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

Best practices for using encryption in transit

The idea behind encryption in transit is to allow two parties to share messages over a publicly exposed network, in a secure way, while retaining message confidentiality and integrity.

IPSec

IPSec is the most commonly used protocol for encryption at transit, mainly for site-to-site VPN and VPN tunnels. IPSec resides on layer 3 of the OSI model.

The following are some best practices regarding IPSec:

  • Use the IKEv2 protocol for security association (SA).
  • Use AES-GCM for encryption.
  • Use HMAC-SHA256 (or higher) for integrity.
  • When supported by both the client and the server, use certificate-based authentication instead of a pre-shared key.
  • Use an up-to-date VPN client (to avoid known vulnerabilities).

For more information, please refer to the following resources:

Internet Protocol Security (IPSec):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPsec

Guide to IPSec VPNs:

https://csrc.nist.gov/publications...