AWS Security Flashcards
What is the Shared Responsibility Model?
In the public cloud, there is a shared security responsibility between you and AWS.
- AWS’s responsibility: Security of the Cloud
- Your Responsibility: Security in the Cloud
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What is AWS’s responsibility “Security Of The Cloud”?
AWS is responsible for protecting and securing their infrastructure.
- AWS Global Infrastructure: AWS is responsible for its global infrastructure elements: Regions, edge locations, and Availability Zones.
- Building Security: AWS controls access to its data centers where your data resides.
- Networking Components:AWS maintains networking components: generators, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems, computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units, fire suppression systems, and more.
- Software: AWS is responsible for any managed service like RDS, S3, ECS, or Lambda, patching of host operating systems, and data access endpoints.
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What is Your responsibility “Security In The Cloud”?
You are responsible for how the services are implemented and managing your application data.
- Application Data: You are responsible for managing your application data, which includes encryption options.
- Security Configuration: You are responsible for securing your account and API calls, rotating credentials, restricting internet access from your VPCs, and more.
- Patching: You are responsible for the guest operating system (OS), which includes updates and security patches.
- Identity and Access Management:You are responsible for application security and identity and access management.
- Network Traffic: You are responsible for network traffic protection, which includes security group firewall configuration.
- Installed Software: You are responsible for your application code, installed software, and more. You should frequently scan for and patch vulnerabilities in your code.
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What is EC2 Shared Responsibility Model?
AWS:
- EC2 service
- Patching the host operating system
- Security of the physical server
ME/YOU:
- Installed applications
- Patching the guest operating system
- Security controls
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What is Lambda Shared Responsibility Model?
AWS:
- Lambda service
- Upgrading Lambda languages
- Lambda endpoints
- Operating system
- Underlying infrastructure
- Software dependencies
ME/YOU:
- Security of code
- Stogare of sensitive data
- IAM for permissions
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What is the Well-Architected Framework?
The 5 pillars of the Well-Architected Framework describe design principles and best practices for running workloads in the cloud.
- Operational Excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Perfomance Efficiency
- Cost Optimization
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What does the Operation Excellence entail(Well-Architected Framework)?
This pillar focus on creating application that effectively support production workloads.
- Plan for and anticipate failure
- Deploy smaller, reversible changes
- Script operations as code
- Learn from failure and refine
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What does the Security entail(Well-Architected Framework)?
This pillar focuses on putting mechanism in place that help protect your systems and data.
- Automate security tasks
- Encrypt data in transit and at rest
- Assign only the least privileges required
- Track who did what and when
- Ensure security at all application layers
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What does the Reliability entail(Well-Architected Framework)?
This pillar focuses on designing systems that work consistently and recover quickly.
- Recover from failure automatically
- Scale horizontally for resilience
- Reduce idle resources
- Manage change through automation
- Test recovery procedures
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What does the Performance Efficiency entail(Well-Architected Framework)?
This pillar focuses on the effective use of computing resources to meet system and business requirements while removing bottlenecks.
- Use serverless architectures first
- Use Multi-region deployments
- Delegate tasks to a cloud vendor
- Experiment with virtual resources
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What does the Cost Optimization entail(Well-Architected Framework)?
This pillar focuses on delivering optimum and resilient solutions at the least cost to the user.
- Utilize consumption based pricing
- Measure overall efficiency
- Implement Cloud Financial management
- Pay only for resources your application requires
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What is Operation Excellence real world usecase?
You can use AWS CodeCommit for version control to enable tracking of code changes and to version-control CloudFormation templates of your infrastructure.
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What is Security real world usecase?
You can configure central logging of all actions performed in your account using CloudTrail.
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What is Reliability real world usecase?
You can use Multi-AZ deployments for enhanced availability and reliability of RDS databases.
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What is “Performance Efficiency” real world usecase?
You can use AWS Lambda to run code with zero administration.
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What is “Cost Optimization” real world usecase?
You can use S3 Intelligent-Tiering to automatically move your data between access tiers based on your usage patterns.
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What is Amazon IAM?
IAM allows you to control access to your AWS services and resources.
- Helps you secure your cloud resources
- You define who has access
- You define what they can do
- A free global service
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Identities vs. Access ?
Identities: Who can access your resources
- Root user
- Individual users
- Groups
- Roles
Access: What resources they can access
- Policies
- AWS managed policies
- Customer managed policies
- Permissions boundaries
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Authentication (“Who”) vs. Authorization (“What”)
- Authentication is where you present your identity (username) and provide verification (password).
- Authorization determines which services and resources the authenticated identity has access to.
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Types of Users?
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Root User: The root user is created when you first open your AWS account.
- Close your account settings, includes (email address, account name etc..)
- Modify your support plan
- Cancel your AWS Support plan
- Restore IAM user permissions
- View certain tax invoices.
- Register as a seller in the Reserved Instance Marketplace.
- Configure an Amazon S3 bucket to enable MFA (multi-factor authentication) Delete.
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Users: Individual users are created in IAM and are used for everyday tasks.
- Perform administrative tasks
- Launch EC2 Instances
- Access application code
- Configure databases
- Applications:You’ll create a user in IAM so you can generate access keys for an application running on-premises that needs access to your cloud resources.
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