Posted by
Justin Foster in
Cloud
Apr 30th, 2013 |
No Comments
Over the past weeks we have been reviewing the top 10 tips for securing instances running on Amazon Web Services. We walked through the critical controls as part of the AWS shared security model. As noted in these tips, host-based security capabilities such as intrusion detection and prevention, anti-malware, and integrity monitoring are critical for protecting your applications and data.
While some of these recommended tips involve configuring and tuning AWS itself, some require the use of third-party tools. So when looking for candidates for securing your cloud projects, here are five questions...
Posted by
Dave Asprey in
Cloud
Apr 29th, 2013 |
No Comments
Amazon Web Services did it again. Its new service, OpsWorks, is an application management service with the ability to manage applications of any scale or complexity in the AWS cloud. This integrated system manages resource provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, software updates, and monitoring and access control.
The service is another offering from the leader in cloud computing poised to disrupt a market, in this case, Platform as a Service (PaaS). OpsWorks will compete directly with PaaS mainstays Heroku, Engine Yard and AppFog. Given the speculation that AWS is working...
Posted by
Mark Nunnikhoven in
Cloud
Apr 17th, 2013 |
No Comments
In last week’s post, we gave a high level overview of vulnerability assessments. This type of assessment results in a prioritized list of vulnerabilities in your deployment. It’s an excellent first step in knowing the state of your deployment.
The next step you should take is to conduct a penetration test.
The Test
A penetration test (or simply, pentest) is an active test of your defenses. You’re hiring a trusted 3rd party to attack your deployment in order to find exploitable vulnerabilities. The theory is that it’s better to have someone working with you do this before...
Posted by
Justin Foster in
Cloud
Apr 10th, 2013 |
No Comments
In this series, Mark and I have talked about hardening your AWS resources (both inside and outside of your instances) and preforming ongoing monitoring. The last two tips are around measuring your overall security so that you can understand your risks and measure your progress.
It may be an old adage but it still rings true… You can’t manage what you can’t measure. You may have layer upon layer of defense, but unless you conduct a vulnerability assessment you don’t really know where you stand.
Assess Your IaaS
Conducting a vulnerability assessment includes identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities...
Posted by
Mark Nunnikhoven in
Cloud
Apr 3rd, 2013 |
No Comments
Last week, we tackled the basics of monitoring your AWS deployment. This week we’re going to shift gears and take a look at encryption.
Data Drives Your Business
Your business runs on data and information. One of the biggest concerns about moving to the public cloud is the safety of that data. With a little due diligence, you can put those concerns to bed.
There are three key steps to protections your data in the cloud:
Identify and classify your data
Protect your data at rest
Protect your data in motion
Identify & Classify
You can’t take steps to protect your data until you...
Posted by
Justin Foster in
Cloud
Mar 27th, 2013 |
No Comments
So far in this series, we have shared tips for securing access to your AWS resources, hardening your system and protecting with a firewall and IPS combination. At this point, your applications running on Amazon Web Services are resilient to attack, but it is critical that ongoing monitoring be a part of your overall security strategy. Monitoring ensures that you are aware of intrusions that have made it past your lines of defense, and that your application continues to operate correctly.
Start With Statistics
AWS provides CloudWatch, an excellent service to monitor your overall system health....
Posted by
Mark Nunnikhoven in
Cloud
Mar 20th, 2013 |
No Comments
So far in this series, Justin and I have provided tips for securing the foundations of your AWS deployment. Taken together, these tips work to reduce the overall attack surface—the area exposed to the outside world—of your application. Now it’s time to add the next layer of controls to you application, starting with a host-based intrusion prevention system or IPS.
Why IPS?
At this point we’ve already disabled unused services on our instances and have blocked any unnecessary inbound ports using our firewalls. This is a fantastic start but it really only reduces the area we present...
Posted by
Justin Foster in
Cloud
Mar 13th, 2013 |
No Comments
In this series, Mark and I have covered tips for securing your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, building hardened Amazon Machine Images and locking down the operating system. Now we turn our attention to one of the most simple, yet powerful ways to secure your instances: the firewall.
Implementing a firewall policy is just basic survival when it comes to internet-facing servers. AWS provides Security Groups as a mandatory whitelisting firewall to limit inbound open ports on EC2. You can allow specific ports/protocols for an IP or CIDR. Within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) the firewall adds...
Posted by
Mark Nunnikhoven in
Cloud
Mar 6th, 2013 |
No Comments
Last week, Justin covered some of the high level issues around AMI development. This week, we’re going to take a look at how to protect the guest operating system running on your EC2 and VPC instances.
AWS Recommendations
AWS had published quite a few papers around their services. AWS Security Best Practices [PDF] and AWS Risk and Compliance [PDF] stand out as excellent security resources. In the best practices paper, under the section “Secure your Application” (pg. 4), they make a few recommendations which boil down to:
patch ASAP
use recommended secure settings for operating...
Posted by
Justin Foster in
Cloud
Feb 28th, 2013 |
2 Comments
In our previous top tips for AWS security we looked at hardening access to your AWS resources through proper use of IAM, policies and authentication. In this tip we turn our focus to hardening your Amazon Machine Images (AMI).
No matter whether you pronounce it A.M.I or Ahhh-ME (as the AWS folks do) your machine images are an important part of building applications on AWS. AMIs form the foundation of ‘Instances’ or the running machines in EC2 or VPC. AMIs can be private, communal or from the AWS marketplace.
AMIs may include only the operating system, foundation for your application...
