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)

Encryption and Decryption Fundamentals


Encryption of data can be defined as converting data known as plaintext into code, often known as ciphertext that is unreadable by anyone except the intended audience. Data encryption is the most popular way of adding another layer of security for preventing unauthorized access and use of data. Encryption is a two-step process: in the first step, data is encrypted using a combination of an encryption key and an encryption algorithm, in the second step, data is decrypted using a combination of a decryption key and a decryption algorithm to view data in its original form.

The following three components are required for encryption. These three components work hand in hand for securing your data.

  • Data to be encrypted

  • Algorithm for encryption

  • Encryption keys to be used alongside the data and the algorithm

There are two types of encryption available, symmetric and asymmetric. Asymmetric encryption is also known as public key encryption. Symmetric encryption uses...