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

What is AWS federated access?

Federated access within AWS allows access to your AWS resources without having the need to create an associated IAM user account. Instead, credentials are federated by an identity provider (IdP), for example, your corporate accounts, such as your Microsoft Active Directory (MS-AD) accounts (enterprise federation), or even by a social IdP, for example, using the credentials from your Google, Facebook, or even Amazon account (social identity federation).

Federation allows you to manage your account centrally and reduces the administration required in creating multiple accounts to access your AWS resources.  

There are a number of different options that organizations use to implement federation. We will be looking at two of the most common ones:

  • SAML federation
  • Social federation

We will then look at how Amazon Cognito uses federation to manage access to web and mobile applications with ease.

We'll start by explaining how you can allow users...