AWS Security Blog

Category: Intermediate (200)

Use AWS Secrets Manager to simplify the management of private certificates

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) lets you easily provision, manage, and deploy public and private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with Amazon Web Services (AWS) services and your internal connected resources. For private certificates, AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority (ACM PCA) can be used to create private CA hierarchies, including root […]

Figure 1: Architectural overview

Signing executables with HSM-backed certificates using multiple Windows instances

Feb 17, 2025: This blog post references AWS CloudHSM Client SDK 3, which is no longer the recommended version. AWS recommends that you use the latest version, AWS CloudHSM Client SDK 5, which provides updated functionality and commands. We are currently working on an updated blog post for CloudHSM Client SDK 5. See the AWS […]

How to deploy public ACM certificates across multiple AWS accounts and Regions using AWS CloudFormation StackSets

December, 6, 2022: The post had been updated to reflect the updates on Lambda function runtime in the cloudformation template from version 3.6 to 3.9, as 3.6 is deprecated, as well as updates in Lambda deployment package filename in the same template. In this post, I take you through the steps to deploy a public […]

Use a single AWS Managed Microsoft AD for Amazon RDS for SQL Server instances in multiple Regions

Many Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers use Active Directory to centralize user authentication and authorization for a variety of applications and services. For these customers, Active Directory is a critical piece of their IT infrastructure. AWS offers AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, to provide a highly […]

How to bulk import users and groups from CSV into AWS IAM Identity Center

September 12, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more about the name change here. When you connect an external identity provider (IdP) to AWS IAM Identity Center using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0 standard, you must create […]

Automate domain join for Amazon EC2 instances from multiple AWS accounts and Regions

As organizations scale up their Amazon Web Services (AWS) presence, they are faced with the challenge of administering user identities and controlling access across multiple accounts and Regions. As this presence grows, managing user access to cloud resources such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) becomes increasingly complex. AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active […]

Get started with fine-grained access control in Amazon Elasticsearch Service

September 9, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) provides fine-grained access control, powered by the Open Distro for Elasticsearch security plugin. The security plugin adds Kibana authentication and access control at the cluster, index, document, and field levels that can help you secure […]

Configuring AWS VPN for UK public sector use

In this post, we explain the United Kingdom (UK) National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)’s guidance on VPN profiles configuration, and how the configuration parameters for the AWS Virtual Private Network (AWS VPN) align with the NCSC guidance. At the end of the post, there are links to code to deploy the AWS VPN in line […]

How to deploy the AWS Solution for Security Hub Automated Response and Remediation

In this blog post I show you how to deploy the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Solution for Security Hub Automated Response and Remediation. The first installment of this series was about how to create playbooks using Amazon CloudWatch Events, AWS Lambda functions, and AWS Security Hub custom actions that you can run manually based on […]

Set up centralized monitoring for DDoS events and auto-remediate noncompliant resources

When you build applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it’s a common security practice to isolate production resources from non-production resources by logically grouping them into functional units or organizational units. There are many benefits to this approach, such as making it easier to implement the principal of least privilege, or reducing the scope of […]