Introduction to AWS Security

January 2020
Notices
Customers are responsible for making their own independent assessment of the
information in this document. This document: (a) is for informational purposes only, (b)
represents current AWS product offerings and practices, which are subject to change
without notice, and (c) does not create any commitments or assurances from AWS and
its affiliates, suppliers or licensors. AWS products or services are provided “as is”
without warranties, representations, or conditions of any kind, whether express or
implied. The responsibilities and liabilities of AWS to its customers are controlled by
AWS agreements, and this document is not part of, nor does it modify, any agreement
between AWS and its customers.

© 2020 Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Contents
Security of the AWS Infrastructure......................................................................................1
Security Products and Features ..........................................................................................2
Infrastructure Security ......................................................................................................2
Inventory and Configuration Management ......................................................................2
Data Encryption ................................................................................................................3
Identity and Access Control .............................................................................................3
Monitoring and Logging ...................................................................................................4
Security Products in AWS Marketplace ...........................................................................4
Security Guidance ...............................................................................................................4
Compliance ..........................................................................................................................6
Further Reading ...................................................................................................................7
Document Revisions............................................................................................................8
Abstract
Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a scalable cloud computing platform designed
for high availability and dependability, providing the tools that enable you to run a wide
range of applications. Helping to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of
your systems and data is of the utmost importance to AWS, as is maintaining your trust
and confidence. This document is intended to provide an introduction to AWS’s
approach to security, including the controls in the AWS environment and some of the
products and features that AWS makes available to customers to meet your security
objectives.
Amazon Web Services Introduction to AWS Security

Security of the AWS Infrastructure

The AWS infrastructure has been architected to be one of the most flexible and secure
cloud computing environments available today. It is designed to provide an extremely
scalable, highly reliable platform that enables customers to deploy applications and data
quickly and securely.

This infrastructure is built and managed not only according to security best practices
and standards, but also with the unique needs of the cloud in mind. AWS uses
redundant and layered controls, continuous validation and testing, and a substantial
amount of automation to ensure that the underlying infrastructure is monitored and
protected 24x7. AWS ensures that these controls are replicated in every new data
center or service.

All AWS customers benefit from a data center and network architecture built to satisfy
the requirements of our most security-sensitive customers. This means that you get a
resilient infrastructure, designed for high security, without the capital outlay and
operational overhead of a traditional data center.

AWS operates under a shared security responsibility model, where AWS is responsible
for the security of the underlying cloud infrastructure and you are responsible for
securing workloads you deploy in AWS (Figure 1). This gives you the flexibility and
agility you need to implement the most applicable security controls for your business
functions in the AWS environment. You can tightly restrict access to environments that
process sensitive data, or deploy less stringent controls for information you want to
make public.

Figure 1: AWS Shared Security Responsibility Model

Page 1
Amazon Web Services Introduction to AWS Security

Security Products and Features

AWS and its partners offer a wide range of tools and features to help you to meet your
security objectives. These tools mirror the familiar controls you deploy within your on-
premises environments. AWS provides security-specific tools and features across
network security, configuration management, access control and data security. In
addition, AWS provides monitoring and logging tools to can provide full visibility into
what is happening in your environment.

Infrastructure Security
AWS provides several security capabilities and services to increase privacy and control
network access. These include:

• Network firewalls built into Amazon VPC let you create private networks and
control access to your instances or applications. Customers can control
encryption in transit with TLS across AWS services.

• Connectivity options that enable private, or dedicated, connections from your

office or on-premises environment.

• DDoS mitigation technologies that apply at layer 3 or 4 as well as layer 7. These

can be applied as part of application and content delivery strategies.

• Automatic encryption of all traffic on the AWS global and regional networks
between AWS secured facilities.

Inventory and Configuration Management

AWS offers a range of tools to allow you to move fast, while still enabling you to ensure
that your cloud resources comply with organizational standards and best practices.
These include:

• Deployment tools to manage the creation and decommissioning of AWS

resources according to organization standards.

• Inventory and configuration management tools to identify AWS resources and

then track and manage changes to those resources over time.

• Template definition and management tools to create standard, preconfigured,

hardened virtual machines for EC2 instances.

Page 2
Amazon Web Services Introduction to AWS Security

Data Encryption
AWS offers you the ability to add a layer of security to your data at rest in the cloud,
providing scalable and efficient encryption features. These include:

• Data at rest encryption capabilities available in most AWS services, such as

Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon
ElastiCache, AWS Lambda, and Amazon SageMaker

• Flexible key management options, including AWS Key Management Service,

that allow you to choose whether to have AWS manage the encryption keys or
enable you to keep complete control over your own keys
• Dedicated, hardware-based cryptographic key storage using AWS CloudHSM,
allowing you to help satisfy your compliance requirements

• Encrypted message queues for the transmission of sensitive data using server-
side encryption (SSE) for Amazon SQS

In addition, AWS provides APIs for you to integrate encryption and data protection with
any of the services you develop or deploy in an AWS environment.

Identity and Access Control

AWS offers you capabilities to define, enforce, and manage user access policies across
AWS services. These include:

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets you define individual user
accounts with permissions across AWS resources AWS Multi-Factor
Authentication for privileged accounts, including options for software- and
hardware-based authenticators. IAM can be used to grant your employees and
applications federated access to the AWS Management Console and AWS
service APIs, using your existing identity systems, such as Microsoft Active
Directory or other partner offering.

• AWS Directory Service allows you to integrate and federate with corporate
directories to reduce administrative overhead and improve end-user experience.

• AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) allows you to manage SSO access and user
permissions to all of your accounts in AWS Organizations, centrally.

AWS provides native identity and access management integration across many of its
services, plus API integration with any of your own applications or services.

Page 3
Amazon Web Services Introduction to AWS Security

Monitoring and Logging

AWS provides tools and features that enable you to see what’s happening in your AWS
environment. These include:

• With AWS CloudTrail, you can monitor your AWS deployments in the cloud by
getting a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made via
the AWS Management Console, the AWS SDKs, the command line tools, and
higher-level AWS services. You can also identify which users and accounts
called AWS APIs for services that support CloudTrail, the source IP address the
calls were made from, and when the calls occurred.

• Amazon CloudWatch provides a reliable, scalable, and flexible monitoring

solution that you can start using within minutes. You no longer need to set up,
manage, and scale your own monitoring systems and infrastructure.

• Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for

malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect your AWS accounts and
workloads. Amazon GuardDuty exposes notifications via Amazon CloudWatch so
you can trigger an automated response or notify a human.

These tools and features give you the visibility you need to spot issues before they
impact the business and allow you to improve security posture, and reduce the risk
profile, of your environment.

Security Products in AWS Marketplace

Moving production workloads to AWS can enable organizations to improve agility,
scalability, innovation, and cost savings — while maintaining a secure environment.
AWS Marketplace offers security industry-leading products that are equivalent, identical
to, or integrate with existing controls in your on-premises environments. These products
complement the existing AWS services to enable you to deploy a comprehensive
security architecture and a more seamless experience across your cloud and on-
premises environments.

Security Guidance
AWS provides customers with guidance and expertise through online tools, resources,
support, and professional services provided by AWS and its partners.

Page 4
Amazon Web Services Introduction to AWS Security

AWS Trusted Advisor is an online tool that acts like a customized cloud expert,
helping you to configure your resources to follow best practices. Trusted Advisor
inspects your AWS environment to help close security gaps, and finds opportunities to
save money, improve system performance, and increase reliability.

AWS Account Teams provide a first point of contact, guiding you through your
deployment and implementation, and pointing you toward the right resources to resolve
security issues you may encounter.

AWS Enterprise Support provides 15-minute response time and is available 24×7 by
phone, chat, or email; along with a dedicated Technical Account Manager. This
concierge service ensures that customers’ issues are addressed as swiftly as possible.

AWS Partner Network offers hundreds of industry-leading products that are equivalent,
identical to, or integrated with existing controls in your on-premises environments.
These products complement the existing AWS services to enable you to deploy a
comprehensive security architecture and a more seamless experience across your
cloud and on-premises environments, as well as hundreds of certified AWS Consulting
Partners worldwide to help with your security and compliance needs.

AWS Professional Services houses a Security, Risk and Compliance specialty

practice to help you develop confidence and technical capability when migrating your
most sensitive workloads to the AWS Cloud. AWS Professional Services helps
customers develop security policies and practices based on well-proven designs, and
helps ensure that customers’ security design meets internal and external compliance
requirements.

AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from

independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software
that runs on AWS. AWS Marketplace Security products complement the existing AWS
services to enable you to deploy a comprehensive security architecture and a more
seamless experience across your cloud and on-premises environments.

AWS Security Bulletins provides security bulletins around current vulnerabilities and
threats, and enables customers to work with AWS security experts to address concerns
like reporting abuse, vulnerabilities, and penetration testing. We also have online
resources for vulnerability reporting.

AWS Security Documentation shows how to configure AWS services to meet your
security and compliance objectives. AWS customers benefit from a data center and

Page 5
Amazon Web Services Introduction to AWS Security

network architecture that are built to meet the requirements of the most security-
sensitive organizations.

AWS Well-Architected Framework helps cloud architects build secure, high-

performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications. The AWS Well-
Architected Framework includes a security pillar that focuses on protecting information
and systems. Key topics include confidentiality and integrity of data, identifying and
managing who can do what with privilege management, protecting systems, and
establishing controls to detect security events. Customers can use the Well Architected
service from the console or engage the services of one of the APN partners to assist
them.

AWS Well Architected Tool helps you review the state of your workloads and
compares them to the latest AWS architectural best practices. This free tool is available
in the AWS Management Console, and after answering a set of questions regarding
operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost
optimization. The AWS Well-Architected Tool then provides a plan on how to architect
for the cloud using established best practices.

Compliance
AWS Compliance empowers customers to understand the robust controls in place at
AWS to maintain security and data protection in the AWS Cloud. When systems are
built in the AWS Cloud, AWS and customers share compliance responsibilities. AWS
computing environments are continuously audited, with certifications from accreditation
bodies across geographies and verticals, including SOC 1/SSAE 16/ISAE 3402
(formerly SAS 70), SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 9001 / ISO 27001, FedRAMP, DoD SRG, and
PCI DSS Level 1.i Additionally, AWS also has assurance programs that provide
templates and control mappings to help customers establish the compliance of their
environments running on AWS, for a full list of programs, see AWS Compliance
Programs.

We can confirm that all AWS services can be used in compliance with the GDPR. This
means that, in addition to benefiting from all of the measures that AWS already takes to
maintain services security, customers can deploy AWS services as a part of their GDPR
compliance plans. AWS offers a GDPR-compliant Data Processing Addendum (GDPR
DPA), enabling you to comply with GDPR contractual obligations. The AWS GDPR DPA
is incorporated into the AWS Service Terms and applies automatically to all customers
globally who require it to comply with the GDPR. Amazon.com, Inc. is certified under the
EU-US Privacy Shield and AWS is covered under this certification. This helps

Page 6
Amazon Web Services Introduction to AWS Security

customers who choose to transfer personal data to the US to meet their data protection
obligations. Amazon.com Inc.’s certification can be found on the EU-US Privacy Shield
website: https://www.privacyshield.gov/list

By operating in an accredited environment, customers reduce the scope and cost of

audits they need to perform. AWS continuously undergoes assessments of its
underlying infrastructure—including the physical and environmental security of its
hardware and data centers—so customers can take advantage of those certifications
and simply inherent those controls.

In a traditional data center, common compliance activities are often manual, periodic
activities. These activities include verifying asset configurations and reporting on
administrative activities. Moreover, the resulting reports are out of date before they are
even published. Operating in an AWS environment allows customers to take advantage
of embedded, automated tools like AWS Security Hub, AWS Config and AWS
CloudTrail for validating compliance. These tools reduce the effort needed to perform
audits, since these tasks become routine, ongoing, and automated. By spending less
time on manual activities, you can help evolve the role of compliance in your company
from one of a necessary administrative burden, to one that manages your risk and
improves your security posture.

Further Reading
For additional information, see the following resources:

For information on … See

Key topics, research areas, and training AWS Cloud Security Learning
opportunities for cloud security on AWS

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework which AWS Cloud Adoption Framework
organizes guidance into six areas of focus:
Business, People, Governance, Platform,
Security, and Operations

Specific controls in place at AWS; how to Amazon Web Services: Risk and Compliance
integrate AWS into your existing framework

Best practices guidance on how to deploy AWS Security Best Practices

security controls within an AWS environment

Page 7
Amazon Web Services Introduction to AWS Security

For information on … See

AWS Well-Architected Framework, security AWS Well-Architected Framework Security Pillar

pillar

Document Revisions
Date Description
January 2020 Updated for latest services, resources, and technologies.

July 2015 First publication.

Page 8