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

Summary

This chapter took you through the various types of access policies, their structure, and how to effectively and securely manage access to your AWS resources. You need to be fully aware of the different policies that exist within AWS and how they work together to either grant or deny access to resources based on different actions.  

Regardless of which policy you are using, one key point is to always implement security based on the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP). This essentially means that you should only ever grant permissions for an identity that they actually need, and no more. For example, let's say a user needed access to be able to stop and terminate instances using ec2:stopinstances and ec2:terminateinstances. Then, you wouldn’t issue a policy that allowed access to all ec2 APIs—for example, ec2:*. If this happens, you are increasing the potential of security threats, especially from an internal perspective. For the certification exam...