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

Configuring MFA

Each cloud provider has its own mechanism to enforce the use of MFA to protect authentication attempts against potential account breaches.

Best practices for configuring MFA using AWS IAM

The following is a list of best practices:

  • Enable MFA on the AWS account root user.
  • Enable MFA on any IAM user with high privileges to the AWS console (such as an admin role).
  • Enable MFA for AWS console access and so that users must authenticate themselves using MFA before programmatically calling for API access requests.
  • For non-sensitive environments, use a virtual MFA device (such as Google Authenticator) for better protection of your IAM users' access.
  • For sensitive environments, use a hardware MFA device or U2F security key (such as Yubikey).
  • Avoid using SMS as part of MFA (due to vulnerabilities in the SMS protocol).

For more information, please refer to the following resources:

Using multi-factor authentication (MFA) in AWS:

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