AWS Security Blog

Category: Amazon EC2

How to Monitor AWS Account Configuration Changes and API Calls to Amazon EC2 Security Groups

You can use AWS security controls to detect and mitigate risks to your AWS resources. The purpose of each security control is defined by its control objective. For example, the control objective of an Amazon VPC security group is to permit only designated traffic to enter or leave a network interface. Let’s say you have […]

How to Manage Secrets for Amazon EC2 Container Service–Based Applications by Using Amazon S3 and Docker

Docker enables you to package, ship, and run applications as containers. This approach provides a comprehensive abstraction layer that allows developers to “containerize” or “package” any application and have it run on any infrastructure. Docker containers are analogous to shipping containers in that they provide a standard and consistent way of shipping almost anything. One […]

How to Automatically Tag Amazon EC2 Resources in Response to API Events

Note: As of March 28, 2017,  Amazon EC2 supports tagging on creation, enforced tag usage, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resource-level permissions, and enforced volume encryption. See New – Tag EC2 Instances & EBS Volumes on Creation on the AWS Blog for more information. Access to manage Amazon EC2 instances can be controlled using […]

How to Configure Your EC2 Instances to Automatically Join a Microsoft Active Directory Domain

Seamlessly joining Windows EC2 instances in AWS to a Microsoft Active Directory domain is a common scenario, especially for enterprises building a hybrid cloud architecture. With AWS Directory Service, you can target an Active Directory domain managed on-premises or within AWS. How to Connect Your On-Premises Active Directory to AWS Using AD Connector takes you […]

Granting Permission to Launch EC2 Instances with IAM Roles (PassRole Permission)

When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance, you can associate an AWS IAM role with the instance to give applications or CLI commands that run on the instance permissions that are defined by the role. When a role is associated with an instance, EC2 obtains temporary security credentials for the role you associated with the […]

Demystifying EC2 Resource-Level Permissions

Note: As of March 28, 2017,  Amazon EC2 supports tagging on creation, enforced tag usage, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resource-level permissions, and enforced volume encryption. See New – Tag EC2 Instances & EBS Volumes on Creation on the AWS Blog for more information. AWS announced initial support for Amazon EC2 resource-level permissions in July of […]

Analyzing OS-Related Security Events on EC2 with SplunkStorm

September 3, 2021: This blog post was updated to clarify that the S3 bucket name DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET is a placeholder name that readers should replace with their own S3 bucket name. An important objective of analyzing OS-generated data is to detect, correlate, and report on potential security events. Several partner solutions available in AWS Marketplace provide this functionality, […]

Amazon EC2 Resource-Level Permissions for RunInstances

Yesterday the EC2 team announced fine grained controls for managing RunInstances. This release enables you to set fine-grained controls over the AMIs, Snapshots, Subnets, and other resources that can be used when creating instances and the types of instances and volumes that users can create when using the RunInstances API. This is a major milestone […]