Infrastructure security in AWS Direct Connect

As a managed service, AWS Direct Connect is protected by the AWS global network security procedures. You use AWS published API calls to access AWS Direct Connect through the network. Clients must support Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 or later. We recommend TLS 1.3. 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.

You can call these API operations from any network location, but AWS Direct Connect supports resource-based access policies, which can include restrictions based on the source IP address. You can also use AWS Direct Connect policies to control access from specific Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoints or specific VPCs. Effectively, this isolates network access to a given AWS Direct Connect resource from only the specific VPC within the AWS network. For example, see Identity-based policy examples for Direct Connect.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) security

The internet relies in large part on BGP for routing information between network systems. BGP routing can some times be susceptible to malicious attacks, or BGP hijacking. To understand how AWS works to more securely safeguard your network from BGP hijacking, see How AWS is helping to secure internet routing.