Infrastructure security in Amazon Aurora
As a managed service, Amazon RDS is protected by the AWS global network security
procedures that are described in the Best Practices for Security, Identity, and Compliance
You use AWS published API calls to access Amazon Aurora through the network. Clients must support Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0. We recommend TLS 1.2 or later. Clients must also support cipher suites with perfect forward secrecy (PFS) such as Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman (DHE) or Elliptic Curve Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman (ECDHE). Most modern systems such as Java 7 and later support these modes.
Additionally, requests must be signed by using an access key ID and a secret access key that is associated with an IAM principal. Or you can use the AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) to generate temporary security credentials to sign requests.
In addition, Aurora offers features to help support infrastructure security.
Security groups
Security groups control the access that traffic has in and out of a DB cluster. By default, network access is turned off to a DB cluster. You can specify rules in a security group that allow access from an IP address range, port, or security group. After ingress rules are configured, the same rules apply to all DB clusters that are associated with that security group.
For more information, see Controlling access with security groups.
Public accessibility
When you launch a DB instance inside a virtual private cloud (VPC) based on the Amazon VPC service, you can turn on or off public accessibility for that DB instance. To designate whether the DB instance that you create has a DNS name that resolves to a public IP address, you use the Public accessibility parameter. By using this parameter, you can designate whether there is public access to the DB instance. You can modify a DB instance to turn on or off public accessibility by modifying the Public accessibility parameter.
For more information, see Hiding a DB cluster in a VPC from the internet.
If your DB instance is in a VPC but isn't publicly accessible, you can also use an AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection or an AWS Direct Connect connection to access it from a private network. For more information, see Internetwork traffic privacy.
