1. Security on AWS

Shared Responsibility Model

IAM: users and Groups

Root user

• The user created when the AWS account is created
• The credentials are the email & password used when signing up for the AWS account
• By default, the root user has full administrative rights & access to every part of the account

Best practices for the root user

• We should not use the root user for daily work & administration
  • another account that has admin rights should be used
• The root user account should not access keys. Delete them if they exist
• The root user should use MFA

IAM User

• A new user has an implicit deny for all AWS services and requires a policy be added to grant them access
• Users receive unique credentials (username, password & access keys)
• Users can have IAM policies applied directly to them, or they can be a member of a group that has policies attached
• With policies, an explicit deny always overrides an explicit allow from attached policies
  • for instance, AWS will ignore all policies attached to a user if a single deny-all policy is added

Best practices for users

• Never store or "pass" your credentials to EC2 instances - use SSH forwarding
• MFA can and should be used for users' accounts
• Access credentials are unique and should never be shared

IAM Groups

• Allow for policy assignments to multiple users at the same time
• We may assign permission to a group
• More organized and efficient way's to manage users and policies
• Cannot be nested
• Users may be the members of multiple groups

Rest practices for groups

• Organize users by functions
• Assign IAM policies to groups, not individual users

IAM policies

• A document that states one or more permissions (JSON formatted)
• An explicit deny always overrides an explicit allow.
• This allows for the users of a deny-all policy to quickly restricts all access a user may have

Managed policies

• AWS provides pre-built policy templates to assign to users & groups
• Examples include:
  • Administrator access: Full access to all AWS resources
  • Power-user access: Admin access, except it does not allow user/group management
  • Read-only access: Only view AWS resources (e.g., user can only view what is in S3 buckets)

Custom policies

• You can create custom IAM policies using the policy generator or write them from scratch
• More than one policy can be attached to a user/group at the same time
• Policies can not be directly attached to AWS resources (such as an EC2 instance)

IAM Roles

• Temporary security credentials in AWS managed by Security Token Service (STS)
• Another entity can assume the specific permissions defined by the Roles
• These entities include:
  • AWS resources (e.g., EC2 instance)
  • A user outside of AWS needs temporary access

Roles with AWS services

• We must use role because policies cannot be attached directly to AWS resources
• Services can only have one role attached at a time
• You should never pass or store credentials to an EC2 instance - instead, use role
• You may change the role of running EC2 instances through the console or URI

Other uses of Roles

• Cross-account access (delegation)
  • Provide access to another AWS account from another account
• Identity Federation
  • Users ordside AWS can assume a role for temporary access to aws account and resources
• These users assume an identify provider access role
• Example identity providers:
  • Active Directory
  • Single sign on providers: like Facebook, Google, Amazon

IAM: Multi -Factor Authentication (MFA)

What is Multi -Factor Authentication?

• A security method that requires multiple seperate authentications
• One authentication option we nave with AWS uses time-based codes.
• Familiar examples of MFA: ATM to withdraw morey, both physical card & a PIN

AWS Scenario

• Enable MFA in order to access AWS console:
  • Users type in their username and password as well as a time-based code
  • The username and password are not enough to be authenticated
  • The time-based code can be on the user's computer, smartphone or a device they carry around
• This should be turn on for users who have access to the console
• MFA Delete for S3 obrects can be used to mitigate acidental deletions

Amazon 53: Bucket Policies

• JSON statement used to allow or deny permission across obfects in a single bucket

Elements of a Pucket Policies

Effect

• Define whether to allow or deny the action

Action

• Actions we want to allow or deny
• Important An explicit deny always override an explicit allow

Resource

• Used to identity resources (like a bucket & object) with ARNs

Principal

• An account or users that this policy applies to
• Specific to S3 bucket policies, not user policies

Sid (Optional)

• Statement identifier that provides a way to indude information about an individual statement

Condition (Optional)

• Specify condition for when the policy is in effect

S3 Data Integrity

Versioning

• Enable to store new versions for every modification or deletion
  • Help with accidental deletion by creating Dersions for deleted obrects

Replication

• Object are replicated across AZ automatically
• Standard and Infrequent Acces options at differents price options

Multi-Factor Authentication Delete (MFA Delete)

• MFA to prevent accidental deletion of objects
  • Requires Versioning enable on a bucket
• We can enforce the use of MFA in order to permanently delete an object
• Only root account (the bucket owner) can access this feature

Amazon VPC: Security Group and NACLS

VPC (Virtual Private Clond)

• Isolate workloads into separented VPCs (based on applications , department, test, dev, etc)

Security Groups

• Group instances with similar functions
• Stateful = every allowed TCP or UDP ports will be allowed in both directions.

NACLS (Network Access Control list)

• Stateless = inbound and outbound rules are separate, no dependencies
• Granular control over IP protocols (allow and deny rules for inbound and outbound evaluated in order)
• Work with security groups (NACLs applies for the whole subnet, security groups app to members)
• Ephemeral ports: Client requests depending on OS(port 1024-65535)

Host-based Fire walls: Os-level frewalls as needed

AWS STS: Federation

Secure Token Service (STS)

An extensions of IAM that allows for management of temporary security credentials for IAM users or federated users

• It allows for granular control of how long the access remains active
  • Fifteen minutes to one hour (default = 1 hour)
• Credentials are not stored with the user or service granted temporary access -A token is attached to the access request of API call
• Beneficial in a mumber of ways
  • Low risk of credentials being exposed (not distributed)
  • Do not have to create IAM identities for every user
  • Because they are temporary in nature, there is no need to rotate keys
• STS uses a single endpoint
  • This single endpoint resides in us-east-1
  • Latency can be reduced by using STS API calls to regions that support them
  • Temporary credentials have global scope, just like IAM

Identity Federation

• Federation: Providing a non-AWS user temporary AWS access by linking that user's indentity accross multiple identity systems
• Federation with Third-Party Providers:
  • Most commonly used in web and mohile applications
  • Amazon Cognito allows for creation of unique identities for users
  • Uses identity providers to federate them: Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc
• Establishing Single-Sign-On (SSO) using SAML2.0
  • Most commonly used in enterprise environment with an existing directory system
    • Active Drectory,...
  • Federated users can access AWS resources using their corporate domain account
  • Federation also aids user management by allowing central management of accouts

Amazon Inspector

Inspector can

• Analyze the behavior of your AWS account
• Test network accessibility and security state
• Assesses for secunty vulnerabitaties and deviations from best pratices
• Target: A collection of Ecz instances
• Assessment template: Composed of security rules and produce a list of findings
• Assessment run: Applying the assegment tiplate to a tanget
• Findings: Security report, organized by severity level
• Features:
  • Configuration scanning and activity monitoring engine:
    • Determines what a target look like, its behavior, and any dependencies it may have
    • Identifies security and compliances issues

TO BE UPDATED

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