Book Image

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Exam Guide

By : Stuart Scott
Book Image

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Exam Guide

By: Stuart Scott

Overview of this book

AWS Certified Security – Specialty is a certification exam to validate your expertise in advanced cloud security. With an ever-increasing demand for AWS security skills in the cloud market, this certification can help you advance in your career. This book helps you prepare for the exam and gain certification by guiding you through building complex security solutions. From understanding the AWS shared responsibility model and identity and access management to implementing access management best practices, you'll gradually build on your skills. The book will also delve into securing instances and the principles of securing VPC infrastructure. Covering security threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks such as the DDoS attack, you'll discover how to mitigate these at different layers. You'll then cover compliance and learn how to use AWS to audit and govern infrastructure, as well as to focus on monitoring your environment by implementing logging mechanisms and tracking data. Later, you'll explore how to implement data encryption as you get hands-on with securing a live environment. Finally, you'll discover security best practices that will assist you in making critical decisions relating to cost, security,and deployment complexity. By the end of this AWS security book, you'll have the skills to pass the exam and design secure AWS solutions.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Exam and Preparation
3
Section 2: Security Responsibility and Access Management
8
Section 3: Security - a Layered Approach
15
Section 4: Monitoring, Logging, and Auditing
18
Section 5: Best Practices and Automation
21
Section 6: Encryption and Data Security

Domain 3 – Infrastructure security

The infrastructure security domain assesses your ability to architect security best practices across your AWS architecture, from an individual host, to your VPC, and then to the outer reaches of your edge infrastructure. This domain carries the highest percentage mark across your certification, so it's key that you understand all the concepts and components:

  • 3.1: Design edge security on AWS: A thorough understanding of Amazon CloudFront and its security capabilities and controls is a must, in addition to other edge services offered by AWS.
  • 3.2: Design and implement a secure network infrastructure: Here, you will be tested on your knowledge of Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) infrastructure, and how to architect an environment to meet different security needs using route tables, Network Access Control Lists (NACLs), bastion hosts, NAT gateways, Internet Gateway (IGWs), and security groups.
  • 3.3: Troubleshoot a secure network infrastructure: This follows on from point 3.2, which ensures that you have a deep level of security architecture, enabling you to quickly pinpoint the most likely cause of misconfiguration from a security perspective.
  • 3.4: Design and implement host-based security: This will focus on security controls that can be enabled and configured on individual hosts, such as your Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.

A VPC is one of the first elements you are likely to build within your AWS account. Understanding how to protect your VPC is key in maintaining a level of protection over the rest of your resources running within it.