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Mastering AWS Security
Mastering AWS Security

Mastering AWS Security: Create and maintain a secure cloud ecosystem

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Profile Icon Albert Anthony
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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7 (13 Ratings)
Paperback Oct 2017 252 pages 1st Edition
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Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Albert Anthony
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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7 (13 Ratings)
Paperback Oct 2017 252 pages 1st Edition
eBook
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Mastering AWS Security

AWS Identity and Access Management

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources for your users. You use IAM to control who can use your AWS resources (authentication) and what resources they can use and in what ways (authorization).

In other words, or rather a simpler definition of IAM is as follows:

AWS IAM allows you to control who can take what actions on which resources in AWS.

IAM manages users (identities) and permissions (access control) for all AWS resources. It is offered free of charge, so you don't have to pay to use IAM. It provides you greater control, security, and elasticity while working with AWS cloud.

IAM gives you the ability to grant, segregate, monitor, and manage access for multiple users inside your organization or outside of your organization who need to interact with AWS resources...

Chapter overview

In this chapter, we are going to learn about AWS IAM. We will go through various IAM tools and features and their use cases and look at ways in which we can access IAM. We will deep dive into IAM authentication and authorization. Authentication includes identities such as users, roles, and groups, and authorization talks about access management, permissions, and policies for AWS resources. We'll walk through the benefits of IAM and how it can help us secure our AWS resources. Finally, we'll take a look at IAM best practices.

The following is a snapshot of what we'll cover in this chapter:

  • IAM features and tools
  • IAM authentication
  • IAM authorization
  • AWS credentials
  • IAM limitations
  • IAM best practices

This chapter will help us understand user authentication and access control in detail. Essentially, IAM is our first step towards securing our AWS resources...

IAM features and tools

IAM is free of cost. It is Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) compliant, so you can run your credit card application and store credit card information using IAM. It is also eventually consistent, meaning any change you make in IAM would be propagated across multiple AWS data centers: this propagation could take a few milliseconds. So design your application and architecture keeping this feature in mind. IAM integrates with various AWS services so you can define fine grain access control for these services.

Let us look at other features of IAM that make it such a widely used, powerful, and versatile AWS service. As a matter of fact, if you have an AWS account and you want to use resources in your AWS account, you have to pass through IAM in one way or other, there's no two ways about it!

...

IAM Authentication

IAM authentication in AWS includes the following identities:

  • Users
  • Groups
  • Roles
  • Temporary security credentials
  • Account root user

Identities are used to provide authentication for people, applications, resources, services, and processes in your AWS account. Identities represent the user that interacts with the AWS resources based on authentication and authorization to perform various actions and tasks. We will look at each one of the identities in detail.

IAM user

You create an IAM user in AWS as an entity to allow people to sign into the AWS Management Console or to make requests to AWS services from your programs using CLI or API. An IAM user can be a person, an application, or an AWS service that interacts...

IAM Authorization

When you create an AWS account, it has a user known as root user. This user has, by default, access to all AWS service and resources. No other user (or any IAM entity) has any access by default and we have to explicitly grant access for all users. In this section, we'll talk about authorization in IAM or access management, it is made up of the following two components:

  • Permissions
  • Policy

Permissions

Permissions let you take actions on AWS resources. It allows your users (AWS identities) to perform tasks in AWS. When you create a new user (except for the root user), it has no permission to take any action in AWS. You grant permissions to the user by attaching a policy to that user. So, for example,...

Passwords Policy

You can set up the password policy for your AWS account from IAM. Navigate to the IAM dashboard from the AWS console. Click on Account settings. As shown in the following figure, on the Password Policy page, you can setup requirements such as minimum password length, rotation period, and so on. Most of these changes in your password policy are effective when your users log in the next time, however, for changes such as change in the password expiration period, they are applied immediately:

Figure 13 - AWS IAM Password Policy

AWS credentials

As we have seen in the previous chapter, AWS provides you with various credentials to authorize and authenticate your requests. Let us look at these AWS credentials in detail:

  • Email and password: These credentials are used by your account root user. As discussed earlier, by default, the account root user has access to all services and resources. AWS recommends that root user credentials should be used to create another user and all the work should be carried out by the other user.
  • IAM username and password: When you create one or more users in your AWS account through IAM. They can login to the AWS console by using the username and password. This username is given by you when you create a user in IAM. Passwords for these users are created by you as well, you can give permissions to users to change their passwords.
  • Multi-factor Authentication (MFA): MFA adds an...

IAM limitations

IAM has certain limitations for entities and objects. Let us look at the most important limitations across the most common entities and objects:

  • Names of all IAM identities and IAM resources can be alphanumeric. They can include common characters such as plus (+), equal (=), comma (,), period (.), at (@), underscore (_), and hyphen (-).
  • Names of IAM identities (users, roles, and groups) must be unique within the AWS account. So you can't have two groups named DEVELOPERS and developers in your AWS account.
  • AWS account ID aliases must be unique across AWS products in your account. It cannot be a 12 digit number.
  • You can create 100 groups in an AWS account.
  • You can create 5000 users in an AWS account. AWS recommends the use of temporary security credentials for adding a large number of users in an AWS account.
  • You can create 500 roles in an AWS account.
  • An IAM...

IAM best practices

Lock root account keys: As we know the root account user has access to all resources for all AWS services by default, so if you have access keys (access key ID and secret access key) for a root account user, lock them in a secure place and rotate them periodically.

Do not share credentials: AWS gives you multiple ways for your users to interact with resources in your AWS account, so you would never have a requirement to share credentials. Create individual users for all access requirements with necessary credentials and never share credentials with other users.

Use managed policies: AWS provides comprehensive sets of policies that cover access requirements for the most common scenarios. AWS also provides you policies aligned with job functions. These policies are managed by AWS and they are updated as and when required so you don't have to worry about your...

Summary

This concludes Chapter 2, AWS Identity and Access Management. IAM is one of the most important AWS service as it controls access to your AWS resources. We had a detailed view of Identities including users, groups, and roles. We learnt how to create each of these identities and what features each of these identities offer to support multiple use cases.

We looked at identity federation to allow access for identities that are managed out of our AWS account. We learnt about delegation, temporary security credentials, AWS Security token service and account root user.

We also learnt about policies and permissions. We went through various elements of a policy. We got to know that AWS managed policies are preferred over inline policies for most use cases. There are multiple tools and features available to help us write, validate, and manage our own policies such as IAM policy...

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Key benefits

  • • Learn to secure your network, infrastructure, data and applications in AWS cloud
  • • Log, monitor and audit your AWS resources for continuous security and continuous compliance in AWS cloud
  • • Use AWS managed security services to automate security. Focus on increasing your business rather than being diverged onto security risks and issues with AWS security.
  • • Delve deep into various aspects such as the security model, compliance, access management and much more to build and maintain a secure environment.

Description

Mastering AWS Security starts with a deep dive into the fundamentals of the shared security responsibility model. This book tells you how you can enable continuous security, continuous auditing, and continuous compliance by automating your security in AWS with the tools, services, and features it provides. Moving on, you will learn about access control in AWS for all resources. You will also learn about the security of your network, servers, data and applications in the AWS cloud using native AWS security services. By the end of this book, you will understand the complete AWS Security landscape, covering all aspects of end - to -end software and hardware security along with logging, auditing, and compliance of your entire IT environment in the AWS cloud. Lastly, the book will wrap up with AWS best practices for security.

Who is this book for?

This book is for all IT professionals, system administrators and security analysts, solution architects and Chief Information Security Officers who are responsible for securing workloads in AWS for their organizations. It is helpful for all Solutions Architects who want to design and implement secure architecture on AWS by the following security by design principle. This book is helpful for personnel in Auditors and Project Management role to understand how they can audit AWS workloads and how they can manage security in AWS respectively. If you are learning AWS or championing AWS adoption in your organization, you should read this book to build security in all your workloads. You will benefit from knowing about security footprint of all major AWS services for multiple domains, use cases, and scenarios.

What you will learn

  • •Learn about AWS Identity Management and Access control
  • •Gain knowledge to create and secure your private network in AWS
  • •Understand and secure your infrastructure in AWS
  • •Understand monitoring, logging and auditing in AWS
  • •Ensure Data Security in AWS
  • •Learn to secure your applications in AWS
  • •Explore AWS Security best practices

Product Details

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Publication date : Oct 26, 2017
Length: 252 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788293723
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Publication date : Oct 26, 2017
Length: 252 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781788293723
Vendor :
Amazon
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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
Overview of Security in AWS Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
AWS Identity and Access Management Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
AWS Virtual Private Cloud Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Data Security in AWS Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Securing Servers in AWS Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Securing Applications in AWS Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Monitoring in AWS Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Logging and Auditing in AWS Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
AWS Security Best Practices Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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(13 Ratings)
5 star 53.8%
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3 star 15.4%
2 star 23.1%
1 star 7.7%
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Eric Vanderburg Dec 20, 2017
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If you are not in the cloud today, you are not doing business right and Amazon is one of the key cloud players. Amazon’s security framework is extensive and there are many options available to cloud administrators and consumers alike. In Mastering AWS Security, Albert Anthony provides a comprehensive review of Amazon’s security features including AWS IAM, AWS VPC, AWS KMS, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, AWS Artifact, and AWS CloudWatch.Mastering AWS Security is organized well beginning with the AWS shared security responsibility model and an overview of Amazon’s main security technologies and then going through the remaining areas functionally. Anthony divided the book into seven major functional areas: (1)Identity, (2)AWS Private Cloud, (3)Data Security, (4)Server Security, (5)Application Security, (6)Monitoring, and finally (7)Auditing. The book closes with some best practices for each of the functional areas.I enjoyed reading this book and think it is a great resource for IT professionals using AWS and for those interested in cloud security. In about 200 pages of content, Anthony is able to provide good depth to the subject matter without it feeling like a series of Amazon guides or whitepapers. The book is definitely one to read.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Stephen Geier Jun 27, 2019
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A few errors (NACLs are not stateful ) but otherwise very comprehensive and excellent information. Very helpful in understanding and studying for the security specialization cert
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Dwayne Monroe Jan 05, 2018
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In 2017 there were quite a few news stories about 'cloud security breaches' that were actually caused by misconfigured S3 buckets and other errors. Clearly, there’s a very large gap between what IT organizations know, and what’s required to secure solutions built on AWS. Albert Anthony’s book, Mastering AWS Security is a welcome and high-quality contribution to the ongoing effort to close this gap.Appropriately, Anthony starts with an overview of the often-misunderstood shared security modelThis is the key — in fact, I’d go so far as to say foundational — concept AWS cloud architects must understand as they design solutions and it’s a sure sign of a professional that Anthony begins his book with a careful overview of the shared sec model.Anthony dives deeper into the shared security model as it applies to three main categories of AWS services:Infrastructure Services (EC2 virtual machines, Elastic Block Storage and Virtual Private Cloud)Container Services (which require the proper configuration of IAM roles for offerings such as Elastic Map Reduce and Relational Database Services)Abstracted Services (I.e., services that are accessed via API and offerings such as DynamoDB, Amazon SQS, and S3)The book’s first chapter, which is almost completely devoted to a comprehensive overview of the shared security model — what it means and how it specifically applies to different AWS services — is one of the best treatments of that topic I’ve read to date.Subsequent chapters intelligently build on the first’s foundation, guiding us through:AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM, another, commonly misunderstood topic)Securing AWS Virtual Private Clouds (VPC)Data Security in AWS (securing your data both in transit and at rest and, using data encryption CloudHSM, Amazon Macie, which is particularly useful for organizations concerned about handling sensitive information types, and AWS KMS)Securing Servers in AWS (EC2 security best practices including using IAM roles, controlling access to the server OS and other measures common to server operations generally)Securing applications built on AWS using the Web Application Firewall(among other measures)Anthony’s tour of AWS security is deep and comprehensive, and this review is only scratching the surface of the areas covered (such as auditing and monitoring using CloudWatch and Cloudtrail).By gathering all of the relevant, critical AWS security practices information under one umbrella and presenting it in an engaging and clear way, Albert Anthony has provided us with an excellent resource which, every AWS solutions architect should have in their library.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Suraj p. Oct 29, 2018
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Good book for AWS security buy it from Amazon .
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Luis Gubler Herrera Jun 25, 2018
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As a small tech entrepreneur, reliant on AWS, I cannot afford to hire security advisors on a regular basis. So I require a basic understanding of AWS security best practices and options. This book gave me a great overview which I can now complement with youtube videos and other sources. I am able to second guess security advisors as well.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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