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

Access Control Lists (ACLs)

Firstly, do not confuse ACLs with Network Access Control Lists (NACLs), which are used to control network traffic (discussed later in this chapter). ACLs are used in Amazon S3 and act much like resource-based policies, as these ACLs can be attached to buckets. They can also be attached to S3 objects, whereas bucket policies (discussed later in this chapter) can’t. However, ACLs are used only to control cross-account access from a different AWS account or public access.

When configuring your ACLs, you have a number of options as to who can access the object or bucket via an ACL:

  • Access for other AWS Accounts: Using this option, you can enter the email address of the account owner or the canonical ID of the AWS account.
  • Public Access: This is a pre-configured S3 group created by AWS and allows anyone with internet access to have access to your object. This should be used with extreme caution and should only be used if necessary. Ensure...