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

Customer-managed CMKs

Finally, we have customer-managed keys, and these keys offer the greatest level of flexibility and control. Unlike AWS-owned and AWS-managed CMKs, with customer-managed keys, you have total control and governance over these keys. You are able to create, disable, or delete the key, configure the key policies associated with your key, configure grants, and also alter and adjust the key rotation periods and view full usage through the audit history of the key. 

These keys can be used by other AWS services that integrate with KMS and can be used instead of the AWS-managed keys if desired. Due to the additional flexibility offered by customer-managed keys, there is an additional charge for using your customer CMKs, whereas the other CMKs discussed can be used free of charge. 

Let's try and create a customer-managed CMK. It is a simple process, so let's take a look step by step:

  1. From within the AWS Management Console, make sure you are in the region...