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 insecure APIs in cloud services

In today's world, all modern developments are based on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to communicate between system components, mostly based on web services (using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)) or REST APIs. The fact that APIs are publicly exposed makes them an easy target for attackers trying to access a system and cause damage. Some common consequences of insecure APIs are as follows:

  • Data breaches
  • Data leakage
  • Damage to data integrity
  • Denial of service

Some common examples of attacks exploiting insecure APIs are as follows:

  • Due to a lack of input validation, an attacker can misuse an exposed API and inject malicious code through the API into a backend database.
  • Due to a lack of input validation, an attacker can perform an SQL injection through an exposed API and exfiltrate customer data from a retail site.
  • Due to a lack of application access control mechanisms...