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

Using key policies with grants

The last method of allowing access to your CMKs is via grants. Grants effectively allow you to programmatically delegate your permissions to another principal, but at a more granular level than key policies can.

It is not possible to create grants from within the AWS Management Console; they are programmatically created, and so you can use the AWS CLI instead. 

A grant consists of two parties, the user who creates the grant, and the grantee who then uses that grant to perform cryptographic operations. However, the permissions given to the grantee can only be equal to, or more restrictive than, those associated with the user who issued and created the grant.

For a user to be able to create and revoke grants, they must have the following permissions, either within the key policy, or given via an IAM identity-based policy, providing IAM permissions are allowed:

  • "kms:CreateGrant"
  • "kms:ListGrants"
  • "kms:RevokeGrant"

To facilitate...