Operational Best Practices for SWIFT CSP
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 SWIFT's Customer Security Programme (CSP) and AWS managed Config rules. Each AWS Config rule applies to a specific AWS resource, and relates to one or more SWIFT CSP controls. A SWIFT CSP control can be related to multiple AWS Config rules. Refer to the table below for more detail and guidance related to these mappings.
| Control ID | AWS Config Rule | Guidance |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | 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. | |
| 1.1 | 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. | |
| 1.1 | This rule checks if running Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances are launched using amazon key pairs. This can assist in reducing the risk of compromised credentials. Amazon EC2 Instances without key pairs can still be accessed using Session Manager or Browser based SSH connection via the AWS console. | |
| 1.1 | 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 an Amazon 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. | |
| 1.1 | 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. | |
| 1.1 | This rule ensures that Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network access control lists are in use. Monitoring for unused network access control lists can assist in accurate inventory and management of your environment. | |
| 1.1 | 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. | |
| 1.2 | 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 blocked actions on all AWS Key Management Service keys. Having more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. This rule allows you to set the blockedActionsPatterns parameter. (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: kms:Decrypt, kms:ReEncryptFrom). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies | |
| 1.2 | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties with access permissions and authorizations, by ensuring that IAM groups have at least one user. Placing users in groups based on their associated permissions or job function is one way to incorporate least privilege. | |
| 1.2 | Ensure an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user, IAM role or IAM group does not have an inline policy to allow blocked actions on all AWS Key Management Service keys. AWS recommends to use managed policies instead of inline policies. The managed policies allow reusability, versioning, rolling back, and delegating permissions management. This rule allows you to set the blockedActionsPatterns parameter. (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: kms:Decrypt, kms:ReEncryptFrom). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| 1.2 | Ensure an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user, IAM role or IAM group does not have an inline policy to control access to systems and assets. AWS recommends to use managed policies instead of inline policies. The managed policies allow reusability, versioning and rolling back, and delegating permissions management. | |
| 1.2 | 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. | |
| 1.2 | 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. | |
| 1.2 | Access to remote server administration ports in your Network Access Control Lists (NACLs), such as port 22 (SSH) and port 3389 (RDP), should not be publicly accessible, as this may allow unintended access to resources within your VPC. | |
| 1.2 | This rule checks to see if Access Control Lists (ACLs) are used to for access control on Amazon S3 Buckets. ACLs are legacy access control mechanisms for Amazon S3 buckets that predate AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Instead of ACLs, it is a best practice to use IAM policies or S3 bucket policies to more easily manage access to your S3 buckets. | |
| 1.2 | 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. | |
| 1.2 | 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. | |
| 1.2 | To assist with logging requirements in your environment, ensure to enable delivery status notifications are enabled for your Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics. Logging message delivery status helps provide better operational insight, such as the following: Knowing whether a message was delivered to the Amazon SNS endpoint, identifying the response sent from the Amazon SNS endpoint to Amazon SNS, and determining the message dwell time (the time between the publish timestamp and just before handing off to an Amazon SNS endpoint). | |
| 1.4 | 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. | |
| 1.4 | 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. | |
| 1.4 | 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. | |
| 1.4 | 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. | |
| 1.4 | 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 at the bucket level. | |
| 1.4 | 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. | |
| 1.4 | 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. | |
| 1.4 | Ensure AWS Systems Manager (SSM) documents are not public, as this may allow unintended access to your SSM documents. A public SSM document can expose information about your account, resources and internal processes. | |
| 2.3 | Ensure the Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) method is enabled to help protect access and control of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance metadata. The IMDSv2 method uses session-based controls. With IMDSv2, controls can be implemented to restrict changes to instance metadata. | |
| 2.3 | This rule checks if your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances have multiple ENIs. Having multiple ENIs can cause dual-homed instances, meaning instances that have multiple subnets. This can add network security complexity and introduce unintended network paths and access. | |
| 2.3 | Ensure the Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) HTTP PUT response is restricted to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance. With IMDSv2, the PUT response that contains the secret token by default cannot travel outside the instance, because the Metadata response hop limit is set to 1 (Config default). If this value is greater than 1, the token is able to leave the EC2 instance. | |
| 2.3 | 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. | |
| 2.3 | Centralized management of AWS accounts within AWS Organizations helps to ensure that accounts are compliant. The lack of centralized account governance may lead to inconsistent account configurations, which may expose resources and sensitive data. | |
| 2.3 | 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. | |
| 2.3 | 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. | |
| 2.3 | 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. | |
| 2.3 | If unused credentials exist in AWS Secrets Manager, you should disable and/or remove the credentials, as this may violate the principle of least privilege. This rule allows you to set a value to the unusedForDays (Config Default: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| 2.5A | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| 2.5A | 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. | |
| 2.5A | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). | |
| 2.5A | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| 2.5A | 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. | |
| 2.5A | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Kinesis Streams. | |
| 2.5A | 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. | |
| 2.5A | Ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in an Amazon S3 bucket, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| 2.5A | 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. | |
| 4.1 | 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 AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard 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. | |
| 4.1 | The credentials are audited for authorized devices, users, and processes by ensuring IAM access keys are rotated as per 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. | |
| 4.2 | 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 sign-in credentials. Reduce the incidents of compromised accounts by requiring MFA for users. | |
| 4.2 | 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. | |
| 4.2 | 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. | |
| 4.2 | 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 sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| 5.1 | EC2 instance profiles pass an IAM role to an EC2 instance. Attaching an instance profile to your instances can assist with least privilege and permissions management. | |
| 5.1 | Ensure IAM Actions are restricted to only those actions that are needed. Allowing users to have more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| 5.1 | 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. | |
| 5.1 | 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. | |
| 5.1 | 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. | |
| 5.4 | 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. | |
| 5.4 | 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. | |
| 5.4 | This rule ensures AWS Secrets Manager secrets have periodic 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. The default value is 90 days. | |
| 5.4 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is enabled for AWS Secrets Manager secrets. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in Secrets Manager secrets, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| 6.4 | Enable this rule to help improve Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance monitoring on the Amazon EC2 console, which displays monitoring graphs with a 1-minute period for the instance. | |
| 6.4 | To help protect sensitive data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon CloudWatch Log Groups. | |
| 6.4 | 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. | |
| 6.4 | 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. | |
| 6.4 | Because sensitive data may exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your AWS CloudTrail trails. | |
| 6.4 | 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. | |
| 6.4 | 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. | |
| 6.4 | 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. | |
| 6.5A | 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. | |
| 6.5A | 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. |
Template
The template is available on GitHub: Operational Best Practices for SWIFT CSP
