AWS Security Blog

I am pleased to announce that AWS has successfully completed a new assessment, ISO/IEC 27018:2014, a code of practice regarding the protection of personally identifiable information (PII) in the cloud and our adherence to the commitments we make to our customers with regard to their content. This privacy code of practice is now an integral […]

As a cloud support engineer, I am frequently asked this question: “How can I lock down my user’s Amazon EC2 access to a single VPC?” This blog post will answer the question and explain how you can help control this level of access through the use of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies and […]

October 12, 2023: This blog is out of date. Please refer to this post instead: How to restrict Amazon S3 bucket access to a specific IAM role When it comes to securing access to your Amazon S3 buckets, AWS provides various options. You can utilize access control lists (ACLs), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) […]

AWS’s industry-leading security strength benefits you in many ways, one of which is by using a platform that is audited extensively by independent third-party assessors. At times, these audits confirm we can meet new requirements, even as they are issued, and this is the case for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines 800-171, […]

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are sometimes used by malicious actors in an attempt to flood a network, system, or application with more traffic, connections, or requests than it can handle. Not surprisingly, customers often ask us how we can help them protect their applications against these types of attacks. To help you optimize […]

July 21, 2020: We’ve updated this post to include AWS Managed Microsoft AD, as well as Simple AD. AWS Directory Service allows you to create a standalone, highly available AWS-managed directory called Simple AD in a matter of minutes. With Simple AD, you can centrally manage user accounts and group memberships for Amazon EC2 instances […]

Important note from July 18, 2019: The original version of this blog uses Python2.x scripts. We now have Python3.x scripts that you can download here: Form-based authentication version of the Python3.x script AD FS 3.0-specific version of the Python3.x script Note from May 24, 2019: The features and services described in this post have changed since […]

The PCI requirements for encryption for data in transit are different for private networks than they are for public networks. When correctly designed, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a logically isolated portion of the AWS infrastructure that allows you to extend your existing data center network to the cloud, can be considered a private network, […]

February 22, 2022: s2n has been renamed to s2n-tls. See details. At Amazon Web Services, strong encryption is one of our standard features, and an integral aspect of that is the TLS (previously called SSL) encryption protocol. TLS is used with every AWS API and is also available directly to customers of many AWS services […]

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices recommend using IAM users or roles to access your AWS resources, instead of using your root credentials. If you follow this best practice, though, how can you monitor for root activity and take action if such activity occurs? AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch provide the solution. In […]