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 4 – Identity and Access Management (IAM)

This domain will focus solely on everything access control-related regarding the IAM service and how to control access to your AWS resources. IAM must be understood inside out and it is essential that you have the knowledge and confidence to spot errors in IAM JSON policies:

  • 4.1: Design and implement a scalable authorization and authentication system to access AWS resources: I can't emphasize enough the importance of understanding IAM at a deep level. This point will test your knowledge of authentication and authorization mechanisms, from multi-factor authorization to implementing conditional-based IAM policies used for cross-account access.
  • 4.2: Troubleshoot an authorization and authentication system to access the AWS resources domain: Here, you will be required to demonstrate your ability to resolve complex permission-based issues with your AWS resources.

Access control is covered in detail in the exam, so you must be familiar with all things relating to access management, and specifically the IAM service. You need to be able to read access policies to determine the resulting access of that policy.