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)

Security of Servers


Let us look at best practices to secure your servers in AWS cloud:

  • Use IAM roles for EC2: Always use IAM roles instead of IAM users for applications running on your EC2 instances. Assign a role to your EC2 instance for accessing other AWS services. This way, credentials for the role will not be stored in your EC2 instance like they are in case of an IAM user.

  • Use ELB: Put all your EC2 instances behind AWS ELB when applicable. In this configuration, you will shield your instances from receiving traffic directly from the internet and they will receive traffic only from the AWS ELB.

  • Security group configuration: A security group is a virtual firewall for your instance. It is imperative to configure it to secure your instances. Avoid allow all traffic, that is, opening up all ports for CIDR range of 0.0.0.0/0 in your security group. Instead, allow a limited range of IP addresses to access your EC2 instances. Similarly, for your web servers, allow traffic only on port 80 and...