Operational Best Practices for CIS Top 20
Conformance packs provide a general-purpose compliance framework designed to enable you to create security, operational or cost-optimization governance checks using managed or custom AWS Config rules and AWS Config remediation actions. Conformance Packs, as sample templates, are not designed to fully ensure compliance with a specific governance or compliance standard. You are responsible for making your own assessment of whether your use of the Services meets applicable legal and regulatory requirements.
The following provides a sample mapping between the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Top 20 Critical Security Controls and AWS managed Config rules. Each Config rule applies to a specific AWS resource, and relates to one or more CIS Top 20 controls. A CIS Top 20 control can be related to multiple Config rules. Refer to the table below for more detail and guidance related to these mappings.
This Conformance Pack was validated by AWS Security Assurance Services LLC (AWS SAS), which is a team of Payment Card Industry Qualified Security Assessors (QSAs), HITRUST Certified Common Security Framework Practitioners (CCSFPs), and compliance professionals certified to provide guidance and assessments for various industry frameworks. AWS SAS professionals designed this Conformance Pack to enable a customer to align to a subset of the CIS Top 20.
| Control ID | AWS Config Rule | Guidance |
|---|---|---|
| CIS.2 | Use AWS Systems Manager Associations to help with inventory of software platforms and applications within an organization. AWS Systems Manager assigns a configuration state to your managed instances and allows you to set baselines of operating system patch levels, software installations, application configurations, and other details about your environment. | |
| CIS.2 | Enable this rule to help with identification and documentation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) vulnerabilities. The rule checks if Amazon EC2 instance patch compliance in AWS Systems Manager as required by your organization’s policies and procedures. | |
| CIS.2 | This rule ensures the security groups are attached to an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance or to an ENI. This rule helps monitoring unused security groups in the inventory and the management of your environment. | |
| CIS.2 | Enable this rule to help with the baseline configuration of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances by checking whether Amazon EC2 instances have been stopped for more than the allowed number of days, according to your organization’s standards. | |
| CIS.2 | This rule ensures that Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes that are attached to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances are marked for deletion when an instance is terminated. If an Amazon EBS volume isn’t deleted when the instance that it’s attached to is terminated, it may violate the concept of least functionality. | |
| CIS.2 | This rule ensures Elastic IPs allocated to a Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) are attached to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or in-use Elastic Network Interfaces. This rule helps monitor unused EIPs in your environment. | |
| CIS.3 | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| CIS.3 | Amazon GuardDuty helps you understand the impact of an incident by classifying findings by severity: low, medium, and high. You can use these classifications for determining remediation strategies and priorities. This rule allows you to optionally set the daysLowSev (Config Default: 30), daysMediumSev (Config Default: 7), and daysHighSev (Config Default: 1) for non-archived findings, as required by your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.3 | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| CIS.4 | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| CIS.4 | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties with access permissions and authorizations, restricting policies from containing "Effect": "Allow" with "Action": "*" over "Resource": "*". Allowing users to have more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| CIS.4 | Access to systems and assets can be controlled by checking that the root user does not have access keys attached to their AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role. Ensure that the root access keys are deleted. Instead, create and use role-based AWS accounts to help to incorporate the principle of least functionality. | |
| CIS.4 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring hardware MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| CIS.4 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for a user name and password. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| CIS.4 | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| CIS.5 | An inventory of the software platforms and applications within the organization is possible by managing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with AWS Systems Manager. Use AWS Systems Manager to provide detailed system configurations, operating system patch levels, services name and type, software installations, application name, publisher and version, and other details about your environment. | |
| CIS.5 | Use AWS Systems Manager Associations to help with inventory of software platforms and applications within an organization. AWS Systems Manager assigns a configuration state to your managed instances and allows you to set baselines of operating system patch levels, software installations, application configurations, and other details about your environment. | |
| CIS.5 | Enable this rule to help with identification and documentation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) vulnerabilities. The rule checks if Amazon EC2 instance patch compliance in AWS Systems Manager as required by your organization’s policies and procedures. | |
| CIS.5 | To protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Redshift clusters. You must also ensure that required configurations are deployed on Amazon Redshift clusters. The audit logging should be enabled to provide information about connections and user activities in the database. This rule requires that a value is set for clusterDbEncrypted (Config Default : TRUE), and loggingEnabled (Config Default: TRUE). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.5 | This rule ensures that Amazon Redshift clusters have the preferred settings for your organization. Specifically, that they have preferred maintenance windows and automated snapshot retention periods for the database. This rule requires you to set the allowVersionUpgrade. The default is true. It also lets you optionally set the preferredMaintenanceWindow (the default is sat:16:00-sat:16:30), and the automatedSnapshotRetentionPeriod (the default is 1). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.6 | API Gateway logging displays detailed views of users who accessed the API and the way they accessed the API. This insight enables visibility of user activities. | |
| CIS.6 | Use Amazon CloudWatch to centrally collect and manage log event activity. Inclusion of AWS CloudTrail data provides details of API call activity within your AWS account. | |
| CIS.6 | AWS CloudTrail can help in non-repudiation by recording AWS Management Console actions and API calls. You can identify the users and AWS accounts that called an AWS service, the source IP address where the calls generated, and the timings of the calls. Details of captured data are seen within AWS CloudTrail Record Contents. | |
| CIS.6 | Utilize AWS CloudTrail log file validation to check the integrity of CloudTrail logs. Log file validation helps determine if a log file was modified or deleted or unchanged after CloudTrail delivered it. This feature is built using industry standard algorithms: SHA-256 for hashing and SHA-256 with RSA for digital signing. This makes it computationally infeasible to modify, delete or forge CloudTrail log files without detection. | |
| CIS.6 | The collection of Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data events helps in detecting any anomalous activity. The details include AWS account information that accessed an Amazon S3 bucket, IP address, and time of event. | |
| CIS.6 | Amazon CloudWatch alarms alert when a metric breaches the threshold for a specified number of evaluation periods. The alarm performs one or more actions based on the value of the metric or expression relative to a threshold over a number of time periods. This rule requires a value for alarmActionRequired (Config Default: True), insufficientDataActionRequired (Config Default: True), okActionRequired (Config Default: False). The actual value should reflect the alarm actions for your environment. | |
| CIS.6 | Elastic Load Balancing activity is a central point of communication within an environment. Ensure ELB logging is enabled. The collected data provides detailed information about requests sent to the ELB. Each log contains information such as the time the request was received, the client's IP address, latencies, request paths, and server responses. | |
| CIS.6 | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| CIS.6 | Amazon GuardDuty helps you understand the impact of an incident by classifying findings by severity: low, medium, and high. You can use these classifications for determining remediation strategies and priorities. This rule allows you to optionally set the daysLowSev (Config Default: 30), daysMediumSev (Config Default: 7), and daysHighSev (Config Default: 1) for non-archived findings, as required by your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.6 | AWS CloudTrail records AWS Management Console actions and API calls. You can identify which users and accounts called AWS, the source IP address from where the calls were made, and when the calls occurred. CloudTrail will deliver log files from all AWS Regions to your S3 bucket if MULTI_REGION_CLOUD_TRAIL_ENABLED is enabled. Additionally, when AWS launches a new Region, CloudTrail will create the same trail in the new Region. As a result, you will receive log files containing API activity for the new Region without taking any action. | |
| CIS.6 | To protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Redshift clusters. You must also ensure that required configurations are deployed on Amazon Redshift clusters. The audit logging should be enabled to provide information about connections and user activities in the database. This rule requires that a value is set for clusterDbEncrypted (Config Default : TRUE), and loggingEnabled (Config Default: TRUE). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.6 | Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) server access logging provides a method to monitor the network for potential cybersecurity events. The events are monitored by capturing detailed records for the requests that are made to an Amazon S3 bucket. Each access log record provides details about a single access request. The details include the requester, bucket name, request time, request action, response status, and an error code, if relevant. | |
| CIS.6 | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| CIS.6 | The VPC flow logs provide detailed records for information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). By default, the flow log record includes values for the different components of the IP flow, including the source, destination, and protocol. | |
| CIS.8 | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring DMS replication instances cannot be publicly accessed. DMS replication instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring EBS snapshots are not publicly restorable. EBS volume snapshots can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EC2 instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon OpenSearch Service (OpenSearch Service) Domains are within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). An OpenSearch Service domain within an Amazon VPC enables secure communication between OpenSearch Service and other services within the Amazon VPC without the need for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon EMR cluster master nodes cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EMR cluster master nodes can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.9 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups can help manage network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Not allowing ingress (or remote) traffic from 0.0.0.0/0 to port 22 on your resources help you restricting remote access. | |
| CIS.9 | Deploy Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to enable secure communication between an instance and other services within the amazon VPC, without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. All traffic remains securely within the AWS Cloud. Because of their logical isolation, domains that reside within anAmazon VPC have an extra layer of security when compared to domains that use public endpoints. Assign Amazon EC2 instances to an Amazon VPC to properly manage access. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that internet gateways are only attached to authorized Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Internet gateways allow bi-directional internet access to and from the Amazon VPC that can potentially lead to unauthorized access to Amazon VPC resources. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring AWS Lambda functions cannot be publicly accessed. Public access can potentially lead to degradation of availability of resources. | |
| CIS.9 | Deploy AWS Lambda functions within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for a secure communication between a function and other services within the Amazon VPC. With this configuration, there is no requirement for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. All the traffic remains securely within the AWS Cloud. Because of their logical isolation, domains that reside within an Amazon VPC have an extra layer of security when compared to domains that use public endpoints. To properly manage access, AWS Lambda functions should be assigned to a VPC. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information, and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Redshift clusters are not public. Amazon Redshift clusters can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups. Not restricting access to ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. This rule allows you to optionally set blockedPort1 - blockedPort5 parameters (Config Defaults: 20,21,3389,3306,4333). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets cannot be publicly accessed. This rule helps keeping sensitive data safe from unauthorized remote users by preventing public access. This rule allows you to optionally set the ignorePublicAcls (Config Default: True), blockPublicPolicy (Config Default: True), blockPublicAcls (Config Default: True), and restrictPublicBuckets parameters (Config Default: True). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by only allowing authorized users, processes, and devices access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. The management of access should be consistent with the classification of the data. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by only allowing authorized users, processes, and devices access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. The management of access should be consistent with the classification of the data. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon SageMaker notebooks do not allow direct internet access. By preventing direct internet access, you can keep sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. | |
| CIS.9 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups can help in the management of network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Restricting all the traffic on the default security group helps in restricting remote access to your AWS resources. | |
| CIS.9 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups. Not restricting access on ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. By restricting access to resources within a security group from the internet (0.0.0.0/0) remote access can be controlled to internal systems. | |
| CIS.10 | The backup feature of Amazon RDS creates backups of your databases and transaction logs. Amazon RDS automatically creates a storage volume snapshot of your DB instance, backing up the entire DB instance. The system allows you to set specific retention periods to meet your resilience requirements. | |
| CIS.10 | Enable this rule to check that information has been backed up. It also maintains the backups by ensuring that point-in-time recovery is enabled in Amazon DynamoDB. The recovery maintains continuous backups of your table for the last 35 days. | |
| CIS.10 | When automatic backups are enabled, Amazon ElastiCache creates a backup of the cluster on a daily basis. The backup can be retained for a number of days as specified by your organization. Automatic backups can help guard against data loss. If a failure occurs, you can create a new cluster, which restores your data from the most recent backup. | |
| CIS.10 | Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Cross-Region Replication (CRR) supports maintaining adequate capacity and availability. CRR enables automatic, asynchronous copying of objects across Amazon S3 buckets to help ensure that data availability is maintained. | |
| CIS.10 | Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket versioning helps keep multiple variants of an object in the same Amazon S3 bucket. Use versioning to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in your Amazon S3 bucket. Versioning helps you to easily recover from unintended user actions and application failures. | |
| CIS.11 | This rule ensures the security groups are attached to an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance or to an ENI. This rule helps monitoring unused security groups in the inventory and the management of your environment. | |
| CIS.11 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups can help manage network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Not allowing ingress (or remote) traffic from 0.0.0.0/0 to port 22 on your resources help you restricting remote access. | |
| CIS.11 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups. Not restricting access to ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. This rule allows you to optionally set blockedPort1 - blockedPort5 parameters (Config Defaults: 20,21,3389,3306,4333). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.11 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups can help in the management of network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Restricting all the traffic on the default security group helps in restricting remote access to your AWS resources. | |
| CIS.11 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups. Not restricting access on ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. By restricting access to resources within a security group from the internet (0.0.0.0/0) remote access can be controlled to internal systems. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring DMS replication instances cannot be publicly accessed. DMS replication instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring EBS snapshots are not publicly restorable. EBS volume snapshots can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EC2 instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon OpenSearch Service (OpenSearch Service) Domains are within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). An OpenSearch Service domain within an Amazon VPC enables secure communication between OpenSearch Service and other services within the Amazon VPC without the need for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon EMR cluster master nodes cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EMR cluster master nodes can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.12 | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| CIS.12 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups can help manage network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Not allowing ingress (or remote) traffic from 0.0.0.0/0 to port 22 on your resources help you restricting remote access. | |
| CIS.12 | Deploy Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to enable secure communication between an instance and other services within the amazon VPC, without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. All traffic remains securely within the AWS Cloud. Because of their logical isolation, domains that reside within anAmazon VPC have an extra layer of security when compared to domains that use public endpoints. Assign Amazon EC2 instances to an Amazon VPC to properly manage access. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that internet gateways are only attached to authorized Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Internet gateways allow bi-directional internet access to and from the Amazon VPC that can potentially lead to unauthorized access to Amazon VPC resources. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring AWS Lambda functions cannot be publicly accessed. Public access can potentially lead to degradation of availability of resources. | |
| CIS.12 | Deploy AWS Lambda functions within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for a secure communication between a function and other services within the Amazon VPC. With this configuration, there is no requirement for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. All the traffic remains securely within the AWS Cloud. Because of their logical isolation, domains that reside within an Amazon VPC have an extra layer of security when compared to domains that use public endpoints. To properly manage access, AWS Lambda functions should be assigned to a VPC. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information, and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Redshift clusters are not public. Amazon Redshift clusters can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups. Not restricting access to ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. This rule allows you to optionally set blockedPort1 - blockedPort5 parameters (Config Defaults: 20,21,3389,3306,4333). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets cannot be publicly accessed. This rule helps keeping sensitive data safe from unauthorized remote users by preventing public access. This rule allows you to optionally set the ignorePublicAcls (Config Default: True), blockPublicPolicy (Config Default: True), blockPublicAcls (Config Default: True), and restrictPublicBuckets parameters (Config Default: True). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by only allowing authorized users, processes, and devices access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. The management of access should be consistent with the classification of the data. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by only allowing authorized users, processes, and devices access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. The management of access should be consistent with the classification of the data. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon SageMaker notebooks do not allow direct internet access. By preventing direct internet access, you can keep sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. | |
| CIS.12 | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| CIS.12 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups can help in the management of network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Restricting all the traffic on the default security group helps in restricting remote access to your AWS resources. | |
| CIS.12 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups. Not restricting access on ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. By restricting access to resources within a security group from the internet (0.0.0.0/0) remote access can be controlled to internal systems. | |
| CIS.13 | Ensure network integrity is protected by ensuring X509 certificates are issued by AWS ACM. These certificates must be valid and unexpired. This rule requires a value for daysToExpiration (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.13 | To help protect data in transit, ensure that your Application Load Balancer automatically redirects unencrypted HTTP requests to HTTPS. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.13 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your API Gateway stage’s cache. Because sensitive data can be captured for the API method, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.13 | Because sensitive data may exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your AWS CloudTrail trails. | |
| CIS.13 | To help protect sensitive data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon CloudWatch Log Groups. | |
| CIS.13 | To help protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in these volumes, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.13 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). | |
| CIS.13 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon OpenSearch Service (OpenSearch Service) domains. | |
| CIS.13 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at transit, ensure encryption is enabled for your Elastic Load Balancing. Use AWS Certificate Manager to manage, provision and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates with AWS services and internal resources. | |
| CIS.13 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. | |
| CIS.13 | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| CIS.13 | To help protect data at rest, ensure necessary customer master keys (CMKs) are not scheduled for deletion in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Because key deletion is necessary at times, this rule can assist in checking for all keys scheduled for deletion, in case a key was scheduled unintentionally. | |
| CIS.13 | Ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) snapshots. Because sensitive data can exist at rest, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.13 | To help protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in Amazon RDS instances, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.13 | To protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Redshift clusters. You must also ensure that required configurations are deployed on Amazon Redshift clusters. The audit logging should be enabled to provide information about connections and user activities in the database. This rule requires that a value is set for clusterDbEncrypted (Config Default : TRUE), and loggingEnabled (Config Default: TRUE). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.13 | Ensure that your Amazon Redshift clusters require TLS/SSL encryption to connect to SQL clients. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.13 | Ensure that your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket has lock enabled, by default. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in S3 buckets, enforce object locks at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.13 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in Amazon S3 buckets, enable encryption to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.13 | To help protect data in transit, ensure that your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets require requests to use Secure Socket Layer (SSL). Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.13 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is enabled for your SageMaker endpoint. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in SageMaker endpoint, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.13 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is enabled for your SageMaker notebook. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in SageMaker notebook, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.13 | To help protect data at rest, ensure that your Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics require encryption using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Because sensitive data can exist at rest in published messages, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.14 | Ensure network integrity is protected by ensuring X509 certificates are issued by AWS ACM. These certificates must be valid and unexpired. This rule requires a value for daysToExpiration (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.14 | To help protect data in transit, ensure that your Application Load Balancer automatically redirects unencrypted HTTP requests to HTTPS. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.14 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your API Gateway stage’s cache. Because sensitive data can be captured for the API method, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.14 | Because sensitive data may exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your AWS CloudTrail trails. | |
| CIS.14 | To help protect sensitive data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon CloudWatch Log Groups. | |
| CIS.14 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring DMS replication instances cannot be publicly accessed. DMS replication instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.14 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring EBS snapshots are not publicly restorable. EBS volume snapshots can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.14 | To help protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in these volumes, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.14 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EC2 instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.14 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). | |
| CIS.14 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon OpenSearch Service (OpenSearch Service) domains. | |
| CIS.14 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at transit, ensure encryption is enabled for your Elastic Load Balancing. Use AWS Certificate Manager to manage, provision and deploy public and private SSL/TLS certificates with AWS services and internal resources. | |
| CIS.14 | The access permissions and authorizations can be managed and incorporated with the principles of least privilege and separation of duties, by enabling Kerberos for Amazon EMR clusters. In Kerberos, the services and the users that need to authenticate are known as principals. The principals exist within a Kerberos realm. Within the realm, a Kerberos server is known as the key distribution center (KDC). It provides a means for the principals to authenticate. The KDC authenticates by issuing tickets for authentication. The KDC maintains a database of the principals within its realm, their passwords, and other administrative information about each principal. | |
| CIS.14 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. | |
| CIS.14 | To help protect data at rest, ensure necessary customer master keys (CMKs) are not scheduled for deletion in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Because key deletion is necessary at times, this rule can assist in checking for all keys scheduled for deletion, in case a key was scheduled unintentionally. | |
| CIS.14 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information, and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.14 | Ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) snapshots. Because sensitive data can exist at rest, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.14 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.14 | To help protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in Amazon RDS instances, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.14 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Redshift clusters are not public. Amazon Redshift clusters can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CIS.14 | Ensure that your Amazon Redshift clusters require TLS/SSL encryption to connect to SQL clients. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.14 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets cannot be publicly accessed. This rule helps keeping sensitive data safe from unauthorized remote users by preventing public access. This rule allows you to optionally set the ignorePublicAcls (Config Default: True), blockPublicPolicy (Config Default: True), blockPublicAcls (Config Default: True), and restrictPublicBuckets parameters (Config Default: True). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.14 | Ensure that your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket has lock enabled, by default. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in S3 buckets, enforce object locks at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.14 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by enabling s3_ bucket_policy_grantee_check. This rule checks that the access granted by the Amazon S3 bucket is restricted by any of the AWS principals, federated users, service principals, IP addresses, or Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) IDs that you provide. | |
| CIS.14 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by only allowing authorized users, processes, and devices access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. The management of access should be consistent with the classification of the data. | |
| CIS.14 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by only allowing authorized users, processes, and devices access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. The management of access should be consistent with the classification of the data. | |
| CIS.14 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in Amazon S3 buckets, enable encryption to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.14 | To help protect data in transit, ensure that your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets require requests to use Secure Socket Layer (SSL). Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.14 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is enabled for your SageMaker endpoint. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in SageMaker endpoint, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.14 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is enabled for your SageMaker notebook. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in SageMaker notebook, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.14 | To help protect data at rest, ensure that your Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics require encryption using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Because sensitive data can exist at rest in published messages, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CIS.16 | The credentials are audited for authorized devices, users, and processes by ensuring IAM access keys are rotated as specified by the organizational policy. Changing the access keys on a regular schedule is a security best practice. It shortens the period an access key is active and reduces the business impact if the keys are compromised. This rule requires an access key rotation value (Config Default: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.16 | AWS CloudTrail can help in non-repudiation by recording AWS Management Console actions and API calls. You can identify the users and AWS accounts that called an AWS service, the source IP address where the calls generated, and the timings of the calls. Details of captured data are seen within AWS CloudTrail Record Contents. | |
| CIS.16 | Amazon CloudWatch alarms alert when a metric breaches the threshold for a specified number of evaluation periods. The alarm performs one or more actions based on the value of the metric or expression relative to a threshold over a number of time periods. This rule requires a value for alarmActionRequired (Config Default: True), insufficientDataActionRequired (Config Default: True), okActionRequired (Config Default: False). The actual value should reflect the alarm actions for your environment. | |
| CIS.16 | The access permissions and authorizations can be managed and incorporated with the principles of least privilege and separation of duties, by enabling Kerberos for Amazon EMR clusters. In Kerberos, the services and the users that need to authenticate are known as principals. The principals exist within a Kerberos realm. Within the realm, a Kerberos server is known as the key distribution center (KDC). It provides a means for the principals to authenticate. The KDC authenticates by issuing tickets for authentication. The KDC maintains a database of the principals within its realm, their passwords, and other administrative information about each principal. | |
| CIS.16 | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| CIS.16 | Amazon GuardDuty helps you understand the impact of an incident by classifying findings by severity: low, medium, and high. You can use these classifications for determining remediation strategies and priorities. This rule allows you to optionally set the daysLowSev (Config Default: 30), daysMediumSev (Config Default: 7), and daysHighSev (Config Default: 1) for non-archived findings, as required by your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.16 | The identities and the credentials are issued, managed, and verified based on an organizational IAM password policy. They meet or exceed requirements as stated by NIST SP 800-63 and the Centers for Internet Security (CIS) AWS Foundations Benchmark for password strength. This rule allows you to optionally set RequireUppercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireLowercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireSymbols (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireNumbers (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), MinimumPasswordLength (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 14), PasswordReusePrevention (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 24), and MaxPasswordAge (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 90) for your IAM Password Policy. The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.16 | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties with access permissions and authorizations, restricting policies from containing "Effect": "Allow" with "Action": "*" over "Resource": "*". Allowing users to have more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| CIS.16 | Access to systems and assets can be controlled by checking that the root user does not have access keys attached to their AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role. Ensure that the root access keys are deleted. Instead, create and use role-based AWS accounts to help to incorporate the principle of least functionality. | |
| CIS.16 | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you restrict access permissions and authorizations, by ensuring users are members of at least one group. Allowing users more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| CIS.16 | Enable this rule to restrict access to resources in the AWS Cloud. This rule ensures multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled for all users. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of a user name and password. Reduce the incidents of compromised accounts by requiring MFA for users. | |
| CIS.16 | This rule ensures AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies are attached only to groups or roles to control access to systems and assets. Assigning privileges at the group or the role level helps to reduce opportunity for an identity to receive or retain excessive privileges. | |
| CIS.16 | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you with access permissions and authorizations by checking for IAM passwords and access keys that are not used for a specified time period. If these unused credentials are identified, you should disable and/or remove the credentials, as this may violate the principle of least privilege. This rule requires you to set a value to the maxCredentialUsageAge (Config Default: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.16 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that MFA is enabled for all AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users that have a console password. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for users, you can reduce incidents of compromised accounts and keep sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. | |
| CIS.16 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring hardware MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| CIS.16 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for a user name and password. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| CIS.16 | This rule ensures AWS Secrets Manager secrets have rotation enabled. Rotating secrets on a regular schedule can shorten the period a secret is active, and potentially reduce the business impact if the secret is compromised. | |
| CIS.16 | This rule ensures that AWS Secrets Manager secrets have rotated successfully according to the rotation schedule. Rotating secrets on a regular schedule can shorten the period that a secret is active, and potentially reduce the business impact if it is compromised. | |
| CIS.16 | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| CIS.18 | Ensure authentication credentials AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY do not exist within AWS Codebuild project environments. Do not store these variables in clear text. Storing these variables in clear text leads to unintended data exposure and unauthorized access. | |
| CIS.18 | Ensure the GitHub or Bitbucket source repository URL does not contain personal access tokens, sign-in credentials within AWS Codebuild project environments. Use OAuth instead of personal access tokens or sign-in credentials to grant authorization for accessing GitHub or Bitbucket repositories. | |
| CIS.19 | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| CIS.19 | Amazon GuardDuty helps you understand the impact of an incident by classifying findings by severity: low, medium, and high. You can use these classifications for determining remediation strategies and priorities. This rule allows you to optionally set the daysLowSev (Config Default: 30), daysMediumSev (Config Default: 7), and daysHighSev (Config Default: 1) for non-archived findings, as required by your organization's policies. | |
| CIS.19 | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| CIS.2 | An inventory of the software platforms and applications within the organization is possible by managing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with AWS Systems Manager. Use AWS Systems Manager to provide detailed system configurations, operating system patch levels, services name and type, software installations, application name, publisher and version, and other details about your environment. |
Template
The template is available on GitHub: Operational Best Practices for CIS Top 20
