensitive data found.
Now, message data protection provides three actions to help you protect your data. First, the audit operation reports on the amount of sensitive data found. Second, the deny operation helps prevent the publishing or delivery of payloads that contain sensitive data. Third, the de-identify operation can mask or redact the sensitive data detected. These no-code operations can help you adhere to a variety of compliance regulations, such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
This message data protection feature coexists with the message data encryption feature in SNS, both contributing to an enhanced security posture of your messaging workloads.
Managed and custom data identifiers
After you add a data protection policy to your SNS topic, message data protection uses pattern matching and machine learning models to scan your messages for sensitive data, then enforces the data protection policy in real time. The types of sensitive data are referred to as data identifiers. These data identifiers can be either managed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) or custom to your domain.
Custom data identifiers (CDI), on the other hand, enable you to define custom regular expressions in the data protection policy itself, then refer to them from policy statements. Using custom data identifiers, you can scan for business-specific sensitive data, which managed data identifiers can’t. For example, you can use a custom data identifier to look for company-specific employee IDs in SNS message payloads. Internally, SNS has guardrails to make sure custom data identifiers are safe and that they add only low single-digit millisecond latency to message processing.
In a data protection policy statement, you refer to a custom data identifier using only the name that you have given it, as follows:
Note that custom data identifiers can be used in conjunction with managed data identifiers, as part of the same data protection policy statement. In the preceding example, both MyCompanyEmployeeId and CreditCardNumber are in scope.
For more information, see Data Identifiers, in the SNS Developer Guide.
Inbound and outbound data directions
In addition to the DataIdentifier property, each policy statement also sets the DataDirection property (whose value can be either Inbound or Outbound) as well as the Principal property (whose value can be any combination of AWS accounts, IAM users, and IAM roles).
When you use message data protection for data de-identification and set DataDirection to Inbound, instances of DataIdentifier published by the Principal are masked or redacted before the payload is ingested into the SNS topic. This means that every endpoint subscribed to the topic receives the same modified payload.
When you set DataDirection to Outbound, on the other hand, the payload is ingested into the SNS topic as-is. Then, instances of DataIdentifier are either masked, redacted, or kept as-is for each subscribing Principal in isolation. This means that each endpoint subscribed to the SNS topic might receive a different payload from the topic, with different sensitive data de-identified, according to the data access permissions of its Principal.
The following snippet expands the example data protection policy to include the DataDirection and Principal properties.
To complete the policy statement, you need to set the Operation property, which informs the SNS topic of the action that it should take when it finds instances of DataIdentifer in the outbound payload.
The following snippet expands the data protection policy to include the Operation property, in this case using the Deidentify object, which in turn supports masking and redaction.
In this example, the MaskConfig object instructs the SNS topic to mask instances of CreditCardNumber in Outbound messages to subscriptions created by ReportingApplicationRole, using the MaskWithCharacter value, which in this case is the hash symbol (#). Alternatively, you could have used the RedactConfig object instead, which would have instructed the SNS topic to simply cut the sensitive data off the payload.
The following snippet shows how the outbound payload is masked, in real time, by the SNS topic.
// original message published to the topic:
My credit card number is 4539894458086459
// masked message delivered to subscriptions created by ReportingApplicationRole:
My credit card number is ################
Consider a company where managers use an internal expense report management application where expense reports from employees can be reviewed and approved. Initially, this application depended only on an internal payment application, which in turn connected to an external payment gateway. However, this workload eventually became more complex, because the company started also paying expense reports filed by external contractors. At that point, the company built a mobile application that external contractors could use to view their approved expense reports. An important business requirement for this mobile application was that specific financial and PII data needed to be de-identified in the externally displayed expense reports. Specifically, both the credit card number used for the payment and the internal employee ID that approved the payment had to be masked.
Figure 1: Expense report processing application
To distribute the approved expense reports to both the payment application and the reporting application that backed the mobile application, the company used an SNS topic with a data protection policy. The policy has only one statement, which masks credit card numbers and employee IDs found in the payload. This statement applies only to the IAM role that the company used for subscribing the AWS Lambda function of the reporting application to the SNS topic. This access permission configuration enabled the Lambda function from the payment application to continue receiving the raw data from the SNS topic.
The data protection policy from the previous section addresses this use case. Thus, when a message representing an expense report is published to the SNS topic, the Lambda function in the payment application receives the message as-is, whereas the Lambda function in the reporting application receives the message with the financial and PII data masked.
To automate the provisioning of the resources and the data protection policy of the example expense management use case, we’re going to use CloudFormation templates. You have two options for deploying the resources:
Alternatively, use the following four CloudFormation templates, in order. Allow time for each stack to complete before deploying the next stack.
Deploy using the individual CloudFormation templates in sequence
Prerequisites template: This first template provisions two IAM roles with a managed policy that enables them to create SNS subscriptions and configure the subscriber Lambda functions. You will use these provisioned IAM roles in steps 3 and 4 that follow.
Topic owner template: The second template provisions the SNS topic along with its access policy and data protection policy.
Payment subscriber template: The third template provisions the Lambda function and the corresponding SNS subscription that comprise of the Payment application stack. When prompted, select the PaymentApplicationRole in the Permissions panel before running the template. Moreover, the CloudFormation console will require you to acknowledge that a CloudFormation transform might require access capabilities.
Reporting subscriber template: The final template provisions the Lambda function and the SNS subscription that comprise of the Reporting application stack. When prompted, select the ReportingApplicationRole in the Permissions panel, before running the template. Moreover, the CloudFormation console will require, once again, that you acknowledge that a CloudFormation transform might require access capabilities.
Figure 2: Select IAM role
Now that the application stacks have been deployed, you’re ready to start testing.
Testing the data de-identification operation
Use the following steps to test the example expense management use case.
In the Amazon SNS console, select the ApprovalTopic, then choose to publish a message to it.
In the SNS message body field, enter the following message payload, representing an external contractor expense report, then choose to publish this message:
In the CloudWatch console, select the log group for the PaymentLambdaFunction, then choose to view its latest log stream. Now look for the log stream entry that shows the message payload received by the Lambda function. You will see that no data has been masked in this payload, as the payment application requires raw financial data to process the credit card transaction.
Still in the CloudWatch console, select the log group for the ReportingLambdaFunction, then choose to view its latest log stream. Now look for the log stream entry that shows the message payload received by this Lambda function. You will see that the values for properties credit_card_number and employee_id have been masked, protecting the financial data from leaking into the external reporting application.
As shown, different subscribers received different versions of the message payload, according to their sensitive data access permissions.
Cleaning up the resources
After testing, avoid incurring usage charges by deleting the resources that you created. Open the CloudFormation console and delete the four CloudFormation stacks that you created during the walkthrough.
Conclusion
This post showed how you can use Amazon SNS message data protection to discover and protect sensitive data published to or delivered from your SNS topics. The example use case shows how to create a data protection policy that masks messages delivered to specific subscribers if the payloads contain financial or personally identifiable information.
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From day one, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has always believed it is essential that customers have control over their data, and choices for how they secure and manage that data in the cloud. Last year, we introduced the AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge, our commitment to offering AWS customers the most advanced set of sovereignty controls and features available in the cloud. We pledged to work to understand the evolving needs and requirements of both customers and regulators, and to rapidly adapt and innovate to meet them. We committed to expanding our capabilities to allow customers to meet their digital sovereignty needs, without compromising on the performance, innovation, security, or scale of the AWS Cloud.
AWS offers the largest and most comprehensive cloud infrastructure globally. Our approach from the beginning has been to make AWS sovereign-by-design. We built data protection features and controls in the AWS Cloud with input from financial services, healthcare, and government customers—who are among the most security- and data privacy-conscious organizations in the world. This has led to innovations like the AWS Nitro System, which powers all our modern Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and provides a strong physical and logical security boundary to enforce access restrictions so that nobody, including AWS employees, can access customer data running in Amazon EC2. The security design of the Nitro System has also been independently validated by the NCC Group in a public report.
With AWS, customers have always had control over the location of their data. In Europe, customers that need to comply with European data residency requirements have the choice to deploy their data to any of our eight existing AWS Regions (Ireland, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm, Milan, Zurich, and Spain) to keep their data securely in Europe. To run their sensitive workloads, European customers can leverage the broadest and deepest portfolio of services, including AI, analytics, compute, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, and storage. To further support customers, we’ve innovated to offer more control and choice over their data. For example, we announced further transparency and assurances, and new dedicated infrastructure options with AWS Dedicated Local Zones.
Announcing the AWS European Sovereign Cloud
When we speak to public sector and regulated industry customers in Europe, they share how they are facing incredible complexity and changing dynamics with an evolving sovereignty landscape. Customers tell us they want to adopt the cloud, but are facing increasing regulatory scrutiny over data location, European operational autonomy, and resilience. We’ve learned that these customers are concerned that they will have to choose between the full power of AWS or feature-limited sovereign cloud solutions. We’ve had deep engagements with European regulators, national cybersecurity authorities, and customers to understand how the sovereignty needs of customers can vary based on multiple factors, like location, sensitivity of workloads, and industry. These factors can impact their workload requirements, such as where their data can reside, who can access it, and the controls needed. AWS has a proven track record of innovation to address specialized workloads around the world.
Today, we’re excited to announce our plans to launch the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a new, independent cloud for Europe, designed to help public sector organizations and customers in highly regulated industries meet their evolving sovereignty needs. We’re designing the AWS European Sovereign Cloud to be separate and independent from our existing Regions, with infrastructure located wholly within the European Union (EU), with the same security, availability, and performance our customers get from existing Regions today. To deliver enhanced operational resilience within the EU, only EU residents who are located in the EU will have control of the operations and support for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. As with all current Regions, customers using the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will benefit from the full power of AWS with the same familiar architecture, expansive service portfolio, and APIs that millions of customers use today. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will launch its first AWS Region in Germany available to all European customers.
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be sovereign-by-design, and will be built on more than a decade of experience operating multiple independent clouds for the most critical and restricted workloads. Like existing Regions, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be built for high availability and resiliency, and powered by the AWS Nitro System, to help ensure the confidentiality and integrity of customer data. Customers will have the control and assurance that AWS will not access or use customer data for any purpose without their agreement. AWS gives customers the strongest sovereignty controls among leading cloud providers. For customers with enhanced data residency needs, the AWS European Sovereign cloud is designed to go further and will allow customers to keep all metadata they create (such as the roles, permissions, resource labels, and configurations they use to run AWS) in the EU. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will also be built with separate, in-Region billing and usage metering systems.
Delivering operational autonomy
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will provide customers the capability to meet stringent operational autonomy and data residency requirements. To deliver enhanced data residency and operational resilience within the EU, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud infrastructure will be operated independently from existing AWS Regions. To assure independent operation of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, only personnel who are EU residents, located in the EU, will have control of day-to-day operations, including access to data centers, technical support, and customer service.
We’re taking learnings from our deep engagements with European regulators and national cybersecurity authorities and applying them as we build the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, so that customers using the AWS European Sovereign Cloud can meet their data residency, operational autonomy, and resilience requirements. For example, we are looking forward to continuing to partner with Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
“The development of a European AWS Cloud will make it much easier for many public sector organizations and companies with high data security and data protection requirements to use AWS services. We are aware of the innovative power of modern cloud services and we want to help make them securely available for Germany and Europe. The C5 (Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalogue), which was developed by the BSI, has significantly shaped cybersecurity cloud standards and AWS was in fact the first cloud service provider to receive the BSI’s C5 testate. In this respect, we are very pleased to constructively accompany the local development of an AWS Cloud, which will also contribute to European sovereignty, in terms of security.” — Claudia Plattner, President of the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI)
Control without compromise
Though separate, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will offer the same industry-leading architecture built for security and availability as other AWS Regions. This will include multiple Availability Zones (AZs), infrastructure that is placed in separate and distinct geographic locations, with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ business continuity. Each AZ will have multiple layers of redundant power and networking to provide the highest level of resiliency. All AZs in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be interconnected with fully redundant, dedicated metro fiber, providing high-throughput, low-latency networking between AZs. All traffic between AZs will be encrypted. Customers who need more options to address stringent isolation and in-country data residency needs will be able to use Dedicated Local Zones or AWS Outposts to deploy AWS European Sovereign Cloud infrastructure in locations they select.
Continued AWS investment in Europe
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud represents continued AWS investment in Europe. AWS is committed to innovating to support European values and Europe’s digital future. We drive economic development through investing in infrastructure, jobs, and skills in communities and countries across Europe. We are creating thousands of high-quality jobs and investing billions of euros in European economies. Amazon has created more than 100,000 permanent jobs across the EU. Some of our largest AWS development teams are located in Europe, with key centers in Dublin, Dresden, and Berlin. As part of our continued commitment to contribute to the development of digital skills, we will hire and develop additional local personnel to operate and support the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
Customers, partners, and regulators welcome the AWS European Sovereign Cloud
In the EU, hundreds of thousands of organizations of all sizes and across all industries are using AWS – from start-ups, to small and medium-sized businesses, to the largest enterprises, including telecommunication companies, public sector organizations, educational institutions, and government agencies. Organizations across Europe support the introduction of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
“As the market leader in enterprise application software with strong roots in Europe, SAP and AWS have long collaborated on behalf of customers to accelerate digital transformation around the world. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud provides further opportunities to strengthen our relationship in Europe by enabling us to expand the choices we offer to customers as they move to the cloud. We appreciate the ongoing partnership with AWS, and the new possibilities this investment can bring for our mutual customers across the region.” — Peter Pluim, President, SAP Enterprise Cloud Services and SAP Sovereign Cloud Services.
“The new AWS European Sovereign Cloud can be a game-changer for highly regulated business segments in the European Union. As a leading telecommunications provider in Germany, our digital transformation focuses on innovation, scalability, agility, and resilience to provide our customers with the best services and quality. This will now be paired with the highest levels of data protection and regulatory compliance that AWS delivers, and with a particular focus on digital sovereignty requirements. I am convinced that this new infrastructure offering has the potential to boost cloud adaptation of European companies and accelerate the digital transformation of regulated industries across the EU.” — Mallik Rao, Chief Technology and Information Officer, O2 Telefónica in Germany
“Deutsche Telekom welcomes the announcement of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, which highlights AWS’s dedication to continuous innovation for European businesses. The AWS solution will provide greater choice for organizations when moving regulated workloads to the cloud and additional options to meet evolving digital governance requirements in the EU.” — Greg Hyttenrauch, senior vice president, Global Cloud Services at T-Systems
“Today, we stand at the cusp of a transformative era. The introduction of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud does not merely represent an infrastructural enhancement, it is a paradigm shift. This sophisticated framework will empower Dedalus to offer unparalleled services for storing patient data securely and efficiently in the AWS cloud. We remain committed, without compromise, to serving our European clientele with best-in-class solutions underpinned by trust and technological excellence.” — Andrea Fiumicelli, Chairman, Dedalus
“At de Volksbank, we believe in investing in a better Netherlands. To do this effectively, we need to have access to the latest technologies in order for us to continually be innovating and improving services for our customers. For this reason, we welcome the announcement of the European Sovereign Cloud which will allow European customers to easily demonstrate compliance with evolving regulations while still benefitting from the scale, security, and full suite of AWS services.” — Sebastiaan Kalshoven, Director IT/CTO, de Volksbank
“Eviden welcomes the launch of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. This will help regulated industries and the public sector address the requirements of their sensitive workloads with a fully featured AWS cloud wholly operated in Europe. As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and leader in cybersecurity services in Europe, Eviden has an extensive track record in helping AWS customers formalize and mitigate their sovereignty risks. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will allow Eviden to address a wider range of customers’ sovereignty needs.” — Yannick Tricaud, Head of Southern and Central Europe, Middle East, and Africa, Eviden, Atos Group
“We welcome the commitment of AWS to expand its infrastructure with an independent European cloud. This will give businesses and public sector organizations more choice in meeting digital sovereignty requirements. Cloud services are essential for the digitization of the public administration. With the “German Administration Cloud Strategy” and the “EVB-IT Cloud” contract standard, the foundations for cloud use in the public administration have been established. I am very pleased to work together with AWS to practically and collaboratively implement sovereignty in line with our cloud strategy.” — Dr. Markus Richter, CIO of the German federal government, Federal Ministry of the Interior
Our commitments to our customers
We remain committed to giving our customers control and choices to help meet their evolving digital sovereignty needs. We continue to innovate sovereignty features, controls, and assurances globally with AWS, without compromising on the full power of AWS.
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AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge : Un nouveau cloud souverain, indépendant en Europe
Depuis sa création, Amazon Web Services (AWS) est convaincu qu’il est essentiel que les clients aient le contrôle de leurs données et puissent choisir la manière dont ils les sécurisent et les gèrent dans le cloud. L’année dernière, nous avons annoncé l’AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge, notre engagement à offrir aux clients d’AWS l’ensemble le plus avancé de contrôles et de fonctionnalités de souveraineté disponibles dans le cloud. Nous nous sommes engagés à travailler pour comprendre les besoins et les exigences en constante évolution de nos clients et des régulateurs, et à nous adapter et innover rapidement pour y répondre. Nous nous sommes engagés à développer notre offre afin de permettre à nos clients de répondre à leurs besoins en matière de souveraineté numérique, sans compromis sur les performances, l’innovation, la sécurité ou encore l’étendue du Cloud AWS.
AWS propose l’infrastructure cloud la plus étendue et la plus complète au monde. Dès l’origine, notre approche a été de rendre AWS souverain dès la conception. Nous avons développé des fonctionnalités et des contrôles de protection des données dans le Cloud AWS en nous appuyant sur les retours de clients du secteur financier, de la santé et du secteur public, qui figurent parmi les organisations les plus soucieuses de la sécurité et de la confidentialité des données au monde. Cela a donné lieu à des innovations telles que AWS Nitro System, qui alimente toutes nos instances modernes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) et fournit une solide barrière de sécurité physique et logique pour implémenter les restrictions d’accès afin que personne, y compris les employés d’AWS, ne puisse accéder aux données des clients traitées dans Amazon EC2. La conception de la sécurité du Système Nitro a également été validée de manière indépendante par NCC Group dans un rapport public.
Avec AWS, les clients ont toujours eu le contrôle de l’emplacement de leurs données. En Europe, les clients qui doivent se conformer aux exigences européennes en matière de localisation des données peuvent choisir de déployer leurs données dans l’une de nos huit Régions AWS existantes (Irlande, Francfort, Londres, Paris, Stockholm, Milan, Zurich et Espagne) afin de conserver leurs données en toute sécurité en Europe. Pour exécuter leurs applications sensibles, les clients européens peuvent avoir recours à l’offre de services la plus étendue et la plus complète, de l’intelligence artificielle à l’analyse, du calcul aux bases de données, en passant par l’Internet des objets (IoT), l’apprentissage automatique, les services mobiles et le stockage. Pour soutenir davantage nos clients, nous avons innové pour offrir un plus grand choix en matière de contrôle sur leurs données. Par exemple, nous avons annoncé une transparence et des garanties de sécurité accrues, ainsi que de nouvelles options d’infrastructure dédiée appelées AWS Dedicated Local Zones.
Annonce de l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud Lorsque nous parlons à des clients du secteur public et des industries régulées en Europe, ils nous font part de l’incroyable complexité à laquelle ils sont confrontés dans un contexte de souveraineté en pleine évolution. Les clients nous disent qu’ils souhaitent adopter le cloud, mais qu’ils sont confrontés à des exigences réglementaires croissantes en matière de localisation des données, d’autonomie opérationnelle européenne et de résilience. Nous entendons que ces clients craignent de devoir choisir entre la pleine puissance d’AWS et des solutions de cloud souverain aux fonctionnalités limitées. Nous avons eu des contacts approfondis avec les régulateurs européens, les autorités nationales de cybersécurité et les clients afin de comprendre comment ces besoins de souveraineté peuvent varier en fonction de multiples facteurs tels que la localisation, la sensibilité des applications et le secteur d’activité. Ces facteurs peuvent avoir une incidence sur leurs exigences, comme l’endroit où leurs données peuvent être localisées, les personnes autorisées à y accéder et les contrôles nécessaires. AWS a fait ses preuves en matière d’innovation pour les applications spécialisées dans le monde entier.
Aujourd’hui, nous sommes heureux d’annoncer le lancement de l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud, un nouveau cloud indépendant pour l’Europe, conçu pour aider les organisations du secteur public et les clients des industries régulées à répondre à leurs besoins évolutifs en matière de souveraineté. Nous concevons l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud de manière à ce qu’il soit distinct et indépendant de nos Régions existantes, avec une infrastructure entièrement située dans l’Union européenne (UE), avec les mêmes niveaux de sécurité, de disponibilité et de performance que ceux dont bénéficient nos clients aujourd’hui dans les Régions existantes. Pour offrir une résilience opérationnelle accrue au sein de l’UE, seuls des résidents de l’UE qui se trouvent dans l’UE auront le contrôle sur l’exploitation et le support de l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Comme dans toutes les Régions existantes, les clients utilisant l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud bénéficieront de toute la puissance d’AWS avec la même architecture à laquelle ils sont habitués, le même portefeuille de services étendu et les mêmes API que ceux utilisés par des millions de clients aujourd’hui. L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud lancera sa première Région AWS en Allemagne, disponible pour tous les clients européens.
L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud sera souverain dès la conception et s’appuiera sur plus d’une décennie d’expérience dans l’exploitation de clouds indépendants pour les applications les plus critiques et les plus sensibles. À l’instar des Régions existantes, l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud sera conçu pour offrir une haute disponibilité et un haut niveau de résilience, et sera basé sur le Système AWS Nitro afin de garantir la confidentialité et l’intégrité des données des clients. Les clients auront le contrôle de leurs données et l’assurance qu’AWS n’y accèdera pas, ni ne les utilisera à aucune fin sans leur accord. AWS offre à ses clients les contrôles de souveraineté les plus puissants parmi les principaux fournisseurs de cloud. Pour les clients ayant des besoins accrus en matière de localisation des données, l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud est conçu pour aller plus loin et permettra aux clients de conserver toutes les métadonnées qu’ils créent (telles que les rôles de compte, les autorisations, les étiquettes de données et les configurations qu’ils utilisent au sein d’AWS) dans l’UE. L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud sera également doté de systèmes de facturation et de mesure de l’utilisation distincts et propres.
Apporter l’autonomie opérationnelle L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud permettra aux clients de répondre à des exigences strictes en matière d’autonomie opérationnelle et de localisation des données. Pour améliorer la localisation des données et la résilience opérationnelle au sein de l’UE, l’infrastructure de l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud sera exploitée indépendamment des Régions AWS existantes. Afin de garantir le fonctionnement indépendant de l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud, seul le personnel résidant de l’UE et situé dans l’UE contrôlera les opérations quotidiennes, y compris l’accès aux centres de données, l’assistance technique et le service client.
Nous tirons les enseignements de nos échanges approfondis auprès des régulateurs européens et des autorités nationales de cybersécurité et les appliquons à la création de l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud, afin que les clients qui l’utilisent puissent répondre à leurs exigences en matière de localisation des données, d’autonomie opérationnelle et de résilience. Par exemple, nous nous réjouissons de poursuivre notre partenariat avec l’Office fédéral allemand de la sécurité de l’information (BSI).
« Le développement d’un cloud AWS européen facilitera grandement l’utilisation des services AWS pour de nombreuses organisations du secteur public et des entreprises ayant des exigences élevées en matière de sécurité et de protection des données. Nous sommes conscients du pouvoir d’innovation des services cloud modernes et nous voulons contribuer à les rendre disponibles en toute sécurité pour l’Allemagne et l’Europe. Le C5 (Catalogue des critères de conformité du cloud computing), développé par le BSI, a considérablement façonné les normes de cybersécurité dans le cloud et AWS a été en fait le premier fournisseur de services cloud à recevoir la certification C5 du BSI. À cet égard, nous sommes très heureux d’accompagner de manière constructive le développement local d’un cloud AWS, qui contribuera également à la souveraineté européenne en termes de sécurité ». — Claudia Plattner, Présidente de l’Office fédéral allemand de la sécurité de l’information (BSI)
Contrôle sans compromis Bien que distinct, l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud proposera la même architecture à la pointe de l’industrie, conçue pour offrir la même sécurité et la même disponibilité que les autres Régions AWS. Cela inclura plusieurs Zones de Disponibilité (AZ), des infrastructures physiques placées dans des emplacements géographiques séparés et distincts, avec une distance suffisante pour réduire de manière significative le risque qu’un seul événement ait un impact sur la continuité des activités des clients. Chaque AZ disposera de plusieurs couches d’alimentation et de réseau redondantes pour fournir le plus haut niveau de résilience. Toutes les Zones de Disponibilité de l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud seront interconnectées par un réseau métropolitain de fibres dédié entièrement redondant, fournissant un réseau à haut débit et à faible latence entre les Zones de Disponibilité. Tous les échanges entre les AZ seront chiffrés. Les clients recherchant davantage d’options pour répondre à des besoins stricts en matière d’isolement et de localisation des données dans le pays pourront tirer parti des Dedicated Local Zones ou d’AWS Outposts pour déployer l’infrastructure de l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud sur les sites de leur choix.
Un investissement continu d’AWS en Europe L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud s’inscrit dans un investissement continu d’AWS en Europe. AWS s’engage à innover pour soutenir les valeurs européennes et l’avenir numérique de l’Europe.
Nous créons des milliers d’emplois qualifiés et investissons des milliards d’euros dans l’économie européenne. Amazon a créé plus de 100 000 emplois permanents dans l’UE.
Nous favorisons le développement économique en investissant dans les infrastructures, les emplois et les compétences dans les territoires et les pays d’Europe. Certaines des plus grandes équipes de développement d’AWS sont situées en Europe, avec des centres majeurs à Dublin, Dresde et Berlin. Dans le cadre de notre engagement continu à contribuer au développement des compétences numériques, nous recruterons et formerons du personnel local supplémentaire pour exploiter et soutenir l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
Les clients, partenaires et régulateurs accueillent favorablement l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud Dans l’UE, des centaines de milliers d’organisations de toutes tailles et de tous secteurs utilisent AWS, qu’il s’agisse de start-ups, de petites et moyennes entreprises ou de grandes entreprises, y compris des sociétés de télécommunications, des organisations du secteur public, des établissements d’enseignement ou des agences gouvernementales. Des organisations de toute l’Europe accueillent favorablement l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
« En tant que leader du marché des logiciels de gestion d’entreprise fortement ancré en Europe, SAP collabore depuis longtemps avec AWS pour le compte de ses clients, afin d’accélérer la transformation numérique dans le monde entier. L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud offre de nouvelles opportunités de renforcer notre relation en Europe en nous permettant d’élargir les choix que nous offrons aux clients lorsqu’ils passent au cloud. Nous apprécions le partenariat en cours avec AWS, et les nouvelles possibilités que cet investissement peut apporter à nos clients mutuels dans toute la région. » — Peter Pluim, Président, SAP Enterprise Cloud Services and SAP Sovereign Cloud Services.
« Le nouvel AWS European Sovereign Cloud peut changer la donne pour les secteurs d’activité très réglementés de l’Union européenne. En tant que fournisseur de télécommunications de premier plan en Allemagne, notre transformation numérique se concentre sur l’innovation, l’évolutivité, l’agilité et la résilience afin de fournir à nos clients les meilleurs services et la meilleure qualité. Cela sera désormais associé aux plus hauts niveaux de protection des données et de conformité réglementaire qu’offre AWS, avec un accent particulier sur les exigences de souveraineté numérique. Je suis convaincu que cette nouvelle offre d’infrastructure a le potentiel de stimuler l’adaptation au cloud des entreprises européennes et d’accélérer la transformation numérique des industries réglementées à travers l’UE. » — Mallik Rao, Chief Technology and Information Officer, O2 Telefónica, Allemagne
« Deutsche Telekom se réjouit de l’annonce de l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud, qui souligne la volonté d’AWS d’innover en permanence pour les entreprises européennes. La solution d’AWS offrira un plus grand choix aux organisations lorsqu’elles migreront des applications réglementées vers le cloud, ainsi que des options supplémentaires pour répondre à l’évolution des exigences en matière de gouvernance numérique dans l’UE. » — Greg Hyttenrauch, vice-président senior, Global Cloud Services chez T-Systems
« Aujourd’hui, nous sommes à l’aube d’une ère de transformation. Le lancement de l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud ne représente pas seulement une amélioration de l’infrastructure, c’est un changement de paradigme. Ce cadre sophistiqué permettra à Dedalus d’offrir des services inégalés pour le stockage sécurisé et efficace des données des patients dans le cloud AWS. Nous restons engagés, sans compromis, à servir notre clientèle européenne avec les meilleures solutions de leur catégorie, étayées par la confiance et l’excellence technologique ». — Andrea Fiumicelli, Chairman at Dedalus
« À de Volksbank, nous croyons qu’il faut investir dans l’avenir des Pays-Bas. Pour y parvenir efficacement, nous devons avoir accès aux technologies les plus récentes afin d’innover en permanence et d’améliorer les services offerts à nos clients. C’est pourquoi nous nous réjouissons de l’annonce de l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud, qui permettra aux clients européens de démontrer facilement leur conformité aux réglementations en constante évolution tout en bénéficiant de l’étendue, de la sécurité et de la suite complète de services AWS ». — Sebastiaan Kalshoven, Director IT/CTO, de Volksbank
« Eviden se réjouit du lancement de l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Celui-ci aidera les industries réglementées et le secteur public à satisfaire leurs exigences pour les applications les plus sensibles, grâce à un Cloud AWS doté de toutes ses fonctionnalités et entièrement opéré en Europe. En tant que partenaire AWS Premier Tier Services et leader des services de cybersécurité en Europe, Eviden a une longue expérience dans l’accompagnement de clients AWS pour formaliser et maîtriser leurs risques en termes de souveraineté. L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud permettra à Eviden de répondre à un plus grand nombre de besoins de ses clients en matière de souveraineté ». — Yannick Tricaud, Head of Southern and Central Europe, Middle East and Africa, Eviden, Atos Group
« Nous saluons l’engagement d’AWS d’étendre son infrastructure avec un cloud européen indépendant. Les entreprises et les organisations du secteur public auront ainsi plus de choix pour répondre aux exigences de souveraineté numérique. Les services cloud sont essentiels pour la numérisation de l’administration publique. La “stratégie de l’administration allemande en matière de cloud” et la norme contractuelle “EVB-IT Cloud” ont constitué les bases de l’utilisation du cloud dans l’administration publique. Je suis très heureux de travailler avec AWS pour mettre en œuvre de manière pratique et collaborative la souveraineté, conformément à notre stratégie cloud. » — Markus Richter, DSI du gouvernement fédéral allemand, ministère fédéral de l’Intérieur.
Nos engagements envers nos clients Nous restons déterminés à donner à nos clients le contrôle et les choix nécessaires pour répondre à l’évolution de leurs besoins en matière de souveraineté numérique. Nous continuons d’innover en matière de fonctionnalités, de contrôles et de garanties de souveraineté au niveau mondial au sein d’AWS, tout en fournissant sans compromis et sans restriction la pleine puissance d’AWS.
AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge: Ankündigung der neuen, unabhängigen AWS European Sovereign Cloud
Amazon Web Services (AWS) war immer der Meinung, dass es wichtig ist, dass Kunden die volle Kontrolle über ihre Daten haben. Kunden sollen die Wahl haben, wie sie diese Daten in der Cloud absichern und verwalten.
Letztes Jahr haben wir unseren „AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge“ vorgestellt: Unser Versprechen, allen AWS-Kunden ohne Kompromisse die fortschrittlichsten Steuerungsmöglichkeiten für Souveränitätsanforderungen und Funktionen in der Cloud anzubieten. Wir haben uns dazu verpflichtet, die sich wandelnden Anforderungen von Kunden und Aufsichtsbehörden zu verstehen und sie mit innovativen Angeboten zu adressieren. Wir bauen unser Angebot so aus, dass Kunden ihre Bedürfnisse an digitale Souveränität erfüllen können, ohne Kompromisse bei der Leistungsfähigkeit, Innovationskraft, Sicherheit und Skalierbarkeit der AWS-Cloud einzugehen.
AWS bietet die größte und umfassendste Cloud-Infrastruktur weltweit. Von Anfang an haben wir bei der AWS-Cloud einen „sovereign-by-design“-Ansatz verfolgt. Wir haben mit Hilfe von Kunden aus besonders regulierten Branchen, wie z.B. Finanzdienstleistungen, Gesundheit, Staat und Verwaltung, Funktionen und Steuerungsmöglichkeiten für Datenschutz und Datensicherheit entwickelt. Dieses Vorgehen hat zu Innovationen wie dem AWS Nitro System geführt, das heute die Grundlage für alle modernen Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Instanzen und Confidential Computing auf AWS bildet. AWS Nitro setzt auf eine starke physikalische und logische Sicherheitsabgrenzung und realisiert damit Zugriffsbeschränkungen, die unautorisierte Zugriffe auf Kundendaten in EC2 unmöglich machen – das gilt auch für AWS-Personal. Die NCC Group hat das Sicherheitsdesign von AWS Nitro im Rahmen einer unabhängigen Untersuchung in einem öffentlichen Bericht validiert.
Mit AWS hatten und haben Kunden stets die Kontrolle über den Speicherort ihrer Daten. Kunden, die spezifische europäische Vorgaben zum Ort der Datenverarbeitung einhalten müssen, haben die Wahl, ihre Daten in jeder unserer bestehenden acht AWS-Regionen (Frankfurt, Irland, London, Mailand, Paris, Stockholm, Spanien und Zürich) zu verarbeiten und sicher innerhalb Europas zu speichern. Europäische Kunden können ihre kritischen Workloads auf Basis des weltweit umfangreichsten und am weitesten verbreiteten Portfolios an Diensten betreiben – dazu zählen AI, Analytics, Compute, Datenbanken, Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning (ML), Mobile Services und Storage. Wir haben Innovationen in den Bereichen Datenverwaltung und Kontrolle realisiert, um unsere Kunden besser zu unterstützen. Zum Beispiel haben wir weitergehende Transparenz und zusätzliche Zusicherungen sowie neue Optionen für dedizierte Infrastruktur mit AWS Dedicated Local Zones angekündigt.
Ankündigung der AWS European Sovereign Cloud Kunden aus dem öffentlichen Sektor und aus regulierten Industrien in Europa berichten uns immer wieder, mit welcher Komplexität und Dynamik sie im Bereich Souveränität konfrontiert werden. Wir hören von unseren Kunden, dass sie die Cloud nutzen möchten, aber gleichzeitig zusätzliche Anforderungen im Zusammenhang mit dem Ort der Datenverarbeitung, der betrieblichen Autonomie und der operativen Souveränität erfüllen müssen.
Kunden befürchten, dass sie sich zwischen der vollen Leistung von AWS und souveränen Cloud-Lösungen mit eingeschränkter Funktion entscheiden müssen. Wir haben intensiv mit Aufsichts- und Cybersicherheitsbehörden sowie Kunden aus Deutschland und anderen europäischen Ländern zusammengearbeitet, um zu verstehen, wie Souveränitätsbedürfnisse aufgrund verschiedener Faktoren wie Standort, Klassifikation der Workloads und Branche variieren können. Diese Faktoren können sich auf Workload-Anforderungen auswirken, z. B. darauf, wo sich diese Daten befinden dürfen, wer darauf zugreifen kann und welche Steuerungsmöglichkeiten erforderlich sind. AWS hat eine nachgewiesene Erfolgsbilanz insbesondere für innovative Lösungen zur Verarbeitung spezialisierter Workloads auf der ganzen Welt.
Wir freuen uns, heute die AWS European Sovereign Cloud ankündigen zu können: Eine neue, unabhängige Cloud für Europa. Sie soll Kunden aus dem öffentlichen Sektor und stark regulierten Industrien (z.B. Betreiber kritischer Infrastrukturen („KRITIS“)) dabei helfen, spezifische gesetzliche Anforderungen an den Ort der Datenverarbeitung und den Betrieb der Cloud zu erfüllen. Die AWS European Sovereign Cloud wird sich in der Europäischen Union (EU) befinden und dort betrieben. Sie wird physisch und logisch von den bestehenden AWS-Regionen getrennt sein und dieselbe Sicherheit, Verfügbarkeit und Leistung wie die bestehenden AWS-Regionen bieten. Die Kontrolle über den Betrieb und den Support der AWS European Sovereign Cloud wird ausschließlich von AWS-Personal ausgeübt, das in der EU ansässig ist und sich in der EU aufhält.
Wie schon bei den bestehenden AWS-Regionen, werden Kunden, welche die AWS European Sovereign Cloud nutzen, von dem gesamten AWS-Leistungsumfang profitieren. Dazu zählen die gewohnte Architektur, das umfangreiche Service-Portfolio und die APIs, die heute schon von Millionen von Kunden verwendet werden. Die AWS European Sovereign Cloud wird mit ihrer ersten AWS-Region in Deutschland starten und allen Kunden in Europa zur Verfügung stehen.
Die AWS European Sovereign Cloud wird “sovereign-by-design” sein und basiert auf mehr als zehn Jahren Erfahrung beim Betrieb mehrerer unabhängiger Clouds für besonders kritische und vertrauliche Workloads. Wie schon bei unseren bestehenden AWS-Regionen wird die AWS European Sovereign Cloud für Hochverfügbarkeit und Ausfallsicherheit ausgelegt sein und auf dem AWS Nitro System aufbauen, um die Vertraulichkeit und Integrität von Kundendaten sicherzustellen. Kunden haben die Kontrolle und Gewissheit darüber, dass AWS nicht ohne ihr Einverständnis auf Kundendaten zugreift oder sie für andere Zwecke verwendet. Die AWS European Sovereign Cloud ist so gestaltet, dass nicht nur alle Kundendaten, sondern auch alle Metadaten, die durch Kunden angelegt werden (z.B. Rollen, Zugriffsrechte, Labels für Ressourcen und Konfigurationsinformationen), innerhalb der EU verbleiben. Die AWS European Sovereign Cloud verfügt über unabhängige Systeme für das Rechnungswesen und zur Nutzungsmessung.
„Die neue AWS European Sovereign Cloud kann ein Game Changer für stark regulierte Geschäftsbereiche in der Europäischen Union sein. Als führender Telekommunikationsanbieter in Deutschland konzentriert sich unsere digitale Transformation auf Innovation, Skalierbarkeit, Agilität und Resilienz, um unseren Kunden die besten Dienste und die beste Qualität zu bieten. Dies wird nun von AWS mit dem höchsten Datenschutzniveau unter Einhaltung der regulatorischen Anforderungen vereint mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt auf die Anforderungen an digitale Souveränität. Ich bin überzeugt, dass dieses neue Infrastrukturangebot das Potenzial hat, die Cloud-Adaption von europäischen Unternehmen voranzutreiben und die digitale Transformation regulierter Branchen in der EU zu beschleunigen.“ — Mallik Rao, Chief Technology and Information Officer bei O2 Telefónica in Deutschland
Sicherstellung operativer Autonomie Die AWS European Sovereign Cloud bietet Kunden die Möglichkeit, strenge Anforderungen an Betriebsautonomie und den Ort der Datenverarbeitung zu erfüllen. Um eine Datenverarbeitung und operative Souveränität innerhalb der EU zu gewährleisten, wird die AWS European Sovereign Cloud-Infrastruktur unabhängig von bestehenden AWS-Regionen betrieben. Um den unabhängigen Betrieb der AWS European Sovereign Cloud zu gewährleisten, hat nur Personal, das in der EU ansässig ist und sich in der EU aufhält die Kontrolle über den täglichen Betrieb. Dazu zählen der Zugang zu Rechenzentren, der technische Support und der Kundenservice.
Wir nutzen die Erkenntnisse aus unserer intensiven Zusammenarbeit mit Aufsichts- und Cybersicherheitsbehörden in Europa beim Aufbau der AWS European Sovereign Cloud, damit Kunden ihren Anforderungen an die Kontrolle über den Speicher- und Verarbeitungsort ihrer Daten, der betrieblichen Autonomie und der operativen Souveränität gerecht werden können. Wir freuen uns, mit dem Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) auch bei der Umsetzung der AWS European Sovereign Cloud zu kooperieren:
„Der Aufbau einer europäischen AWS-Cloud wird es für viele Behörden und Unternehmen mit hohen Anforderungen an die Datensicherheit und den Datenschutz deutlich leichter machen, die AWS-Services zu nutzen. Wir wissen um die Innovationskraft moderner Cloud-Dienste und wir wollen mithelfen, sie für Deutschland und Europa sicher verfügbar zu machen. Das BSI hat mit dem Kriterienkatalog C5 die Cybersicherheit im Cloud Computing bereits maßgeblich beeinflusst, und tatsächlich war AWS der erste Cloud Service Provider, der das C5-Testat des BSI erhalten hat. Insofern freuen wir uns sehr, den hiesigen Aufbau einer AWS-Cloud, die auch einen Beitrag zur europäischen Souveränität leisten wird, im Hinblick auf die Sicherheit konstruktiv zu begleiten.“ — Claudia Plattner, Präsidentin, deutsches Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI)
Kontrolle ohne Kompromisse Obwohl sie separat betrieben wird, bietet die AWS European Sovereign Cloud dieselbe branchenführende Architektur, die auf Sicherheit und Verfügbarkeit ausgelegt ist wie andere AWS-Regionen. Dazu gehören mehrere Verfügbarkeitszonen (Availability Zones, AZs) – eine Infrastruktur, die sich an verschiedenen voneinander getrennten geografischen Standorten befindet. Diese räumliche Trennung verringert signifikant das Risiko, dass ein Zwischenfall an einem einzelnen Standort den Geschäftsbetrieb des Kunden beeinträchtigt. Jede Verfügbarkeitszone besitzt eine autarke Stromversorgung und Kühlung und verfügt über redundante Netzwerkanbindungen, um ein Höchstmaß an Ausfallsicherheit zu gewährleisten. Zudem zeichnet sich jede Verfügbarkeitszone durch eine hohe physische Sicherheit aus. Alle AZs in der AWS European Sovereign Cloud werden über vollständig redundante, dedizierte Metro-Glasfaser miteinander verbunden und ermöglichen so eine Vernetzung mit hohem Durchsatz und niedriger Latenz zwischen den AZs. Der gesamte Datenverkehr zwischen AZs wird verschlüsselt. Für besonders strikte Anforderungen an die Trennung von Daten und den Ort der Datenverarbeitung innerhalb eines Landes bieten bestehende Angebote wie AWS Dedicated Local Zones oder AWS Outposts zusätzliche Optionen. Damit können Kunden die AWS European Sovereign Cloud Infrastruktur auf selbstgewählte Standorte erweitern.
Kontinuierliche AWS-Investitionen in Deutschland und Europa Mit der AWS European Sovereign Cloud setzt AWS seine Investitionen in Deutschland und Europa fort. AWS entwickelt Innovationen, um europäische Werte und die digitale Zukunft in Deutschland und Europa zu unterstützen. Wir treiben die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung voran, indem wir in Infrastruktur, Arbeitsplätze und Ausbildung in ganz Europa investieren. Wir schaffen Tausende von hochwertigen Arbeitsplätzen und investieren Milliarden von Euro in europäische Volkswirtschaften. Amazon hat mehr als 100.000 dauerhafte Arbeitsplätze innerhalb der EU geschaffen.
„Die deutsche und europäische Wirtschaft befindet sich auf Digitalisierungskurs. Insbesondere der starke deutsche Mittelstand braucht eine souveräne Digitalinfrastruktur, die höchsten Anforderungen genügt, um auch weiterhin wettbewerbsfähig im globalen Markt zu sein. Für unsere digitale Unabhängigkeit ist wichtig, dass Rechenleistungen vor Ort in Deutschland entstehen und in unseren Digitalstandort investiert wird. Wir begrüßen daher die Ankündigung von AWS, die Cloud für Europa in Deutschland anzusiedeln.“ — Stefan Schnorr, Staatssekretär im deutschen Bundesministerium für Digitales und Verkehr
Einige der größten Entwicklungsteams von AWS sind in Deutschland und Europa angesiedelt, mit Standorten in Aachen, Berlin, Dresden, Tübingen und Dublin. Da wir uns verpflichtet fühlen, einen langfristigen Beitrag zur Entwicklung digitaler Kompetenzen zu leisten, wird AWS zusätzliches Personal vor Ort für die AWS European Sovereign Cloud einstellen und ausbilden.
Kunden, Partner und Aufsichtsbehörden begrüßen die AWS European Sovereign Cloud In der EU nutzen Hunderttausende Organisationen aller Größen und Branchen AWS – von Start-ups über kleine und mittlere Unternehmen bis hin zu den größten Unternehmen, einschließlich Telekommunikationsunternehmen, Organisationen des öffentlichen Sektors, Bildungseinrichtungen und Regierungsbehörden. Europaweit unterstützen Organisationen die Einführung der AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Für Kunden wird die AWS European Sovereign Cloud neue Möglichkeiten im Cloudeinsatz eröffnen.
„Wir begrüßen das Engagement von AWS, seine Infrastruktur mit einer unabhängigen europäischen Cloud auszubauen. So erhalten Unternehmen und Organisationen der öffentlichen Hand mehr Auswahlmöglichkeiten bei der Erfüllung der Anforderungen an digitale Souveränität. Cloud-Services sind für die Digitalisierung der öffentlichen Verwaltung unerlässlich. Mit der Deutschen Verwaltungscloud-Strategie und dem Vertragsstandard EVB-IT Cloud wurden die Grundlagen für die Cloud-Nutzung in der Verwaltung geschaffen. Ich freue mich sehr, gemeinsam mit AWS Souveränität im Sinne unserer Cloud-Strategie praktisch und partnerschaftlich umzusetzen.” — Dr. Markus Richter, Staatssekretär im deutschen Bundesministerium des Innern und für Heimat sowie Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Informationstechnik (CIO des Bundes)
„Als Marktführer für Geschäftssoftware mit starken Wurzeln in Europa, arbeitet SAP seit langem im Interesse der Kunden mit AWS zusammen, um die digitale Transformation auf der ganzen Welt zu beschleunigen. Die AWS European Sovereign Cloud bietet weitere Möglichkeiten, unsere Beziehung in Europa zu stärken, indem wir die Möglichkeiten, die wir unseren Kunden beim Wechsel in die Cloud bieten, erweitern können. Wir schätzen die fortlaufende Zusammenarbeit mit AWS und die neuen Möglichkeiten, die diese Investition für unsere gemeinsamen Kunden in der gesamten Region mit sich bringen kann.“ — Peter Pluim, President – SAP Enterprise Cloud Services und SAP Sovereign Cloud Services
„Heute stehen wir an der Schwelle zu einer transformativen Ära. Die Einführung der AWS European Sovereign Cloud stellt nicht nur eine infrastrukturelle Erweiterung dar, sondern ist ein Paradigmenwechsel. Dieses hochentwickelte Framework wird Dedalus in die Lage versetzen, unvergleichliche Dienste für die sichere und effiziente Speicherung von Patientendaten in der AWS-Cloud anzubieten. Wir bleiben kompromisslos dem Ziel verpflichtet, unseren europäischen Kunden erstklassige Lösungen zu bieten, die auf Vertrauen und technologischer Exzellenz basieren.“ — Andrea Fiumicelli, Chairman bei Dedalus
„Die Deutsche Telekom begrüßt die Ankündigung der AWS European Sovereign Cloud, die das Engagement von AWS für fortwährende Innovationen für europäische Unternehmen unterstreicht. Diese AWS-Lösung wird Unternehmen eine noch größere Auswahl bieten, wenn sie kritische Workloads in die AWS-Cloud verlagern, und zusätzliche Optionen zur Erfüllung der sich entwickelnden Anforderungen an die digitale Governance in der EU.” — Greg Hyttenrauch, Senior Vice President, Global Cloud Services bei T-Systems
„Wir begrüßen die AWS European Sovereign Cloud als neues Angebot innerhalb von AWS, um die komplexesten regulatorischen Anforderungen an die Datenresidenz und betrieblichen Erfordernisse in ganz Europa zu adressieren.“ — Bernhard Wagensommer, Vice President Prinect bei der Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG
„Die AWS European Sovereign Cloud wird neue Branchenmaßstäbe setzen und sicherstellen, dass Finanzdienstleistungsunternehmen noch mehr Optionen innerhalb von AWS haben, um die wachsenden Anforderungen an die digitale Souveränität hinsichtlich der Datenresidenz und operativen Autonomie in der EU zu erfüllen.“ — Gerhard Koestler, Chief Information Officer bei Raisin
„Mit einem starken Fokus auf Datenschutz, Sicherheit und regulatorischer Compliance unterstreicht die AWS European Sovereign Cloud das Engagement von AWS, die höchsten Standards für die digitale Souveränität von Finanzdienstleistern zu fördern. Dieser zusätzliche robuste Rahmen ermöglicht es Unternehmen wie unserem, in einer sicheren Umgebung erfolgreich zu sein, in der Daten geschützt sind und die Einhaltung höchster Standards leichter denn je wird.“ — Andreas Schranzhofer, Chief Technology Officer bei Scalable Capital
„Die AWS European Sovereign Cloud ist ein wichtiges, zusätzliches Angebot von AWS, das hochregulierten Branchen, Organisationen der öffentlichen Hand und Regierungsbehörden in Deutschland weitere Optionen bietet, um strengste regulatorische Anforderungen an den Datenschutz in der Cloud noch einfacher umzusetzen. Als AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, AWS Solution Provider und AWS Public Sector Partner beraten und unterstützen wir kritische Infrastrukturen (KRITIS) bei der erfolgreichen Implementierung. Das neue Angebot von AWS ist ein wichtiger Impuls für Innovationen und Digitalisierung in Deutschland.“ — Martin Wibbe, CEO bei Materna
„Als eines der größten deutschen IT-Unternehmen und strategischer AWS-Partner begrüßt msg ausdrücklich die Ankündigung der AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Für uns als Anbieter von Software as a Service (SaaS) und Consulting Advisor für Kunden mit spezifischen Datenschutzanforderungen ermöglicht die Schaffung einer eigenständigen europäischen Cloud, unseren Kunden dabei zu helfen, die Einhaltung sich entwickelnder Vorschriften leichter nachzuweisen. Diese spannende Ankündigung steht im Einklang mit unserer Cloud-Strategie. Wir betrachten dies als Chance, um unsere Partnerschaft mit AWS zu stärken und die Entwicklung der Cloud in Deutschland voranzutreiben.“ — Dr. Jürgen Zehetmaier, CEO von msg
Unsere Verpflichtung gegenüber unseren Kunden Um Kunden bei der Erfüllung der sich wandelnden Souveränitätsanforderungen zu unterstützen, entwickelt AWS fortlaufend innovative Features, Kontrollen und Zusicherungen, ohne die Leistungsfähigkeit der AWS Cloud zu beeinträchtigen.
AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge: Annuncio di un nuovo cloud sovrano e indipendente in Europa
Fin dal primo giorno, abbiamo sempre creduto che fosse essenziale che tutti i clienti avessero il controllo sui propri dati e sulle scelte di come proteggerli e gestirli nel cloud. L’anno scorso abbiamo introdotto l’AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge, il nostro impegno a offrire ai clienti AWS il set più avanzato di controlli e funzionalità di sovranità disponibili nel cloud. Ci siamo impegnati a lavorare per comprendere le esigenze e le necessità in costante evoluzione sia dei clienti che delle autorità di regolamentazione, e per adattarci e innovare rapidamente per soddisfarli. Ci siamo impegnati ad espandere le nostre funzionalità per consentire ai clienti di soddisfare le loro esigenze di sovranità digitale senza compromettere le prestazioni, l’innovazione, la sicurezza o la scalabilità del cloud AWS.
AWS offre l’infrastruttura cloud più grande e completa a livello globale. Il nostro approccio fin dall’inizio è stato quello di rendere il cloud AWS sovrano by design. Abbiamo creato funzionalità e controlli di protezione dei dati nel cloud AWS confrontandoci con i clienti che operano in settori quali i servizi finanziari e l’assistenza sanitaria, che sono in assoluto tra le organizzazioni più attente alla sicurezza e alla privacy dei dati. Ciò ha portato a innovazioni come AWS Nitro System, che alimenta tutte le nostre moderne istanze Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) e fornisce un solido standard di sicurezza fisico e logico-infrastrutturale al fine di imporre restrizioni di accesso in modo che nessuno, compresi i dipendenti AWS, possa accedere ai dati dei clienti in esecuzione in EC2. Il design di sicurezza del sistema Nitro è stato inoltre convalidato in modo indipendente dal gruppo NCC in un report pubblico.
Con AWS i clienti hanno sempre avuto il controllo sulla posizione dei propri dati. I clienti che devono rispettare i requisiti europei di residenza dei dati possono scegliere di distribuire i propri dati in una delle otto regioni AWS esistenti (Irlanda, Francoforte, Londra, Parigi, Stoccolma, Milano, Zurigo e Spagna) per conservare i propri dati in modo sicuro in Europa. Per gestire i propri carichi di lavoro sensibili, i clienti europei possono sfruttare il portafoglio di servizi più ampio e completo, tra cui intelligenza artificiale, analisi ed elaborazione dati, database, Internet of Things (IoT), apprendimento automatico, servizi mobili e storage. Per supportare ulteriormente i clienti, abbiamo introdotto alcune innovazioni per offrire loro maggiore controllo e scelta sulla gestione dei dati. Ad esempio, abbiamo annunciato ulteriore trasparenza e garanzie e nuove opzioni di infrastruttura dedicate con AWS Dedicated Local Zones.
Annuncio AWS European Sovereign Cloud Quando in Europa parliamo con i clienti del settore pubblico e delle industrie regolamentate, riceviamo continue conferme di come si trovano ad affrontare una incredibile complessità e mutevoli dinamiche di un panorama di sovranità in continua evoluzione. I clienti ci dicono che vogliono adottare il cloud, ma si trovano ad affrontare crescenti interventi normativi in relazione alla residenza dei dati, all’autonomia operativa ed alla resilienza europea. Abbiamo appreso che questi clienti temono di dover scegliere tra tutta la potenza di AWS e soluzioni cloud sovrane ma con funzionalità limitate. Abbiamo collaborato intensamente con le autorità di regolamentazione europee, le agenzie nazionali per la sicurezza informatica e i nostri clienti per comprendere come le esigenze di sovranità possano variare in base a molteplici fattori come la residenza, la sensibilità dei carichi di lavoro e il settore. Questi fattori possono influire sui requisiti del carico di lavoro, ad esempio dove possono risiedere i dati, chi può accedervi e i controlli necessari, ed AWS ha una comprovata esperienza di innovazione per affrontare carichi di lavoro specializzati in tutto il mondo.
Oggi siamo lieti di annunciare il nostro programma di lancio dell’AWS European Sovereign Cloud, un nuovo cloud indipendente per l’Europa, progettato per aiutare le organizzazioni del settore pubblico e i clienti in settori altamente regolamentati a soddisfare le loro esigenze di sovranità in continua evoluzione. Stiamo progettando il cloud sovrano europeo AWS in modo che sia separato e indipendente dalle nostre regioni esistenti, con un’infrastruttura situata interamente all’interno dell’Unione Europea (UE), con la stessa sicurezza, disponibilità e prestazioni che i nostri clienti ottengono dalle regioni esistenti oggi. Per garantire una maggiore resilienza operativa all’interno dell’UE, solo i residenti dell’UE che si trovano nell’UE avranno il controllo delle operazioni e il supporto per l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Come per tutte le regioni attuali, i clienti che utilizzeranno l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud trarranno vantaggio da tutta la potenza di AWS con la stessa architettura, un ampio portafoglio di servizi e API che milioni di clienti già utilizzano oggi. L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud lancerà la sua prima regione AWS in Germania, disponibile per tutti i clienti europei.
Il cloud sovrano europeo AWS sarà progettato per garantire l’indipendenza operativa e la resilienza all’interno dell’UE e sarà gestito e supportato solamente da dipendenti AWS che si trovano nell’UE e che vi risiedono. Questo design offrirà ai clienti una scelta aggiuntiva per soddisfare le diverse esigenze di residenza dei dati, autonomia operativa e resilienza. Come in tutte le regioni AWS attuali, i clienti che utilizzano l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud trarranno vantaggio da tutta la potenza di AWS, dalla stessa architettura, dall’ampio portafoglio di servizi e dalle stesse API utilizzate oggi da milioni di clienti. L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud lancerà la sua prima regione in Germania.
Il cloud sovrano europeo AWS sarà sovrano by design e si baserà su oltre un decennio di esperienza nella gestione di più cloud indipendenti per carichi di lavoro critici e soggetti a restrizioni. Come le regioni esistenti, il cloud sovrano europeo AWS sarà progettato per garantire disponibilità e resilienza elevate e sarà alimentato da AWS Nitro System per contribuire a garantire la riservatezza e l’integrità dei dati dei clienti. Clienti che avranno il controllo e la garanzia che AWS non potrà accedere od utilizzare i dati dei clienti per alcuno scopo senza il loro consenso. AWS offre ai clienti i controlli di sovranità più rigorosi tra quelli offerti dai principali cloud provider. Per i clienti con esigenze avanzate di residenza dei dati, il cloud sovrano europeo AWS è progettato per andare oltre, e consentirà ai clienti di conservare tutti i metadati che creano (come le etichette dei dati, le categorie, i ruoli degli account e le configurazioni che utilizzano per eseguire AWS) nell’UE. L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud sarà inoltre realizzato con sistemi separati di fatturazione e misurazione dell’utilizzo a livello regionale.
Garantire autonomia operativa L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud fornirà ai clienti la capacità di soddisfare rigorosi requisiti di autonomia operativa e residenza dei dati. Per offrire un maggiore controllo sulla residenza dei dati e sulla resilienza operativa all’interno dell’UE, l’infrastruttura AWS European Sovereign Cloud sarà gestita indipendentemente dalle regioni AWS esistenti. Per garantire il funzionamento indipendente dell’AWS European Sovereign Cloud, solo il personale residente nell’UE, situato nell’UE, avrà il controllo delle operazioni quotidiane, compreso l’accesso ai data center, il supporto tecnico e il servizio clienti.
Stiamo attingendo alle nostre profonde collaborazioni con le autorità di regolamentazione europee e le agenzie nazionali per la sicurezza informatica per applicarle nella realizzazione del cloud sovrano europeo AWS, di modo che i clienti che utilizzano AWS European Sovereign Cloud possano soddisfare i loro requisiti di residenza dei dati, di controllo, di autonomia operativa e resilienza. Ne è un esempio la stretta collaborazione con l’Ufficio federale tedesco per la sicurezza delle informazioni (BSI).
“Lo sviluppo di un cloud AWS europeo renderà molto più semplice l’utilizzo dei servizi AWS per molte organizzazioni del settore pubblico e per aziende con elevati requisiti di sicurezza e protezione dei dati. Siamo consapevoli della forza innovativa dei moderni servizi cloud e vogliamo contribuire a renderli disponibili in modo sicuro per la Germania e l’Europa. Il C5 (Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalogue), sviluppato da BSI, ha plasmato in modo significativo gli standard cloud di sicurezza informatica e AWS è stato infatti il primo fornitore di servizi cloud a ricevere l’attestato C5 di BSI. In questo senso, siamo molto lieti di accompagnare in modo costruttivo lo sviluppo locale di un Cloud AWS, che contribuirà anche alla sovranità europea, in termini di sicurezza”. — Claudia Plattner, Presidente dell’Ufficio federale tedesco per la sicurezza informatica (BSI)
Controllo senza compromessi Sebbene separato, l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud offrirà la stessa architettura leader del settore creata per la sicurezza e la disponibilità delle altre regioni AWS. Ciò includerà multiple zone di disponibilità (AZ) e un’infrastruttura collocata in aree geografiche separate e distinte, con una distanza sufficiente a ridurre in modo significativo il rischio che un singolo evento influisca sulla continuità aziendale dei clienti. Ogni AZ disporrà di più livelli di alimentazione e rete ridondanti per fornire il massimo livello di resilienza. Tutte le AZ del cloud sovrano europeo AWS saranno interconnesse con fibra metropolitana dedicata e completamente ridondata, che fornirà reti ad alta velocità e bassa latenza tra le AZ. Tutto il traffico tra le AZ sarà crittografato. I clienti che necessitano di più opzioni per far fronte ai rigorosi requisiti di isolamento e residenza dei dati all’interno del Paese potranno sfruttare le zone locali dedicate o AWS Outposts per distribuire l’infrastruttura AWS European Sovereign Cloud nelle località da loro selezionate.
Continui investimenti di AWS in Europa L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud è parte del continuo impegno ad investire in Europa di AWS. AWS si impegna a innovare per sostenere i valori europei e il futuro digitale dell’Europa. Promuoviamo lo sviluppo economico investendo in infrastrutture, posti di lavoro e competenze nelle comunità e nei paesi di tutta Europa. Stiamo creando migliaia di posti di lavoro di alta qualità e investendo miliardi di euro nelle economie europee. Amazon ha creato più di 100.000 posti di lavoro permanenti in tutta l’UE. Alcuni dei nostri team di sviluppo AWS più grandi si trovano in Europa, con centri di eccellenza a Dublino, Dresda e Berlino. Nell’ambito del nostro continuo impegno a contribuire allo sviluppo delle competenze digitali, assumeremo e svilupperemo ulteriore personale locale per gestire e supportare l’AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
Clienti, partner e autorità di regolamentazione accolgono con favore il cloud sovrano europeo AWS Nell’UE, centinaia di migliaia di organizzazioni di tutte le dimensioni e in tutti i settori utilizzano AWS, dalle start-up alle piccole e medie imprese, alle grandi imprese, alle società di telecomunicazioni, alle organizzazioni del settore pubblico, agli istituti di istruzione e alle agenzie governative. Organizzazioni di tutta Europa sostengono l’introduzione dell’AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
“In qualità di leader di mercato nel software applicativo aziendale con forti radici in Europa, SAP collabora da tempo con AWS per conto dei clienti per accelerare la trasformazione digitale in tutto il mondo. L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud offre ulteriori opportunità per rafforzare le nostre relazioni in Europa consentendoci di ampliare le scelte che offriamo ai clienti mentre passano al cloud. Apprezziamo la partnership continua con AWS e le nuove possibilità che questo investimento può offrire ai nostri comuni clienti in tutta la regione.” — Peter Pluim, Presidente, SAP Enterprise Cloud Services e SAP Sovereign Cloud Services
“Il nuovo AWS European Sovereign Cloud può rappresentare un punto di svolta per i segmenti di business altamente regolamentati nell’Unione Europea. In qualità di fornitore leader di telecomunicazioni in Germania, la nostra trasformazione digitale si concentra su innovazione, scalabilità, agilità e resilienza per fornire ai nostri clienti i migliori servizi e la migliore qualità. Ciò sarà ora abbinato ai più alti livelli di protezione dei dati e conformità normativa offerti da AWS e con un’attenzione particolare ai requisiti di sovranità digitale. Sono convinto che questa nuova offerta di infrastrutture abbia il potenziale per stimolare l’adozione del cloud da parte delle aziende europee e accelerare la trasformazione digitale delle industrie regolamentate in tutta l’UE”. — Mallik Rao, Chief Technology & Information Officer (CTIO) presso O2 Telefónica in Germania
“Deutsche Telekom accoglie l’annuncio dell’AWS European Sovereign Cloud, che evidenzia l’impegno di AWS a un’innovazione continua nel mercato europeo. Questa soluzione AWS offrirà opportunità important per le aziende e le organizzazioni nell’ambito della migrazione regolamentata sul cloud e opzioni addizionali per soddisfare i requisiti di sovranità digitale europei in continua evoluzione”. — Greg Hyttenrauch, Senior Vice President, Global Cloud Services presso T-Systems
“Oggi siamo al culmine di un’era di trasformazione. L’introduzione dell’AWS European Sovereign Cloud non rappresenta semplicemente un miglioramento infrastrutturale, è un cambio di paradigma. Questo sofisticato framework consentirà a Dedalus di offrire servizi senza precedenti per l’archiviazione dei dati dei pazienti in modo sicuro ed efficiente nel cloud AWS. Rimaniamo impegnati, senza compromessi, a servire la nostra clientela europea con soluzioni best-in-class sostenute da fiducia ed eccellenza tecnologica”. — Andrea Fiumicelli, Presidente di Dedalus
“Noi di de Volksbank crediamo nell’investire per migliorare i Paesi Bassi. Ma perché questo avvenga in modo efficace, dobbiamo avere accesso alle tecnologie più recenti per poter innovare e migliorare continuamente i servizi per i nostri clienti. Per questo motivo, accogliamo con favore l’annuncio dello European Sovereign Cloud che consentirà ai clienti europei di rispettare facilmente la conformità alle normative in evoluzione, beneficiando comunque della scalabilità, della sicurezza e della suite completa dei servizi AWS”. — Sebastiaan Kalshoven, Direttore IT/CTO della Volksbank
“Eviden accoglie con favore il lancio dell’AWS European Sovereign Cloud, che aiuterà le industrie regolamentate e il settore pubblico a soddisfare i requisiti dei loro carichi di lavoro sensibili con un cloud AWS completo e interamente gestito in Europa. In qualità di partner AWS Premier Tier Services e leader nei servizi di sicurezza informatica in Europa, Eviden ha una vasta esperienza nell’aiutare i clienti AWS a formalizzare e mitigare i rischi di sovranità. L’AWS European Sovereign Cloud consentirà a Eviden di soddisfare una gamma più ampia di esigenze di sovranità dei clienti”. — Yannick Tricaud, Responsabile Europa meridionale e centrale, Medio Oriente e Africa, Eviden, Gruppo Atos
“Accogliamo con favore l’impegno di AWS di espandere la propria infrastruttura con un cloud europeo indipendente. Ciò offrirà alle imprese e alle organizzazioni del settore pubblico una scelta più ampia nel soddisfare i requisiti di sovranità digitale. I servizi cloud sono essenziali per la digitalizzazione della pubblica amministrazione. Con l’” Strategia cloud per l’Amministrazione tedesca” e lo standard contrattuale “EVB-IT Cloud”, sono state gettate le basi per l’utilizzo del cloud nella pubblica amministrazione. Sono molto lieto di collaborare con AWS per implementare in modo pratico e collaborativo la sovranità in linea con la nostra strategia cloud.” — Dr. Markus Richter, CIO del governo federale tedesco, Ministero federale degli interni
I nostri impegni nei confronti dei nostri clienti Manteniamo il nostro impegno a fornire ai nostri clienti il controllo e la possibilità di scelta per contribuire a soddisfare le loro esigenze in continua evoluzione in materia di sovranità digitale. Continueremo a innovare le funzionalità, i controlli e le garanzie di sovranità del dato all’interno del cloud AWS globale e a fornirli senza compromessi sfruttando tutta la potenza di AWS.
Compromiso de Soberanía Digital de AWS: anuncio de una nueva nube soberana independiente en la Unión Europea
Desde el primer día, en Amazon Web Services (AWS) siempre hemos creído que es esencial que los clientes tengan el control sobre sus datos y capacidad para proteger y gestionar los mismos en la nube. El año pasado, anunciamos el Compromiso de Soberanía Digital de AWS, nuestra garantía de que ofrecemos a todos los clientes de AWS los controles y funcionalidades de soberanía más avanzados que estén disponibles en la nube. Nos comprometimos a trabajar para comprender las necesidades y los requisitos cambiantes tanto de los clientes como de los reguladores, y a adaptarnos e innovar rápidamente para satisfacerlos. Asimismo, nos comprometimos a ampliar nuestras capacidades para permitir a los clientes satisfacer sus necesidades de soberanía digital sin reducir el rendimiento, la innovación, la seguridad o la escalabilidad de la nube de AWS.
AWS ofrece la infraestructura de nube más amplia y completa del mundo. Nuestro enfoque desde el principio ha sido hacer que AWS sea una nube soberana por diseño. Creamos funcionalidades y controles de protección de datos en la nube de AWS teniendo en cuenta las aportaciones de clientes de sectores como los servicios financieros, sanidad y entidades gubernamentales, que se encuentran entre los más preocupados por la seguridad y la privacidad de los datos en el mundo. Esto ha dado lugar a innovaciones como el sistema Nitro de AWS, que impulsa todas nuestras instancias de Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) y proporciona un límite de seguridad físico y lógico sólido para imponer restricciones de acceso, de modo que nadie, incluidos los empleados de AWS, pueda acceder a los datos de los clientes que se ejecutan en Amazon EC2. El diseño de seguridad del sistema Nitro también ha sido validado de forma independiente por el Grupo NCC en un informe público.
Con AWS, los clientes siempre han tenido el control sobre la ubicación de sus datos. En Europa, los clientes que deben cumplir con los requisitos de residencia de datos europeos tienen la opción de implementar sus datos en cualquiera de las ocho Regiones de AWS existentes (Irlanda, Frankfurt, Londres, París, Estocolmo, Milán, Zúrich y España) para mantener sus datos de forma segura en Europa. Para ejecutar sus cargas de trabajo sensibles, los clientes europeos pueden aprovechar la cartera de servicios más amplia y completa, que incluye inteligencia artificial, análisis, computación, bases de datos, Internet de las cosas (IoT), aprendizaje automático, servicios móviles y almacenamiento. Para apoyar aún más a los clientes, hemos innovado ofreciendo más control y opciones sobre sus datos. Por ejemplo, anunciamos una mayor transparencia y garantías, y nuevas opciones de infraestructura de uso exclusivo con Zonas Locales Dedicadas de AWS.
Anunciamos AWS European Sovereign Cloud Cuando hablamos con clientes del sector público y de sectores regulados en Europa, nos comparten cómo se enfrentan a una gran complejidad y a una dinámica cambiante en el panorama de la soberanía, que está en constante evolución. Los clientes nos dicen que quieren adoptar la nube, pero se enfrentan a un creciente escrutinio regulatorio en relación con la ubicación de los datos, la autonomía operativa europea y la resiliencia. Sabemos que a estos clientes les preocupa tener que elegir entre toda la potencia de AWS o soluciones de nube soberana con funciones limitadas. Hemos mantenido conversaciones muy provechosas con los reguladores europeos, las autoridades nacionales de ciberseguridad y los clientes para entender cómo las necesidades de soberanía de los clientes pueden variar en función de diferentes factores, como la ubicación, la sensibilidad de las cargas de trabajo y el sector. Estos factores pueden impactar en los requisitos aplicables a sus cargas de trabajo, como dónde pueden residir sus datos, quién puede acceder a ellos y los controles necesarios. AWS tiene un historial comprobado de innovación para abordar cargas de trabajo sensibles o especiales en todo el mundo.
Hoy nos complace anunciar nuestros planes de lanzar la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS, una nueva nube independiente para la Unión Europea, diseñada para ayudar a las organizaciones del sector público y a los clientes de sectores altamente regulados a satisfacer sus necesidades de soberanía en constante evolución. Estamos diseñando la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS para que sea independiente y separada de nuestras Regiones actuales, con una infraestructura ubicada íntegramente dentro de la Unión Europea y con la misma seguridad, disponibilidad y rendimiento que nuestros clientes obtienen en las Regiones actuales. Para ofrecer una mayor resiliencia operativa dentro de la UE, solo los residentes de la UE que se encuentren en la UE, tendrán el control de las operaciones y el soporte de la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS. Como ocurre con todas las Regiones actuales, los clientes que utilicen la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS se beneficiarán de toda la potencia de AWS con la misma arquitectura conocida, una amplia cartera de servicios y las APIs que utilizan millones de clientes en la actualidad. La Nube Soberana Europea de AWS lanzará su primera Región de AWS en Alemania disponible para todos los clientes en Europa.
La Nube Soberana Europea de AWS será soberana por diseño y se basará en más de una década de experiencia en la gestión de múltiples nubes independientes para las cargas de trabajo más críticas y restringidas. Al igual que las Regiones existentes, la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS se diseñará para ofrecer una alta disponibilidad y resiliencia, y contará con la tecnología del sistema Nitro de AWS, a fin de garantizar la confidencialidad e integridad de los datos de los clientes. Los clientes tendrán el control y la seguridad de que AWS no accederá a los datos de los clientes ni los utilizará para ningún propósito sin su consentimiento. AWS ofrece a los clientes los controles de soberanía más estrictos entre los principales proveedores de servicios en la nube. Para los clientes con necesidades de residencia de datos mejoradas, la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS está diseñada para ir más allá y permitirá a los clientes conservar todos los metadatos que crean (como funciones, permisos, etiquetas de recursos y configuraciones), las funciones de las cuentas y las configuraciones que utilizan para ejecutar AWS) dentro de la UE. La Nube Soberana Europea de AWS también se construirá con sistemas independientes de facturación y medición del uso dentro de la Región.
Ofreciendo autonomía operativa La Nube Soberana Europea de AWS proporcionará a los clientes la capacidad de cumplir con los estrictos requisitos de autonomía operativa y residencia de datos que sean de aplicación a cada cliente. Para proporcionar una mejor residencia de los datos y resiliencia operativa en la UE, la infraestructura de la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS se gestionará de forma independiente del resto de las Regiones de AWS existentes. Para garantizar el funcionamiento independiente de la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS, solo el personal residente en la UE y ubicado en la UE tendrá el control de las operaciones diarias, incluido el acceso a los centros de datos, el soporte técnico y el servicio de atención al cliente.
Estamos aprendiendo de nuestras intensas conversaciones con los reguladores europeos y las autoridades nacionales de ciberseguridad, aplicando estos aprendizajes a medida que construimos la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS, de modo que los clientes que la utilicen puedan cumplir sus requisitos de residencia, autonomía operativa y resiliencia de los datos. Por ejemplo, esperamos continuar colaborando con la Oficina Federal de Seguridad de la Información (BSI) de Alemania.
«El desarrollo de una nube europea de AWS facilitará mucho el uso de los servicios de AWS a muchas organizaciones y empresas del sector público con altos requisitos de seguridad y protección de datos. Somos conscientes del poder innovador de los servicios en la nube modernos y queremos contribuir a que estén disponibles de forma segura en Alemania y Europa. El C5 (Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalogue), desarrollado por la BSI, ha influido considerablemente en los estándares de ciberseguridad en la nube y, de hecho, AWS fue el primer proveedor de servicios en la nube en recibir el certificado C5 de la BSI. En este sentido, nos complace acompañar de manera constructiva el desarrollo local de una nube de AWS, que también contribuirá a la soberanía europea en términos de seguridad». — Claudia Plattner, presidenta de la Oficina Federal Alemana de Seguridad de la Información (BSI)
Control sin concesiones A pesar de ser independiente, la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS ofrecerá la misma arquitectura líder en el sector que otras Regiones de AWS, creada para garantizar la seguridad y la disponibilidad. Esto incluirá varias Zonas de Disponibilidad, una infraestructura distribuida en ubicaciones geográficas separadas y distintas, con una distancia suficiente para reducir el riesgo de que un incidente afecte a la continuidad del negocio de los clientes. Cada Zona de Disponibilidad tendrá varias fuentes de alimentación eléctrica y redes redundantes para ofrecer el máximo nivel de resiliencia. Todas las Zonas de Disponibilidad de la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS estarán interconectadas mediante fibra de uso exclusivo y totalmente redundante, lo que proporcionará una red de alto rendimiento y baja latencia entre las Zonas de Disponibilidad. Todo el tráfico entre las Zonas de Disponibilidad se encriptará. Los clientes que necesiten más opciones para abordar estrictas necesidades de aislamiento y residencia de datos en el país podrán utilizar las Zonas Locales Dedicadas o AWS Outposts para implementar la infraestructura de Nube Soberana Europea de AWS en las ubicaciones que elijan.
Inversión continua de AWS en Europa La Nube Soberana Europea de AWS representa una inversión continua de AWS en la UE. AWS se compromete a innovar para respaldar los valores y el futuro digital de la Unión Europea. Impulsamos el desarrollo económico mediante la inversión en infraestructura, empleos y habilidades en comunidades y países de toda Europa. Estamos creando miles de puestos de trabajo de alta calidad e invirtiendo miles de millones de euros en las economías europeas. Amazon ha creado más de 100 000 puestos de trabajo permanentes en toda la UE. Algunos de nuestros equipos de desarrollo de AWS más importantes se encuentran en Europa, con centros clave en Dublín, Dresde y Berlín. Como parte de nuestro compromiso continuo de contribuir al desarrollo de las habilidades digitales, contrataremos y capacitaremos a más personal local para gestionar y apoyar la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS.
Los clientes, socios y reguladores dan la bienvenida a la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS En la UE, cientos de miles de organizaciones de todos los tamaños y sectores utilizan AWS, desde startups hasta PYMEs, grandes compañías incluyendo empresas de telecomunicaciones, organizaciones del sector público, instituciones educativas, ONGs y agencias gubernamentales. Organizaciones de toda Europa apoyan la introducción de la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS.
“Como líder del mercado en software de aplicaciones empresariales con sólidas raíces en Europa, SAP lleva colaborando durante mucho tiempo con AWS en nombre de los clientes para acelerar la transformación digital en todo el mundo. La Nube Soberana Europea de AWS ofrece nuevas oportunidades para fortalecer nuestra relación en Europa, ya que nos permite ampliar las opciones que ofrecemos a los clientes a medida que se trasladan a la nube. Valoramos la asociación existente con AWS y las nuevas posibilidades que esta inversión puede ofrecer a los clientes de ambos en toda la región”. – Peter Pluim, Presidente de SAP Enterprise Cloud Services y SAP Sovereign Cloud Services.
“La nueva Nube Soberana Europea de AWS puede cambiar las reglas del juego para los segmentos empresariales altamente regulados de la Unión Europea. Como proveedor de telecomunicaciones líder en Alemania, nuestra transformación digital se centra en la innovación, la escalabilidad, la agilidad y la resiliencia para ofrecer a nuestros clientes los mejores servicios y la mejor calidad. Esto se combinará ahora con los niveles más altos de protección de datos y cumplimiento normativo que ofrece AWS, y con un enfoque particular en los requisitos de soberanía digital. Estoy convencido de que esta nueva oferta de infraestructura tiene el potencial de impulsar la adaptación a la nube de las empresas europeas y acelerar la transformación digital de las industrias reguladas en toda la UE”. — Mallik Rao, Directora de Tecnología e Información de O2 Telefónica en Alemania
“Hoy nos encontramos en la cúspide de una era de transformación. La introducción de la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS no solo representa una mejora de la infraestructura, sino que supone un cambio de paradigma. Este sofisticado marco permitirá a Dedalus ofrecer servicios incomparables para almacenar los datos de los pacientes de forma segura y eficiente en la nube de AWS. Mantenemos nuestro compromiso, sin concesiones, de servir a nuestra clientela europea con las mejores soluciones de su clase respaldadas por la confianza y la excelencia tecnológica”. — Andrea Fiumicelli, Presidente de Dedalus
“En de Volksbank, creemos en invertir en unos Países Bajos mejores. Para hacerlo de manera eficaz, necesitamos tener acceso a las últimas tecnologías para poder innovar y mejorar continuamente los servicios para nuestros clientes. Por este motivo, acogemos con satisfacción el anuncio de la Nube Soberana Europea, que permitirá a los clientes europeos demostrar fácilmente el cumplimiento de las cambiantes normativas y, al mismo tiempo, beneficiarse de la escala, la seguridad y la gama completa de servicios de AWS”. — Sebastian Kalshoven, director de TI y CTO de Volksbank
“Eviden acoge con satisfacción el lanzamiento de la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS. Esto ayudará a las industrias reguladas y al sector público a abordar los requisitos de sus cargas de trabajo confidenciales con una nube de AWS con todas las funciones y que funcione exclusivamente en Europa. Como socio de servicios de primer nivel de AWS y líder en servicios de ciberseguridad en Europa, Eviden tiene una amplia trayectoria ayudando a los clientes de AWS a formalizar y mitigar sus riesgos de soberanía. La Nube Soberana Europea de AWS permitirá a Eviden abordar una gama más amplia de necesidades de soberanía de los clientes”. — Yannick Tricaud, director de Europa Central y Meridional, Oriente Medio y África, de Eviden, del Grupo Atos
Nuestros compromisos con nuestros clientes Mantenemos nuestro compromiso de ofrecer a nuestros clientes el control y las opciones que les ayuden a satisfacer sus necesidades de soberanía digital en constante evolución. Seguiremos innovando en las funcionalidades, los controles y las garantías de soberanía globalmente, y ofreceremos esto sin renunciar a la toda la potencia de AWS.
Puede descubrir más sobre la Nube Soberana Europea de AWS y obtener más información sobre nuestros clientes en nuestra Nota de Prensa y en la web European Digital Sovereignty. También puede obtener más información en AWS News Blog.
Historically, data center servers have used motherboards that included all key components on a single circuit board. The DC-SCM (Datacenter-ready Secure Control Module) decouples server management and security functions from a traditional server motherboard, enabling development of server management and security solutions independent of server architecture. It also provides opportunities for reducing server printed circuit board (PCB) material cost, and allows unified firmware images to be developed.
Today, Cloudflare is announcing that it has partnered with Lenovo to design a DC-SCM for our next-generation servers. The design specification has been published to the OCP (Open Compute Project) contribution database under the name Project Argus.
A brief introduction to baseboard management controllers
A baseboard management controller (BMC) is a specialized processor that can be found in virtually every server product. It allows remote access to the server through a network connection, and provides a rich set of server management features. Some of the commonly used BMC features include server power management, device discovery, sensor monitoring, remote firmware update, system event logging, and error reporting.
In a typical server design, the BMC resides on the server motherboard, along with other key components such as the processor, memory, CPLD and so on. This was the norm for generations of server products, but that has changed in recent years as motherboards are increasingly optimized for high-speed signal bandwidth, and servers need to support specialized security requirements. This has made it necessary to decouple the BMC and its related components from the server motherboard, and move them to a smaller common form factor module known as the Datacenter Secure Control Module (DC-SCM).
Figure 1 is a picture of a motherboard used on Cloudflare’s previous generation of edge servers. The BMC and its related circuit components are placed on the same printed circuit board as the host CPU.
Figure 1: Previous Generation Server Motherboard
For Cloudflare’s next generation of edge servers, we are partnering with Lenovo to create a DC-SCM based design. On the left-hand side of Figure 2 is the printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) for the Host Processor Module (HPM). It hosts the CPU, the memory slots, and other components required for the operation and features of the server design. But the BMC and its related circuits have been relocated to a separate PCBA, which is the DC-SCM.
Figure 2: Next Generation HPM and DC-SCM
Benefits of DC-SCM based server design
PCB cost reduction
As of today, DDR5 memory runs at 6400MT/s (mega transfers per second). In the future DDR5 speed may even increase to 7200MT/s or 8800MT/s. Meanwhile, PCIe Gen5 is running at 32 GT/s (giga transfers per second), doubling the speed rate of PCIe Gen4. Both DDR5 and PCIE Gen5 are key interfaces for the processors used on our next-generation servers.
The increasing rates of high-speed IO signals and memory buses are pushing the next generation of server motherboard designs to transition from low-loss to ultra-low loss dielectric printed circuit board (PCB) materials, and higher layer counts in the PCB. At the same time, the speed of BMC and its related circuitry are not progressing so quickly. For example, the physical layer interface of ASPEED AST2600 BMC is only at PCIe Gen2 (5 GT/s).
Ultra-low loss dielectric PCB material and higher PCB layer count are both driving factors for higher PCB cost. Another driving factor of PCB cost is the size of the PCB. In a traditional server motherboard design, the size of the server motherboard is larger, since the BMC and its related circuits are placed on the same PCB as the host CPU.
By decoupling the BMC and its related circuitry from the host processor module (HPM), we can reduce the size of the relatively more expensive PCB for the HPM. BMC and its related circuitry can be placed on relatively cheaper PCB, with reduced layer count and lossier PCB dielectric materials. For example, in the design of Cloudflare’s next generation of servers, the server motherboard PCB needs to be 14 or more layers, whereas the BMC and its related components can be easily routed with 8 or 10 layers of PCB. In addition, the dielectric material used on DC-SCM PCB is low-loss dielectric — another cost saver compared to ultra-low loss dielectric materials used on HPM PCB.
Modularized design enables flexibility
DC-SCM modularizes server management and security components into a common add-in card form factor, enabling developers to remove customer specific solutions from the more complex components, such as motherboards, to the DC-SCM. This provides flexibility for developers to offer multiple customer-specific solutions, without the need to redesign multiple motherboards for each solution.
Developers are able to reuse the DC-SCM from a previous generation of server design, if the management and security requirements remain the same. This reduces the overall cost of upgrading to a new generation of servers, and has the potential to reduce e-waste when a server is decommissioned.
Likewise, management and security solution upgrades within a server generation can be carried out separately by modifying or replacing the DC-SCM. The more complex components on the HPM do not need to be redesigned. From a data center perspective, it speeds up the upgrade of management and security hardware across multiple server platforms.
Unified interoperable OpenBMC firmware development
Data center secure control interface (DC-SCI) is a standardized hardware interface between DC-SCM and the Host Processor Module (HPM). It provides a basis for electrical interoperability between different DC-SCM and host processor module (HPM) designs.
This interoperability makes it possible to have a unified firmware image across multiple DC-SCM designs, concentrating development resources on a single firmware rather than an array of them. The publicly-accessible OpenBMC repository provides a perfect platform for firmware developers of different companies to collaborate and develop such unified OpenBMC images. Instead of maintaining a separate BMC firmware image for each platform, we now use a single image that can be applied across multiple server platforms. The device tree specific to each respective server is automatically loaded based on device product information.
Using a unified OpenBMC image significantly simplifies the process of releasing BMC firmware to multiple server platforms. Firmware updates and changes are propagated to all supported platforms in a single firmware release.
Project Argus
The DC-SCM specifications have been driven by the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation hardware management workstream, as a way to standardize server management, security, and control features.
Cloudflare has partnered with Lenovo on what we call Project Augus, Cloudflare’s first DC-SCM implementation that fully adheres to the DC-SCM 2.0 specification. In the DC-SCM 2.0 specifications, a few design items are left open for implementers to decide on the most suitable architectural choices. With the goal of improving interoperability of Cloudflare DC-SCM designs across server vendors and server designs, Project Argus includes documentation on implementation details and design decisions on form factor, mechanical locking mechanism, faceplate design, DC-SCI pin out, BMC chip, BMC pinout, Hardware Root of Trust (HWRoT), HWRoT pinout, and minimum bootable device tree.
Figure 3: Project Argus DC-SCM 2.0
At the heart of the Project Argus DC-SCM is the ASPEED AST2600 BMC System on Chip (SoC), which when loaded with a compatible OpenBMC firmware, provides a rich set of common features necessary for remote server management. ASPEED AST1060 is used on Project Argus DC-SCM as the HWRoT solution, providing secure firmware authentication, firmware recovery, and firmware update capability. Project Argus DC-SCM 2.0 uses Lattice MachXO3D CPLD with secure boot and dual boot ability as the DC-SCM CPLD to support a variety of IO interfaces including LTPI, SGPIO, UART and GPIOs.
The mechanical form factor of Project Argus DC-SCM 2.0 is the horizontal External Form Factor (EFF).
Mechanical Drawings PDF files, including card assembly drawing and interlock rail drawing
The security foundation for our Gen 12 hardware
Cloudflare has been innovating around server design for many years, delivering increased performance per watt and reduced carbon footprints. We are excited to integrate Project Argus DC-SCM 2.0 into our next-generation, Cloudflare Gen 12 servers. Stay tuned for more exciting updates on Cloudflare Gen 12 hardware design!
Vulnerability findings in a cloud environment can come from a variety of tools and scans depending on the underlying technology you’re using. Without processes in place to handle these findings, they can begin to mount, often leading to thousands to tens of thousands of findings in a short amount of time. We’re excited to announce the Building a scalable vulnerability management program on AWS guide, which includes how you can build a structured vulnerability management program, operationalize tooling, and scale your processes to handle a large number of findings from diverse sources.
Building a scalable vulnerability management program on AWS focuses on the fundamentals of building a cloud vulnerability management program, including traditional software and network vulnerabilities and cloud configuration risks. The guide covers how to build a successful and scalable vulnerability management program on AWS through preparation, enabling and configuring tools, triaging findings, and reporting.
Targeted outcomes
This guide can help you and your organization with the following:
Develop policies to streamline vulnerability management and maintain accountability.
Establish mechanisms to extend the responsibility of security to your application teams.
Configure relevant AWS services according to best practices for scalable vulnerability management.
Identify patterns for routing security findings to support a shared responsibility model.
Establish mechanisms to report on and iterate on your vulnerability management program.
Improve security finding visibility and help improve overall security posture.
Using the new guide
We encourage you to read the entire guide before taking action or building a list of changes to implement. After you read the guide, assess your current state compared to the action items and check off the items that you’ve already completed in the Next steps table. This will help you assess the current state of your AWS vulnerability management program. Then, plan short-term and long-term roadmaps based on your gaps, desired state, resources, and business needs. Building a cloud vulnerability management program often involves iteration, so you should prioritize key items and regularly revisit your backlog to keep up with technology changes and your business requirements.
We greatly value feedback and contributions from our community. To share your thoughts and insights about the guide, your experience using it, and what you want to see in future versions, select Provide feedback at the bottom of any page in the guide and complete the form.
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.
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Security is a top priority for organizations looking to keep pace with a changing threat landscape and build customer trust. However, the traditional approach of defined security perimeters that separate trusted from untrusted network zones has proven to be inadequate as hybrid work models accelerate digital transformation.
Today’s distributed enterprise requires a new approach to ensuring the right levels of security and accessibility for systems and data. Security experts increasingly recommend Zero Trust as the solution, but security teams can get confused when Zero Trust is presented as a product, rather than as a security model. We’re excited to share a whitepaper we recently authored with SANS Institute called Zero Trust: Charting a Path To Stronger Security, which addresses common misconceptions and explores Zero Trust opportunities.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, over 60% of organizations will embrace Zero Trust as a starting place for security.
The whitepaper includes context and analysis that can help you move past Zero Trust marketing hype and learn about these key considerations for implementing a successful Zero Trust strategy:
Zero Trust definition and guiding principles
Six foundational capabilities to establish
Four fallacies to avoid
Six Zero Trust use cases
Metrics for measuring Zero Trust ROI
The journey to Zero Trust is an iterative process that is different for every organization. We encourage you to download the whitepaper, and gain insight into how you can chart a path to a multi-layered security strategy that adapts to the modern environment and meaningfully improves your technical and business outcomes. We look forward to your feedback and to continuing the journey together.
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.
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Starting on Aug 25, 2023, we started to notice some unusually big HTTP attacks hitting many of our customers. These attacks were detected and mitigated by our automated DDoS system. It was not long however, before they started to reach record breaking sizes — and eventually peaked just above 201 million requests per second. This was nearly 3x bigger than our previous biggest attack on record.
Concerning is the fact that the attacker was able to generate such an attack with a botnet of merely 20,000 machines. There are botnets today that are made up of hundreds of thousands or millions of machines. Given that the entire web typically sees only between 1–3 billion requests per second, it's not inconceivable that using this method could focus an entire web’s worth of requests on a small number of targets.
Detecting and Mitigating
This was a novel attack vector at an unprecedented scale, but Cloudflare's existing protections were largely able to absorb the brunt of the attacks. While initially we saw some impact to customer traffic — affecting roughly 1% of requests during the initial wave of attacks — today we’ve been able to refine our mitigation methods to stop the attack for any Cloudflare customer without it impacting our systems.
We noticed these attacks at the same time two other major industry players — Google and AWS — were seeing the same. We worked to harden Cloudflare’s systems to ensure that, today, all our customers are protected from this new DDoS attack method without any customer impact. We’ve also participated with Google and AWS in a coordinated disclosure of the attack to impacted vendors and critical infrastructure providers.
This attack was made possible by abusing some features of the HTTP/2 protocol and server implementation details (see CVE-2023-44487 for details). Because the attack abuses an underlying weakness in the HTTP/2 protocol, we believe any vendor that has implemented HTTP/2 will be subject to the attack. This included every modern web server. We, along with Google and AWS, have disclosed the attack method to web server vendors who we expect will implement patches. In the meantime, the best defense is using a DDoS mitigation service like Cloudflare’s in front of any web-facing web or API server.
This post dives into the details of the HTTP/2 protocol, the feature that attackers exploited to generate these massive attacks, and the mitigation strategies we took to ensure all our customers are protected. Our hope is that by publishing these details other impacted web servers and services will have the information they need to implement mitigation strategies. And, moreover, the HTTP/2 protocol standards team, as well as teams working on future web standards, can better design them to prevent such attacks.
RST attack details
HTTP is the application protocol that powers the Web. HTTP Semantics are common to all versions of HTTP — the overall architecture, terminology, and protocol aspects such as request and response messages, methods, status codes, header and trailer fields, message content, and much more. Each individual HTTP version defines how semantics are transformed into a "wire format" for exchange over the Internet. For example, a client has to serialize a request message into binary data and send it, then the server parses that back into a message it can process.
HTTP/1.1 uses a textual form of serialization. Request and response messages are exchanged as a stream of ASCII characters, sent over a reliable transport layer like TCP, using the following format (where CRLF means carriage-return and linefeed):
HTTP/1.1 200 OK CRLFServer: cloudflareCRLFContent-Length: 100CRLFtext/html; charset=UTF-8CRLF<100 bytes of data>
This format frames messages on the wire, meaning that it is possible to use a single TCP connection to exchange multiple requests and responses. However, the format requires that each message is sent whole. Furthermore, in order to correctly correlate requests with responses, strict ordering is required; meaning that messages are exchanged serially and can not be multiplexed. Two GET requests, for https://blog.cloudflare.com/ and https://blog.cloudflare.com/page/2/, would be:
GET / HTTP/1.1 CRLFHost: blog.cloudflare.comCRLFGET /page/2 HTTP/1.1 CRLFHost: blog.cloudflare.comCRLF
With the responses:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK CRLFServer: cloudflareCRLFContent-Length: 100CRLFtext/html; charset=UTF-8CRLF<100 bytes of data>HTTP/1.1 200 OK CRLFServer: cloudflareCRLFContent-Length: 100CRLFtext/html; charset=UTF-8CRLF<100 bytes of data>
Web pages require more complicated HTTP interactions than these examples. When visiting the Cloudflare blog, your browser will load multiple scripts, styles and media assets. If you visit the front page using HTTP/1.1 and decide quickly to navigate to page 2, your browser can pick from two options. Either wait for all of the queued up responses for the page that you no longer want before page 2 can even start, or cancel in-flight requests by closing the TCP connection and opening a new connection. Neither of these is very practical. Browsers tend to work around these limitations by managing a pool of TCP connections (up to 6 per host) and implementing complex request dispatch logic over the pool.
HTTP/2 addresses many of the issues with HTTP/1.1. Each HTTP message is serialized into a set of HTTP/2 frames that have type, length, flags, stream identifier (ID) and payload. The stream ID makes it clear which bytes on the wire apply to which message, allowing safe multiplexing and concurrency. Streams are bidirectional. Clients send frames and servers reply with frames using the same ID.
In HTTP/2 our GET request for https://blog.cloudflare.com would be exchanged across stream ID 1, with the client sending one HEADERS frame, and the server responding with one HEADERS frame, followed by one or more DATA frames. Client requests always use odd-numbered stream IDs, so subsequent requests would use stream ID 3, 5, and so on. Responses can be served in any order, and frames from different streams can be interleaved.
Stream multiplexing and concurrency are powerful features of HTTP/2. They enable more efficient usage of a single TCP connection. HTTP/2 optimizes resources fetching especially when coupled with prioritization. On the flip side, making it easy for clients to launch large amounts of parallel work can increase the peak demand for server resources when compared to HTTP/1.1. This is an obvious vector for denial-of-service.
In order to provide some guardrails, HTTP/2 provides a notion of maximum active concurrent streams. The SETTINGS_MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS parameter allows a server to advertise its limit of concurrency. For example, if the server states a limit of 100, then only 100 requests can be active at any time. If a client attempts to open a stream above this limit, it must be rejected by the server using a RST_STREAM frame. Stream rejection does not affect the other in-flight streams on the connection.
The true story is a little more complicated. Streams have a lifecycle. Below is a diagram of the HTTP/2 stream state machine. Client and server manage their own views of the state of a stream. HEADERS, DATA and RST_STREAM frames trigger transitions when they are sent or received. Although the views of the stream state are independent, they are synchronized.
HEADERS and DATA frames include an END_STREAM flag, that when set to the value 1 (true), can trigger a state transition.
Let's work through this with an example of a GET request that has no message content. The client sends the request as a HEADERS frame with the END_STREAM flag set to 1. The client first transitions the stream from idle to open state, then immediately transitions into half-closed state. The client half-closed state means that it can no longer send HEADERS or DATA, only WINDOW_UPDATE, PRIORITY or RST_STREAM frames. It can receive any frame however.
Once the server receives and parses the HEADERS frame, it transitions the stream state from idle to open and then half-closed, so it matches the client. The server half-closed state means it can send any frame but receive only WINDOW_UPDATE, PRIORITY or RST_STREAM frames.
The response to the GET contains message content, so the server sends HEADERS with END_STREAM flag set to 0, then DATA with END_STREAM flag set to 1. The DATA frame triggers the transition of the stream from half-closed to closed on the server. When the client receives it, it also transitions to closed. Once a stream is closed, no frames can be sent or received.
Applying this lifecycle back into the context of concurrency, HTTP/2 states:
Streams that are in the "open" state or in either of the "half-closed" states count toward the maximum number of streams that an endpoint is permitted to open. Streams in any of these three states count toward the limit advertised in the SETTINGS_MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS setting.
In theory, the concurrency limit is useful. However, there are practical factors that hamper its effectiveness— which we will cover later in the blog.
HTTP/2 request cancellation
Earlier, we talked about client cancellation of in-flight requests. HTTP/2 supports this in a much more efficient way than HTTP/1.1. Rather than needing to tear down the whole connection, a client can send a RST_STREAM frame for a single stream. This instructs the server to stop processing the request and to abort the response, which frees up server resources and avoids wasting bandwidth.
Let's consider our previous example of 3 requests. This time the client cancels the request on stream 1 after all of the HEADERS have been sent. The server parses this RST_STREAM frame before it is ready to serve the response and instead only responds to stream 3 and 5:
Request cancellation is a useful feature. For example, when scrolling a webpage with multiple images, a web browser can cancel images that fall outside the viewport, meaning that images entering it can load faster. HTTP/2 makes this behaviour a lot more efficient compared to HTTP/1.1.
A request stream that is canceled, rapidly transitions through the stream lifecycle. The client's HEADERS with END_STREAM flag set to 1 transitions the state from idle to open to half-closed, then RST_STREAM immediately causes a transition from half-closed to closed.
Recall that only streams that are in the open or half-closed state contribute to the stream concurrency limit. When a client cancels a stream, it instantly gets the ability to open another stream in its place and can send another request immediately. This is the crux of what makes CVE-2023-44487 work.
Rapid resets leading to denial of service
HTTP/2 request cancellation can be abused to rapidly reset an unbounded number of streams. When an HTTP/2 server is able to process client-sent RST_STREAM frames and tear down state quickly enough, such rapid resets do not cause a problem. Where issues start to crop up is when there is any kind of delay or lag in tidying up. The client can churn through so many requests that a backlog of work accumulates, resulting in excess consumption of resources on the server.
A common HTTP deployment architecture is to run an HTTP/2 proxy or load-balancer in front of other components. When a client request arrives it is quickly dispatched and the actual work is done as an asynchronous activity somewhere else. This allows the proxy to handle client traffic very efficiently. However, this separation of concerns can make it hard for the proxy to tidy up the in-process jobs. Therefore, these deployments are more likely to encounter issues from rapid resets.
When Cloudflare's reverse proxies process incoming HTTP/2 client traffic, they copy the data from the connection’s socket into a buffer and process that buffered data in order. As each request is read (HEADERS and DATA frames) it is dispatched to an upstream service. When RST_STREAM frames are read, the local state for the request is torn down and the upstream is notified that the request has been canceled. Rinse and repeat until the entire buffer is consumed. However this logic can be abused: when a malicious client started sending an enormous chain of requests and resets at the start of a connection, our servers would eagerly read them all and create stress on the upstream servers to the point of being unable to process any new incoming request.
Something that is important to highlight is that stream concurrency on its own cannot mitigate rapid reset. The client can churn requests to create high request rates no matter the server's chosen value of SETTINGS_MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS.
Rapid Reset dissected
Here's an example of rapid reset reproduced using a proof-of-concept client attempting to make a total of 1000 requests. I've used an off-the-shelf server without any mitigations; listening on port 443 in a test environment. The traffic is dissected using Wireshark and filtered to show only HTTP/2 traffic for clarity. Download the pcap to follow along.
It's a bit difficult to see, because there are a lot of frames. We can get a quick summary via Wireshark's Statistics > HTTP2 tool:
The first frame in this trace, in packet 14, is the server's SETTINGS frame, which advertises a maximum stream concurrency of 100. In packet 15, the client sends a few control frames and then starts making requests that are rapidly reset. The first HEADERS frame is 26 bytes long, all subsequent HEADERS are only 9 bytes. This size difference is due to a compression technology called HPACK. In total, packet 15 contains 525 requests, going up to stream 1051.
Interestingly, the RST_STREAM for stream 1051 doesn't fit in packet 15, so in packet 16 we see the server respond with a 404 response. Then in packet 17 the client does send the RST_STREAM, before moving on to sending the remaining 475 requests.
Note that although the server advertised 100 concurrent streams, both packets sent by the client sent a lot more HEADERS frames than that. The client did not have to wait for any return traffic from the server, it was only limited by the size of the packets it could send. No server RST_STREAM frames are seen in this trace, indicating that the server did not observe a concurrent stream violation.
Impact on customers
As mentioned above, as requests are canceled, upstream services are notified and can abort requests before wasting too many resources on it. This was the case with this attack, where most malicious requests were never forwarded to the origin servers. However, the sheer size of these attacks did cause some impact.
First, as the rate of incoming requests reached peaks never seen before, we had reports of increased levels of 502 errors seen by clients. This happened on our most impacted data centers as they were struggling to process all the requests. While our network is meant to deal with large attacks, this particular vulnerability exposed a weakness in our infrastructure. Let's dig a little deeper into the details, focusing on how incoming requests are handled when they hit one of our data centers:
We can see that our infrastructure is composed of a chain of different proxy servers with different responsibilities. In particular, when a client connects to Cloudflare to send HTTPS traffic, it first hits our TLS decryption proxy: it decrypts TLS traffic, processes HTTP 1, 2 or 3 traffic, then forwards it to our "business logic" proxy. This one is responsible for loading all the settings for each customer, then routing the requests correctly to other upstream services — and more importantly in our case, it is also responsible for security features. This is where L7 attack mitigation is processed.
The problem with this attack vector is that it manages to send a lot of requests very quickly in every single connection. Each of them had to be forwarded to the business logic proxy before we had a chance to block it. As the request throughput became higher than our proxy capacity, the pipe connecting these two services reached its saturation level in some of our servers.
When this happens, the TLS proxy cannot connect anymore to its upstream proxy, this is why some clients saw a bare "502 Bad Gateway" error during the most serious attacks. It is important to note that, as of today, the logs used to create HTTP analytics are also emitted by our business logic proxy. The consequence of that is that these errors are not visible in the Cloudflare dashboard. Our internal dashboards show that about 1% of requests were impacted during the initial wave of attacks (before we implemented mitigations), with peaks at around 12% for a few seconds during the most serious one on August 29th. The following graph shows the ratio of these errors over a two hours while this was happening:
We worked to reduce this number dramatically in the following days, as detailed later on in this post. Both thanks to changes in our stack and to our mitigation that reduce the size of these attacks considerably, this number is today is effectively zero:
499 errors and the challenges for HTTP/2 stream concurrency
Another symptom reported by some customers is an increase in 499 errors. The reason for this is a bit different and is related to the maximum stream concurrency in a HTTP/2 connection detailed earlier in this post.
HTTP/2 settings are exchanged at the start of a connection using SETTINGS frames. In the absence of receiving an explicit parameter, default values apply. Once a client establishes an HTTP/2 connection, it can wait for a server's SETTINGS (slow) or it can assume the default values and start making requests (fast). For SETTINGS_MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS, the default is effectively unlimited (stream IDs use a 31-bit number space, and requests use odd numbers, so the actual limit is 1073741824). The specification recommends that a server offer no fewer than 100 streams. Clients are generally biased towards speed, so don't tend to wait for server settings, which creates a bit of a race condition. Clients are taking a gamble on what limit the server might pick; if they pick wrong the request will be rejected and will have to be retried. Gambling on 1073741824 streams is a bit silly. Instead, a lot of clients decide to limit themselves to issuing 100 concurrent streams, with the hope that servers followed the specification recommendation. Where servers pick something below 100, this client gamble fails and streams are reset.
There are many reasons a server might reset a stream beyond concurrency limit overstepping. HTTP/2 is strict and requires a stream to be closed when there are parsing or logic errors. In 2019, Cloudflare developed several mitigations in response to HTTP/2 DoS vulnerabilities. Several of those vulnerabilities were caused by a client misbehaving, leading the server to reset a stream. A very effective strategy to clamp down on such clients is to count the number of server resets during a connection, and when that exceeds some threshold value, close the connection with a GOAWAY frame. Legitimate clients might make one or two mistakes in a connection and that is acceptable. A client that makes too many mistakes is probably either broken or malicious and closing the connection addresses both cases.
While responding to DoS attacks enabled by CVE-2023-44487, Cloudflare reduced maximum stream concurrency to 64. Before making this change, we were unaware that clients don't wait for SETTINGS and instead assume a concurrency of 100. Some web pages, such as an image gallery, do indeed cause a browser to send 100 requests immediately at the start of a connection. Unfortunately, the 36 streams above our limit all needed to be reset, which triggered our counting mitigations. This meant that we closed connections on legitimate clients, leading to a complete page load failure. As soon as we realized this interoperability issue, we changed the maximum stream concurrency to 100.
Actions from the Cloudflare side
In 2019 several DoS vulnerabilities were uncovered related to implementations of HTTP/2. Cloudflare developed and deployed a series of detections and mitigations in response. CVE-2023-44487 is a different manifestation of HTTP/2 vulnerability. However, to mitigate it we were able to extend the existing protections to monitor client-sent RST_STREAM frames and close connections when they are being used for abuse. Legitimate client uses for RST_STREAM are unaffected.
In addition to a direct fix, we have implemented several improvements to the server's HTTP/2 frame processing and request dispatch code. Furthermore, the business logic server has received improvements to queuing and scheduling that reduce unnecessary work and improve cancellation responsiveness. Together these lessen the impact of various potential abuse patterns as well as giving more room to the server to process requests before saturating.
Mitigate attacks earlier
Cloudflare already had systems in place to efficiently mitigate very large attacks with less expensive methods. One of them is named "IP Jail". For hyper volumetric attacks, this system collects the client IPs participating in the attack and stops them from connecting to the attacked property, either at the IP level, or in our TLS proxy. This system however needs a few seconds to be fully effective; during these precious seconds, the origins are already protected but our infrastructure still needs to absorb all HTTP requests. As this new botnet has effectively no ramp-up period, we need to be able to neutralize attacks before they can become a problem.
To achieve this we expanded the IP Jail system to protect our entire infrastructure: once an IP is "jailed", not only it is blocked from connecting to the attacked property, we also forbid the corresponding IPs from using HTTP/2 to any other domain on Cloudflare for some time. As such protocol abuses are not possible using HTTP/1.x, this limits the attacker's ability to run large attacks, while any legitimate client sharing the same IP would only see a very small performance decrease during that time. IP based mitigations are a very blunt tool — this is why we have to be extremely careful when using them at that scale and seek to avoid false positives as much as possible. Moreover, the lifespan of a given IP in a botnet is usually short so any long term mitigation is likely to do more harm than good. The following graph shows the churn of IPs in the attacks we witnessed:
As we can see, many new IPs spotted on a given day disappear very quickly afterwards.
As all these actions happen in our TLS proxy at the beginning of our HTTPS pipeline, this saves considerable resources compared to our regular L7 mitigation system. This allowed us to weather these attacks much more smoothly and now the number of random 502 errors caused by these botnets is down to zero.
Observability improvements
Another front on which we are making change is observability. Returning errors to clients without being visible in customer analytics is unsatisfactory. Fortunately, a project has been underway to overhaul these systems since long before the recent attacks. It will eventually allow each service within our infrastructure to log its own data, instead of relying on our business logic proxy to consolidate and emit log data. This incident underscored the importance of this work, and we are redoubling our efforts.
We are also working on better connection-level logging, allowing us to spot such protocol abuses much more quickly to improve our DDoS mitigation capabilities.
Conclusion
While this was the latest record-breaking attack, we know it won’t be the last. As attacks continue to become more sophisticated, Cloudflare works relentlessly to proactively identify new threats — deploying countermeasures to our global network so that our millions of customers are immediately and automatically protected.
Cloudflare has provided free, unmetered and unlimited DDoS protection to all of our customers since 2017. In addition, we offer a range of additional security features to suit the needs of organizations of all sizes. Contact us if you’re unsure whether you’re protected or want to understand how you can be.
Earlier today, Cloudflare, along with Google and Amazon AWS, disclosed the existence of a novel zero-day vulnerability dubbed the “HTTP/2 Rapid Reset” attack. This attack exploits a weakness in the HTTP/2 protocol to generate enormous, hyper-volumetric Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Cloudflare has mitigated a barrage of these attacks in recent months, including an attack three times larger than any previous attack we’ve observed, which exceeded 201 million requests per second (rps). Since the end of August 2023, Cloudflare has mitigated more than 1,100 other attacks with over 10 million rps — and 184 attacks that were greater than our previous DDoS record of 71 million rps.
This zero-day provided threat actors with a critical new tool in their Swiss Army knife of vulnerabilities to exploit and attack their victims at a magnitude that has never been seen before. While at times complex and challenging to combat, these attacks allowed Cloudflare the opportunity to develop purpose-built technology to mitigate the effects of the zero-day vulnerability.
If you are using Cloudflare for HTTP DDoS mitigation, you are protected. And below, we’ve included more information on this vulnerability, and resources and recommendations on what you can do to secure yourselves.
Deconstructing the attack: What every CSO needs to know
In late August 2023, our team at Cloudflare noticed a new zero-day vulnerability, developed by an unknown threat actor, that exploits the standard HTTP/2 protocol — a fundamental protocol that is critical to how the Internet and all websites work. This novel zero-day vulnerability attack, dubbed Rapid Reset, leverages HTTP/2’s stream cancellation feature by sending a request and immediately canceling it over and over.
By automating this trivial “request, cancel, request, cancel” pattern at scale, threat actors are able to create a denial of service and take down any server or application running the standard implementation of HTTP/2. Furthermore, one crucial thing to note about the record-breaking attack is that it involved a modestly-sized botnet, consisting of roughly 20,000 machines. Cloudflare regularly detects botnets that are orders of magnitude larger than this — comprising hundreds of thousands and even millions of machines. For a relatively small botnet to output such a large volume of requests, with the potential to incapacitate nearly any server or application supporting HTTP/2, underscores how menacing this vulnerability is for unprotected networks.
Threat actors used botnets in tandem with the HTTP/2 vulnerability to amplify requests at rates we have never seen before. As a result, our team at Cloudflare experienced some intermittent edge instability. While our systems were able to mitigate the overwhelming majority of incoming attacks, the volume overloaded some components in our network, impacting a small number of customers’ performance with intermittent 4xx and 5xx errors — all of which were quickly resolved.
Once we successfully mitigated these issues and halted potential attacks for all customers, our team immediately kicked off a responsible disclosure process. We entered into conversations with industry peers to see how we could work together to help move our mission forward and safeguard the large percentage of the Internet that relies on our network prior to releasing this vulnerability to the general public.
How is Cloudflare and the industry thwarting this attack?
There is no such thing as a “perfect disclosure.” Thwarting attacks and responding to emerging incidents requires organizations and security teams to live by an assume-breach mindset — because there will always be another zero-day, new evolving threat actor groups, and never-before-seen novel attacks and techniques.
This “assume-breach” mindset is a key foundation towards information sharing and ensuring in instances such as this that the Internet remains safe. While Cloudflare was experiencing and mitigating these attacks, we were also working with industry partners to guarantee that the industry at-large could withstand this attack.
During the process of mitigating this attack, our Cloudflare team developed and purpose-built new technology to stop these DDoS attacks and further improve our own mitigations for this and other future attacks of massive scale. These efforts have significantly increased our overall mitigation capabilities and resiliency. If you are using Cloudflare, we are confident that you are protected.
Our team also alerted web server software partners who are developing patches to ensure this vulnerability cannot be exploited — check their websites for more information.
Disclosures are never one and done. The lifeblood of Cloudflare is to ensure a better Internet, which stems from instances such as these. When we have the opportunity to work with our industry partners and governments to ensure there are no widespread impacts on the Internet, we are doing our part in increasing the cyber resiliency of every organization no matter the size or vertical.
To gain more of an understanding around mitigation tactics and next steps on patching, register for our webinar.
What are the origins of the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset and these record-breaking attacks on Cloudflare?
It may seem odd that Cloudflare was one of the first companies to witness these attacks. Why would threat actors attack a company that has some of the most robust defenses against DDoS attacks in the world?
The reality is that Cloudflare often sees attacks before they are turned on more vulnerable targets. Threat actors need to develop and test their tools before they deploy them in the wild. Threat actors who possess record-shattering attack methods can have an extremely difficult time testing and understanding how large and effective they are, because they don't have the infrastructure to absorb the attacks they are launching. Because of the transparency that we share on our network performance, and the measurements of attacks they could glean from our public performance charts, this threat actor was likely targeting us to understand the capabilities of the exploit.
But that testing, and the ability to see the attack early, helps us develop mitigations for the attack that benefit both our customers and industry as a whole.
From CSO to CSO: What should you do?
I have been a CSO for over 20 years, on the receiving end of countless disclosures and announcements like this. But whether it was Log4J, Solarwinds, EternalBlueWannaCry/NotPetya, Heartbleed, or Shellshock, all of these security incidents have a commonality. A tremendous explosion that ripples across the world and creates an opportunity to completely disrupt any of the organizations that I have led — regardless of the industry or the size.
Many of these were attacks or vulnerabilities that we may have not been able to control. But regardless of whether the issue arose from something that was in my control or not, what has set any successful initiative I have led apart from those that did not lean in our favor was the ability to respond when zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits like this are identified.
While I wish I could say that Rapid Reset may be different this time around, it is not. I am calling all CSOs — no matter if you’ve lived through the decades of security incidents that I have, or this is your first day on the job — this is the time to ensure you are protected and stand up your cyber incident response team.
We’ve kept the information restricted until today to give as many security vendors as possible the opportunity to react. However, at some point, the responsible thing becomes to publicly disclose zero-day threats like this. Today is that day. That means that after today, threat actors will be largely aware of the HTTP/2 vulnerability; and it will inevitably become trivial to exploit and kickoff the race between defenders and attacks — first to patch vs. first to exploit. Organizations should assume that systems will be tested, and take proactive measures to ensure protection.
To me, this is reminiscent of a vulnerability like Log4J, due to the many variants that are emerging daily, and will continue to come to fruition in the weeks, months, and years to come. As more researchers and threat actors experiment with the vulnerability, we may find different variants with even shorter exploit cycles that contain even more advanced bypasses.
And just like Log4J, managing incidents like this isn’t as simple as “run the patch, now you’re done”. You need to turn incident management, patching, and evolving your security protections into ongoing processes — because the patches for each variant of a vulnerability reduce your risk, but they don’t eliminate it.
I don’t mean to be alarmist, but I will be direct: you must take this seriously. Treat this as a full active incident to ensure nothing happens to your organization.
Recommendations for a New Standard of Change
While no one security event is ever identical to the next, there are lessons that can be learned. CSOs, here are my recommendations that must be implemented immediately. Not only in this instance, but for years to come:
Understand your external and partner network’s external connectivity to remediate any Internet facing systems with the mitigations below.
Understand your existing security protection and capabilities you have to protect, detect and respond to an attack and immediately remediate any issues you have in your network.
Ensure your DDoS Protection resides outside of your data center because if the traffic gets to your datacenter, it will be difficult to mitigate the DDoS attack.
Ensure you have DDoS protection for Applications (Layer 7) and ensure you have Web Application Firewalls. Additionally as a best practice, ensure you have complete DDoS protection for DNS, Network Traffic (Layer 3) and API Firewalls
Ensure web server and operating system patches are deployed across all Internet Facing Web Servers. Also, ensure all automation like Terraform builds and images are fully patched so older versions of web servers are not deployed into production over the secure images by accident.
As a last resort, consider turning off HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (likely also vulnerable) to mitigate the threat. This is a last resort only, because there will be a significant performance issues if you downgrade to HTTP/1.1
Consider a secondary, cloud-based DDoS L7 provider at perimeter for resilience.
Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. If you are concerned with your current state of DDoS protection, we are more than happy to provide you with our DDoS capabilities and resilience for free to mitigate any attempts of a successful DDoS attack. We know the stress that you are facing as we have fought off these attacks for the last 30 days and made our already best in class systems, even better.
