Operational Best Practices for AWS Well-Architected Framework Security Pillar
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 Amazon Web Services’ Well-Architected Framework Security Pillar and AWS managed Config rules. Each Config rule applies to a specific AWS resource, and relates to one or more of the pillar’s design principles. A Well-Architected Framework category can be related to multiple Config rules. Refer to the table below for more detail and guidance related to these mappings.
| Control ID | Control Description | AWS Config Rule | Guidance |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEC-1 | How do you securely operate your workload? To operate your workload securely, you must apply overarching best practices to every area of security. Take requirements and processes that you have defined in operational excellence at an organizational and workload level, and apply them to all areas. Staying up to date with AWS and industry recommendations and threat intelligence helps you evolve your threat model and control objectives. Automating security processes, testing, and validation allow you to scale your security operations. | 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. | |
| SEC-1 | How do you securely operate your workload? To operate your workload securely, you must apply overarching best practices to every area of security. Take requirements and processes that you have defined in operational excellence at an organizational and workload level, and apply them to all areas. Staying up to date with AWS and industry recommendations and threat intelligence helps you evolve your threat model and control objectives. Automating security processes, testing, and validation allow you to scale your security operations. | 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. | |
| SEC-1 | How do you securely operate your workload? To operate your workload securely, you must apply overarching best practices to every area of security. Take requirements and processes that you have defined in operational excellence at an organizational and workload level, and apply them to all areas. Staying up to date with AWS and industry recommendations and threat intelligence helps you evolve your threat model and control objectives. Automating security processes, testing, and validation allow you to scale your security operations. | 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. | |
| SEC-1 | How do you securely operate your workload? To operate your workload securely, you must apply overarching best practices to every area of security. Take requirements and processes that you have defined in operational excellence at an organizational and workload level, and apply them to all areas. Staying up to date with AWS and industry recommendations and threat intelligence helps you evolve your threat model and control objectives. Automating security processes, testing, and validation allow you to scale your security operations. | 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. | |
| SEC-1 | How do you securely operate your workload? To operate your workload securely, you must apply overarching best practices to every area of security. Take requirements and processes that you have defined in operational excellence at an organizational and workload level, and apply them to all areas. Staying up to date with AWS and industry recommendations and threat intelligence helps you evolve your threat model and control objectives. Automating security processes, testing, and validation allow you to scale your security operations. | 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. | |
| SEC-1 | How do you securely operate your workload? To operate your workload securely, you must apply overarching best practices to every area of security. Take requirements and processes that you have defined in operational excellence at an organizational and workload level, and apply them to all areas. Staying up to date with AWS and industry recommendations and threat intelligence helps you evolve your threat model and control objectives. Automating security processes, testing, and validation allow you to scale your security operations. | 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. | |
| SEC-1 | How do you securely operate your workload? To operate your workload securely, you must apply overarching best practices to every area of security. Take requirements and processes that you have defined in operational excellence at an organizational and workload level, and apply them to all areas. Staying up to date with AWS and industry recommendations and threat intelligence helps you evolve your threat model and control objectives. Automating security processes, testing, and validation allow you to scale your security operations. | 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. | |
| SEC-1 | How do you securely operate your workload? To operate your workload securely, you must apply overarching best practices to every area of security. Take requirements and processes that you have defined in operational excellence at an organizational and workload level, and apply them to all areas. Staying up to date with AWS and industry recommendations and threat intelligence helps you evolve your threat model and control objectives. Automating security processes, testing, and validation allow you to scale your security operations. | 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. | |
| SEC-1 | How do you securely operate your workload? To operate your workload securely, you must apply overarching best practices to every area of security. Take requirements and processes that you have defined in operational excellence at an organizational and workload level, and apply them to all areas. Staying up to date with AWS and industry recommendations and threat intelligence helps you evolve your threat model and control objectives. Automating security processes, testing, and validation allow you to scale your security operations. | 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. | |
| SEC-1 | How do you securely operate your workload? To operate your workload securely, you must apply overarching best practices to every area of security. Take requirements and processes that you have defined in operational excellence at an organizational and workload level, and apply them to all areas. Staying up to date with AWS and industry recommendations and threat intelligence helps you evolve your threat model and control objectives. Automating security processes, testing, and validation allow you to scale your security operations. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | If a task definition has elevated privileges it is because the customer has specifically opted-in to those configurations. This control checks for unexpected privilege escalation when a task definition has host networking enabled but the customer has not opted-in to elevated privileges. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-2 | How do you manage identities for people and machines? There are two types of identities you need to manage when approaching operating secure AWS workloads. Understanding the type of identity you need to manage and grant access helps you ensure the right identities have access to the right resources under the right conditions. Human Identities: Your administrators, developers, operators, and end users require an identity to access your AWS environments and applications. These are members of your organization, or external users with whom you collaborate, and who interact with your AWS resources via a web browser, client application, or interactive command-line tools. Machine Identities: Your service applications, operational tools, and workloads require an identity to make requests to AWS services - for example, to read data. These identities include machines running in your AWS environment such as Amazon EC2 instances or AWS Lambda functions. You may also manage machine identities for external parties who need access. Additionally, you may also have machines outside of AWS that need access to your AWS environment. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | If a task definition has elevated privileges it is because the customer has specifically opted-in to those configurations. This control checks for unexpected privilege escalation when a task definition has host networking enabled but the customer has not opted-in to elevated privileges. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | To assist with implementing the principle of least privilege, ensure that a non-root user is designated for access to your Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task definitions. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | To assist with implementing the principle of least privilege, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task definitions should not have elevated privilege enabled. When this parameter is true, the container is given elevated privileges on the host container instance (similar to the root user). | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | Enabling read only access to Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) containers can assist in adhering to the principal of least privilege. This option can reduces attack vectors as the container instance’s filesystem cannot be modified unless it has explicit read-write permissions. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | To assist with implementing the principle of least privilege, ensure user enforcement is enabled for your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) .When enabled, Amazon EFS replaces the NFS client's user and group IDs with the identity configured on the access point for all file system operations and only grants access to this enforced user identity. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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 | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Each component or resource of your workload needs to be accessed by administrators, end users, or other components. Have a clear definition of who or what should have access to each component, choose the appropriate identity type and method of authentication and authorization. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Establish common controls that restrict access to all identities in your organization. For example, you can restrict access to specific AWS Regions, or prevent your operators from deleting common resources, such as an IAM role used for your central security team | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon OpenSearch Service domains are within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). An Amazon OpenSearch Service domain within an Amazon VPC enables secure communication between Amazon OpenSearch Service and other services within the Amazon VPC without the need for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | 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. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) subnets are not automatically assigned a public IP address. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances that are launched into subnets that have this attribute enabled have a public IP address assigned to their primary network interface. | |
| SEC-3 | How do you manage permissions for people and machines? Continuously monitor findings that highlight public and cross account access. Reduce public access and cross account access to only resources that require this type of access. | If you configure your Network Interfaces with a public IP address, then the associated resources to those Network Interfaces are reachable from the internet. EC2 resources should not be publicly accessible, as this may allow unintended access to your applications or servers. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | 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. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | Ensure audit logging is enabled on your Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. Audit logging allows you to track user activity on your OpenSearch domains, including authentication successes and failures, requests to OpenSearch, index changes, and incoming search queries. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | 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. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | 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. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | Ensure a minimum duration of event log data is retained for your log groups to help with troubleshooting and forensics investigations. The lack of available past event log data makes it difficult to reconstruct and identify potentially malicious events. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | Ensure Amazon OpenSearch Service domains have error logs enabled and streamed to Amazon CloudWatch Logs for retention and response. Domain error logs can assist with security and access audits, and can help to diagnose availability issues. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | Ensure Amazon OpenSearch Service domains have error logs enabled and streamed to Amazon CloudWatch Logs for retention and response. OpenSearch Service error logs can assist with security and access audits, and can help to diagnose availability issues. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | 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. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | 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. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | To help with logging and monitoring within your environment, ensure Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) logging is enabled. With Amazon RDS logging, you can capture events such as connections, disconnections, queries, or tables queried. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | 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. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | 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. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | To help with logging and monitoring within your environment, enable AWS WAF (V2) logging on regional and global web ACLs. AWS WAF logging provides detailed information about the traffic that is analyzed by your web ACL. The logs record the time that AWS WAF received the request from your AWS resource, information about the request, and an action for the rule that each request matched. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | This rule helps ensure the use of AWS recommended security best practices for AWS CloudTrail, by checking for the enablement of multiple settings. These include the use of log encryption, log validation, and enabling AWS CloudTrail in multiple regions. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | 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. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | 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. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | 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. | |
| SEC-4 | How do you detect and investigate security events? Capture and analyze events from logs and metrics to gain visibility. Take action on security events and potential threats to help secure your workload. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon OpenSearch Service domains are within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). An Amazon OpenSearch Service domain within an Amazon VPC enables secure communication between Amazon OpenSearch Service and other services within the Amazon VPC without the need for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | Enhanced VPC routing forces all COPY and UNLOAD traffic between the cluster and data repositories to go through your Amazon VPC. You can then use VPC features such as security groups and network access control lists to secure network traffic. You can also use VPC flow logs to monitor network traffic. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | Ensure AWS WAF is enabled on Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) to help protect web applications. A WAF helps to protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits. These web exploits may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources within your environment. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | AWS WAF enables you to configure a set of rules (called a web access control list (web ACL)) that allow, block, or count web requests based on customizable web security rules and conditions that you define. Ensure your Amazon API Gateway stage is associated with a WAF Web ACL to protect it from malicious attacks | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | Ensure Amazon EC2 route tables do not have unrestricted routes to an internet gateway. Removing or limiting the access to the internet for workloads within Amazon VPCs can reduce unintended access within your environment. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) subnets are not automatically assigned a public IP address. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances that are launched into subnets that have this attribute enabled have a public IP address assigned to their primary network interface. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | If you configure your Network Interfaces with a public IP address, then the associated resources to those Network Interfaces are reachable from the internet. EC2 resources should not be publicly accessible, as this may allow unintended access to your applications or servers. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | Ensure your AWS WAF has a rule that is not empty. A rule with no conditions could result in unintended behavior. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | Ensure your AWS WAF has a rule group that is not empty. A rule group that is empty could result in unintended behavior. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | A Web ACL attached to an AWS WAF can contain a collection of rules and rule groups to inspect and control web requests. If a Web ACL is empty, the web traffic passes without being detected or acted upon by the WAF. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-5 | How do you protect your network resources? Any workload that has some form of network connectivity, whether it’s the internet or a private network, requires multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal network-based threats. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | Enable automatic minor version upgrades on your Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) instances to ensure the latest minor version updates to the Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) are installed, which may include security patches and bug fixes. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | This rule helps ensure the use of AWS recommended security best practices for AWS CloudTrail, by checking for the enablement of multiple settings. These include the use of log encryption, log validation, and enabling AWS CloudTrail in multiple regions. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | Enabling managed platform updates for an Amazon Elastic Beanstalk environment ensures that the latest available platform fixes, updates, and features for the environment are installed. Keeping up to date with patch installation is a best practice in securing systems. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | Amazon Elastic Container Repository (ECR) image scanning assists in identifying software vulnerabilities in your container images. Enabling image scanning on ECR repositories adds a layer of verification for the integrity and safety of the images being stored. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | Monitoring is an important part of maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance of Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and your AWS solutions. Container Insights also provides diagnostic information, such as container restart failures, to help you isolate issues and resolve them quickly. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | Security updates and patches are deployed automatically for your AWS Fargate tasks. If a security issue is found that affects an AWS Fargate platform version, AWS patches the platform version. To assist in patch management of your Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) tasks running AWS Fargate, update your services standalone tasks to use the most recent platform version. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-6 | How do you protect your compute resources? Compute resources in your workload require multiple layers of defense to help protect from external and internal threats. Compute resources include EC2 instances, containers, AWS Lambda functions, database services, IoT devices, and more. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | Ensure that encryption is enabled for your AWS Backup recovery points. Because sensitive data can exist at rest, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | To help protect sensitive data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your AWS CodeBuild artifacts. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | To help protect sensitive data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your AWS CodeBuild logs stored in Amazon S3. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | Because sensitive data may exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your AWS CloudTrail trails. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | To help protect sensitive data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon CloudWatch Log Groups. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | Ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon DynamoDB tables. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in these tables, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. By default, DynamoDB tables are encrypted with an AWS owned customer master key (CMK). | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon OpenSearch Service (OpenSearch Service) domains. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is enabled for your Amazon Redshift cluster. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in Redshift clusters, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-8 | How do you protect your data at rest? Protect your data at rest by implementing multiple controls, to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or mishandling. | 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. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | 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. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | 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. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | 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. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | Ensure that your Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) are configured to drop http headers. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | 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. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | Ensure Amazon API Gateway REST API stages are configured with SSL certificates to allow backend systems to authenticate that requests originate from API Gateway. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | Ensure node-to-node encryption for Amazon OpenSearch Service is enabled. Node-to-node encryption enables TLS 1.2 encryption for all communications within the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | Ensure node-to-node encryption for Amazon OpenSearch Service is enabled. Node-to-node encryption enables TLS 1.2 encryption for all communications within the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data in transit, ensure HTTPS is enabled for connections to your Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | 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. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | 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. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | Ensure that your Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) are configured with SSL or HTTPS listeners. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | 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. | |
| SEC-9 | How do you protect your data in transit? Protect your data in transit by implementing multiple controls to reduce the risk of unauthorized access or loss. | 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. |
Template
The template is available on GitHub: Operational Best Practices for AWS Well-Architected Security Pillar
