Data protection in Elastic Load Balancing - Elastic Load Balancing
Encryption at restEncryption in transit

Data protection in Elastic Load Balancing

The AWS shared responsibility model applies to data protection in Elastic Load Balancing. As described in this model, AWS is responsible for protecting the global infrastructure that runs all of the AWS Cloud. You are responsible for maintaining control over your content that is hosted on this infrastructure. You are also responsible for the security configuration and management tasks for the AWS services that you use. For more information about data privacy, see the Data Privacy FAQ. For information about data protection in Europe, see the AWS Shared Responsibility Model and GDPR blog post on the AWS Security Blog.

For data protection purposes, we recommend that you protect AWS account credentials and set up individual users with AWS IAM Identity Center or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). That way, each user is given only the permissions necessary to fulfill their job duties. We also recommend that you secure your data in the following ways:

  • Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) with each account.

  • Use SSL/TLS to communicate with AWS resources. We require TLS 1.2 and recommend TLS 1.3.

  • Set up API and user activity logging with AWS CloudTrail.

  • Use AWS encryption solutions, along with all default security controls within AWS services.

  • Use advanced managed security services such as Amazon Macie, which assists in discovering and securing sensitive data that is stored in Amazon S3.

  • If you require FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic modules when accessing AWS through a command line interface or an API, use a FIPS endpoint. For more information about the available FIPS endpoints, see Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2.

We strongly recommend that you never put confidential or sensitive information, such as your customers' email addresses, into tags or free-form text fields such as a Name field. This includes when you work with Elastic Load Balancing or other AWS services using the console, API, AWS CLI, or AWS SDKs. Any data that you enter into tags or free-form text fields used for names may be used for billing or diagnostic logs. If you provide a URL to an external server, we strongly recommend that you do not include credentials information in the URL to validate your request to that server.

Encryption at rest

If you enable server-side encryption with Amazon S3-managed encryption keys (SSE-S3) for your S3 bucket for Elastic Load Balancing access logs, Elastic Load Balancing automatically encrypts each access log file before it is stored in your S3 bucket. Elastic Load Balancing also decrypts the access log files when you access them. Each log file is encrypted with a unique key, which is itself encrypted with a master key that is regularly rotated.

Encryption in transit

Elastic Load Balancing simplifies the process of building secure web applications by terminating HTTPS and TLS traffic from clients at the load balancer. The load balancer performs the work of encrypting and decrypting the traffic, instead of requiring each EC2 instance to handle the work for TLS termination. When you configure a secure listener, you specify the cipher suites and protocol versions that are supported by your application, and a server certificate to install on your load balancer. You can use AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to manage your server certificates. Application Load Balancers support HTTPS listeners. Network Load Balancers support TLS listeners. Classic Load Balancers support both HTTPS and TLS listeners.