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 insufficient IAM and key management in cloud services

Insufficient IAM can happen in a scenario where we have a large number of user identities (such as in an enterprise organization) but we fail to properly manage the identities. Or we might use cryptography to protect sensitive data but fail to follow key rotation best practices, and as a result, increase the chance of data exposure by unauthorized persons.

Here are some common consequences of insufficient IAM and key management:

  • Failing to follow the principle of least privileged, which leads to excessive permissions being granted
  • Failing to configure access controls – for example, allowing unauthorized access to sensitive data (such as PII, credit card data, healthcare data, and so on), which leads to exposed credentials
  • Not enforcing the password policy (for example, allowing short passwords, not enforcing password changes, allowing password reuse, and so on), which leads to...