AWS Security Blog

Category: Intermediate (200)

Considerations for the security operations center in the cloud: deployment using AWS security services

Welcome back. If you’re joining this series for the first time, we recommend that you read the first blog post in this series, Considerations for security operations in the cloud, for some context on what we will discuss and deploy in this blog post. In the earlier post, we talked through the different operating models […]

How to use granular geographic match rules with AWS WAF

How to use granular geographic match rules with AWS WAF

In November 2022, AWS introduced support for granular geographic (geo) match conditions in AWS WAF. This blog post demonstrates how you can use this new feature to customize your AWS WAF implementation and improve the security posture of your protected application. AWS WAF provides inline inspection of inbound traffic at the application layer. You can […]

AWS IAM logo

How to monitor and query IAM resources at scale – Part 2

In this post, we continue with our recommendations for using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) APIs. In part 1 of this two-part series, we described how you could create IAM resources and use them soon after for authorization decisions. We also described options for monitoring and responding to IAM resource changes for entire accounts. […]

AWS IAM logo

How to monitor and query IAM resources at scale – Part 1

March 7, 2023: We’ve fixed a typo in the blog post. In this two-part blog post, we’ll provide recommendations for using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) APIs, and we’ll share useful details on how IAM works so that you can use it more effectively. For example, you might be creating new IAM resources such as roles […]

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How to use AWS Private Certificate Authority short-lived certificate mode

AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA) is a highly available, fully managed private certificate authority (CA) service that you can use to create CA hierarchies and issue private X.509 certificates. You can use these private certificates to establish endpoints for TLS encryption, cryptographically sign code, authenticate users, and more. Based on customer feedback for […]

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Improve security of Amazon RDS master database credentials using AWS Secrets Manager

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it simpler to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the AWS Cloud. AWS Secrets Manager helps you manage, retrieve, and rotate database credentials, API keys, and other secrets. Amazon RDS now offers integration with Secrets Manager to manage master database credentials. You no longer have to manage master database credentials, such as […]

The anatomy of ransomware event targeting data residing in Amazon S3

Ransomware events have significantly increased over the past several years and captured worldwide attention. Traditional ransomware events affect mostly infrastructure resources like servers, databases, and connected file systems. However, there are also non-traditional events that you may not be as familiar with, such as ransomware events that target data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service […]

AWS IAM Identity Center

Define a custom session duration and terminate active sessions in IAM Identity Center

September 12, 2023: This post has been updated to reflect the increased maximum session duration limit from 7 days to 90 days in IAM Identity Center. Managing access to accounts and applications requires a balance between delivering simple, convenient access and managing the risks associated with active user sessions. Based on your organization’s needs, you […]

Visualize AWS WAF logs with an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard

AWS WAF is a web application firewall service that helps you protect your applications from common exploits that could affect your application’s availability and your security posture. One of the most useful ways to detect and respond to malicious web activity is to collect and analyze AWS WAF logs. You can perform this task conveniently […]

Figure 1: Architecture diagram

How to run AWS CloudHSM workloads in container environments

January 25, 2023: We updated this post to reflect the fact that CloudHSM SDK3 does not support serverless environments and we strongly recommend deploying SDK5. AWS CloudHSM provides hardware security modules (HSMs) in the AWS Cloud. With CloudHSM, you can generate and use your own encryption keys in the AWS Cloud, and manage your keys […]