Book Image

AWS: Security Best Practices on AWS

By : Albert Anthony
Book Image

AWS: Security Best Practices on AWS

By: Albert Anthony

Overview of this book

With organizations moving their workloads, applications, and infrastructure to the cloud at an unprecedented pace, security of all these resources has been a paradigm shift for all those who are responsible for security; experts, novices, and apprentices alike. This book focuses on using native AWS security features and managed AWS services to help you achieve continuous security. Starting with an introduction to Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to secure your AWS VPC, you will quickly explore various components that make up VPC such as subnets, security groups, various gateways, and many more. You will also learn to protect data in the AWS platform for various AWS services by encrypting and decrypting data in AWS. You will also learn to secure web and mobile applications in AWS cloud. This book is ideal for all IT professionals, system administrators, security analysts, solution architects, and chief information security officers who are responsible for securing workloads in AWS for their organizations. This book is embedded with useful assessments that will help you revise the concepts you have learned in this book. This book is repurposed for this specific learning experience from material from Packt's Mastering AWS Security, written by Albert Anthony.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Signing AWS API Requests


API requests sent to AWS should include a digital signature that contains information about the requestor's identity. This identity is verified by AWS for all API requests. This process is known as signing API requests. For all API requests generated through AWS tools, such as AWS SDKs and AWS Command Line Interface, the digital signature is included for you, however, for all API requests that you create manually, you have to include this digital signature yourself.

In other words, you need to sign your HTTP requests when you create them. You need to do this if you are writing a code in a programming language that does not have an AWS SDK. Furthermore, if you need to control what is sent along with an API request, you can choose to sign requests yourself.

A digital signature includes your AWS access keys, that is, your secret access key and access key ID, along with API information. An API request should reach the AWS within 15 minutes of the timestamp stored in this...