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

DynamoDB encryption options

When you create your DynamoDB database, you have three options to encrypt your database with. Let's take a look at these options in the console:

  1. From the AWS Management Console, select DynamoDB from the Database category:

  1. Select Create table:

  1. You will then be presented with the following screen:

  1. Uncheck the Use default settings checkbox under Table settings.
  2. Scroll down to the Encryption At Rest section:

Here, you can see that there are three options:

    • DEFAULT: This is a key that is owned by Amazon DynamoDB and provides the default encryption for your tables. It is free of charge and is stored outside of your AWS account.
    • KMS - Customer managed CMK: Select this option if you want to use your own customer-managed KMS key, which is stored in your own AWS account. Using your own CMK incurs a cost.
    • KMS - AWS managed CMK: This final option allows you to use an AWS-managed key. Again, this also incurs a cost, and it is also stored in your...