AWS Security Blog

In the weeks leading up to re:Inforce, we’ll share conversations we’ve had with people at AWS who will be presenting at the event so you can learn more about them and some of the interesting work that they’re doing. You’ve worn a lot of hats at AWS. What do you do in your current role, […]

At AWS, our customers’ security and privacy is of the highest importance and we continue to provide transparency into our security and privacy posture. Following our first SOC 2 Type 1 Privacy report released in December 2018, AWS is proud to announce the release of the Spring 2019 SOC 2 Type 1 Privacy report. The […]

We’re celebrating the addition of 31 new services in scope with our latest SOC report, pushing AWS past the century mark for the first time – with 104 total services in scope, to be exact! These services are now available under our System and Organizational Controls (SOC) 1, 2, and 3 audits, including the 31 […]

As a security best practice, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) recommends that you use temporary security credentials from AWS Security Token Service (STS) when you access your AWS resources. Temporary credentials are short-term credentials generated dynamically and provided to the user upon request. Today, one of the most widely used mechanisms for requesting temporary […]

Do you encrypt your Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) customer master keys (CMKs) for regulatory or compliance reasons? Do you launch instances with encrypted root volumes? Do you create a golden AMI and distribute it to other accounts in your organization for standardizing application-specific Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon […]

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides the information that you need to launch an instance (a virtual server) in your AWS environment. There are a number of AMIs on the AWS Marketplace (such as Amazon Linux, Red Hat or Ubuntu) that you can use to launch an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance. When […]

Note from May 10, 2019: We’ve updated a code sample for accuracy. Today, AWS Secrets Manager introduced a client-side caching library for Python that improves the availability and latency of accessing and distributing credentials to your applications. It can also help you reduce the cost associated with retrieving secrets. In this post, I’ll walk you […]

Note: BYOK is helpful for certain use cases, but I recommend that you familiarize yourself with KMS best practices before you adopt this approach. You can review best practices in the AWS Key Management Services Best Practices (.pdf) whitepaper. May 14, 2019: We’ve updated a sentence to clarify that this solution does not include instructions […]

In this post, I’ll show you how to migrate an encryption wallet for an Oracle database installed on Amazon EC2 from using an outside HSM to using AWS CloudHSM. Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) for Oracle is a common use case for Hardware Security Module (HSM) devices like AWS CloudHSM. Oracle TDE uses what is called […]

Leading up to AWS Summit Sydney, we’re sharing our conversation with Paul Hawkins, who helped put together the summit’s “Secure” track, so you can learn more about him and some of the interesting work that he’s doing. What does a day in the life of an AWS Security Solutions Architect look like? That’s an interesting […]