AWS
Video: Secure an S3 Bucket
Last week I presented ‘Secure an S3 Bucket (and still use it)’ at the Phoenix DevOps meetup. I’m trying to help people understand why and how to protect every S3 bucket with data that needs to remain confidential. We hosted the meetup using Zoom. Attendee participation was strong and people said the content was on-target,
Why protecting data in S3 is hard and a least-privilege bucket policy to help
Securing data in S3 is a nightmare for many people. This post describes why it’s hard and a least-privilege bucket policy to help.
Better Network-based Identity and Access Control in the Cloud
This is the second post in a series about how the Cloud is changing how we manage network access control and application identity. In particular, my thesis is that the use of a network-centric identity such as an IP address or subnet to identify an application is waning and are being replaced by identities provided
Cloud Pattern: Secure Inbox using S3 and KMS
With the Secure Inbox pattern, organization A can store and deliver objects of arbitrary size to partners while narrowly scoping what partner data its own teams and applications have access to. Organization B can receive work generated by partners reliably and securely while maintaining tight control over who has access to that data via KMS encryption key and bucket policy.
Debugging AccessDenied in AWS IAM
Ugh… that looks like it could be the start of a two hour or two week long goose chase. Understanding why access was denied and implementing a secure solution can be complicated. Sometimes it’s not even clear where to start and what to do when you get stuck. Update: An improved version of this Debugging
Preventing 3rd-Parties from Leaking Data in Cloud – Attunity
Let’s examine three controls customers can adopt to help keep control of their data stored in S3 or another Cloud object store while still making it accessible or manageable by third parties.
Provable Security at AWS
Helping customers answer security questions in the general case and preventing bad configurations from making it into the wild is one of the main themes at AWS’ inaugural Security conference, re:Inforce. They have done this by operationalizing the ‘Provable Security’ field for their services.
Consuming Secrets in Applications
Explore the three main methods, advantages, and disadvantages for applications to consume (use) secrets stored in a vault: environment variable, file, and API.
The First Secret Problem
Your application’s compute execution role is its identity in the Cloud. Use it to bootstrap access to runtime secrets in addition to authenticating to other provider-managed services.
The Promise of Clouds and Optionality
The real magic Cloud providers give you is optionality to build the right thing.
Starting Carefully with Service Control Policy
Let’s say you’re excited about using Service Control Policy to govern what goes on in your organization’s AWS accounts and improve compliance, but you don’t want to break the world when you roll it out. How do you do that? Start by identifying a single account that serves an active, but low risk use case
Improving Enterprise Security and Compliance with AWS Organizations
Let’s examine how AWS Organizations helps you manage and improve some aspects of Enterprise-wide security and compliance. This discussion builds on the previous post detailing how AWS Organizations help you manage many AWS accounts and their costs. AWS Organizations provide a number of additional security features, the one we’ll examine today is Service Control Policy.
How should I organize my AWS accounts?
Previously, I answered ‘How many AWS accounts do I need?’ with: Create however many accounts your organization needs to establish safe security and fault boundaries that enable your organization’s primary use cases and expected level of team/application autonomy. Today, we’ll explore the tradeoffs of AWS account organization methods using an example that covers one approach
How many AWS accounts do I need?
Today, I’d like to answer a common question people ask about AWS accounts: How many AWS accounts do we need? What’s an AWS Account? First let’s start with some background about what an AWS Account is and the features it provides. An AWS Account is a logical container that owns resources in the AWS Cloud.