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

Encryption at rest

When at-rest encryption is configured, your database instance, tables, and any snapshots or automated backups taken of that database will be encrypted using AES-256 (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption. You should also note that you can only encrypt an RDS database during its creation, so be sure to understand your encryption requirements before creating your database.

Configuring at-rest encryption is enabled by a simple checkbox from the AWS Management Console:

  1. From the AWS Management Console, select RDS under the Database category:

  1. Select Create database:

  1. Scroll down to the Additional configuration section and expand the category by selecting it:

  1. From here, you can scroll down to the Encryption section:

From here, you can either select a customer-managed key or, as in the preceding example, you can select the AWS-managed key for the service, aws/rds. You should be aware that once you have selected your key, you cannot change it to a different key...