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

Using social federation

Social federation allows you to build your applications to request temporary credentials. Much like in the previous discussion relating to enterprise federation where we used SAML, these temporary credentials with social federation map to an AWS IAM role that has the relevant permission to access your DynamoDB database.

Instead of using your internal ADFS servers to authenticate users, the users of your app can use widely known social IdPs, for example, Facebook, Amazon, or Google. In fact, as long as the IdP is OpenID Connect (OIDC)-compatible, then you can use it for authentication. Using these social IdPs, the user can get an authentication token, which in turn is exchanged for temporary credentials, and these credentials are associated with your specific IAM role with the required permissions.

When creating applications that require social IdPs for authentication, you need to write specific code to interact with the IdP to allow you to call the AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity...