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 abstract services

The final model we will look at is the abstract shared responsibility model, shown here:

Right away, from a visual perspective, we can see that the shift in responsibility leans even greater toward AWS.

This model retains the level of security AWS has to manage from both of the previous two models (infrastructure and container), with the addition of server-side encryption and network traffic protection. Example AWS services that fall within this model are the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon S3.

These are defined as abstract services as almost all the control and management of the service has been abstracted away from the end customer; we simply access these services through endpoints. Customers do not have access to the underlying operating system (infrastructure) or to the actual platform that is running these services (container); instead, the customer is presented with the service frontend or endpoint...