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

Gaining federated access to the AWS Management Console

For this example, let's say we are using MS-AD. We may have tens or even hundreds of users who may need access to our AWS resources via the Management Console, but instead of creating AWS user accounts for each and every user, we can set up IAM federation using IAM roles and SAML. MS-AD is a SAML 2.0-compliant IdP, and using IAM roles you can allow the IdP to grant MS-AD identities access and permissions to access the AWS Management Console to perform tasks and actions.

To begin with, you need to configure your enterprise network as a SAML provider to AWS. As a part of this configuration, you will need to do the following:

  1. Configure MS-AD to work with a SAML IdP, for example, Windows Active Directory Domain Services.
  2. You must then create a metadata.xml document via your IdP, which is a key document in the configuration. This metadata.xml document also includes authentication keys.
  3. Using your organization's portal, you must...