Book Image

Cloud Security Handbook

By : Eyal Estrin
Book Image

Cloud Security Handbook

By: Eyal Estrin

Overview of this book

Securing resources in the cloud is challenging, given that each provider has different mechanisms and processes. Cloud Security Handbook helps you to understand how to embed security best practices in each of the infrastructure building blocks that exist in public clouds. This book will enable information security and cloud engineers to recognize the risks involved in public cloud and find out how to implement security controls as they design, build, and maintain environments in the cloud. You'll begin by learning about the shared responsibility model, cloud service models, and cloud deployment models, before getting to grips with the fundamentals of compute, storage, networking, identity management, encryption, and more. Next, you'll explore common threats and discover how to stay in compliance in cloud environments. As you make progress, you'll implement security in small-scale cloud environments through to production-ready large-scale environments, including hybrid clouds and multi-cloud environments. This book not only focuses on cloud services in general, but it also provides actual examples for using AWS, Azure, and GCP built-in services and capabilities. By the end of this cloud security book, you'll have gained a solid understanding of how to implement security in cloud environments effectively.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Securing Infrastructure Cloud Services
6
Section 2: Deep Dive into IAM, Auditing, and Encryption
10
Section 3: Threats and Compliance Management
14
Section 4: Advanced Use of Cloud Services

Detecting and mitigating misconfigurations in cloud services

Misconfigurations are a common threat when using cloud services. Under the shared responsibility model, some of the common reasons for misconfigurations in cloud services that fall under the customer's responsibility are as follows:

  • Lack of knowledge in operating cloud services
  • Human error
  • Default settings being left in an unsecured state
  • Large and complex environments being deployed in a very short time
  • Fast and unmanaged changes to cloud environments

Here are some common examples of misconfigurations in cloud services:

  • Having overly broad IAM policies (or role-based access control policies) – for example, default permissions that allow users to conduct actions on sensitive resources, or having more permissions than needed to accomplish their daily tasks
  • Object storage being publicly accessible to anyone on the internet
  • Snapshots and VM images being publicly accessible...