Book Image

Cloud Security Handbook

By : Eyal Estrin
Book Image

Cloud Security Handbook

By: Eyal Estrin

Overview of this book

Securing resources in the cloud is challenging, given that each provider has different mechanisms and processes. Cloud Security Handbook helps you to understand how to embed security best practices in each of the infrastructure building blocks that exist in public clouds. This book will enable information security and cloud engineers to recognize the risks involved in public cloud and find out how to implement security controls as they design, build, and maintain environments in the cloud. You'll begin by learning about the shared responsibility model, cloud service models, and cloud deployment models, before getting to grips with the fundamentals of compute, storage, networking, identity management, encryption, and more. Next, you'll explore common threats and discover how to stay in compliance in cloud environments. As you make progress, you'll implement security in small-scale cloud environments through to production-ready large-scale environments, including hybrid clouds and multi-cloud environments. This book not only focuses on cloud services in general, but it also provides actual examples for using AWS, Azure, and GCP built-in services and capabilities. By the end of this cloud security book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of how to implement security in cloud environments effectively.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Securing Infrastructure Cloud Services
6
Section 2: Deep Dive into IAM, Auditing, and Encryption
10
Section 3: Threats and Compliance Management
14
Section 4: Advanced Use of Cloud Services

Introduction to encryption

Encryption is the process of converting plain text into cipher text. The easiest way to explain why we need encryption is to imagine a scenario where we wish to transfer a file containing sensitive information (such as patient medical records) between two computers over an untrusted network such as the public internet, without being revealed by an untrusted third party.

Another example is a retail website, which processes the credit card information of its customers when they purchase products from the website.

To follow the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), a standard for storing and processing credit card information, the retail company must encrypt all credit card information in transit and at rest.

Let's use a common three-tier architecture as an example – with front web servers (behind the load balancer for high availability), an application server (for processing the business logic), and a backend database...