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

Shared responsibility model for infrastructure services

The infrastructure shared responsibility model is probably the most common model that AWS engineers are aware of today. It looks as in the following table and covers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2):

Let me break this down a bit further to help explain what this table represents. The table is split into two very distinct sections—a green area and a yellow area. This color-split defines the division of responsibility between the customer (green) and AWS (yellow).

We can also see that the customer is responsible for maintaining security in the cloud and AWS maintains the security of the cloud. But what does that mean? 

Let's take a look at what AWS is responsible for:

  • AWS Global Infrastructure: You can see that AWS provides security for the global infrastructure, including regions, availability zones, edge locations, and regional edge caches. This global...