Foundational data sources

To detect unauthorized and unexpected activity in your AWS environment, GuardDuty analyzes and processes data from the data sources described in this topic. GuardDuty uses these foundational data sources to detect anomalies involving the following AWS resource types: IAM access keys, and S3 buckets. While in transit from these sources to GuardDuty, all of the log data is encrypted. GuardDuty extracts various fields from these logs for profiling and anomaly detection, and then discards the logs.

The following sections describe how GuardDuty uses each supported data source.

AWS CloudTrail event logs

AWS CloudTrail provides you with a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made using the AWS Management Console, the AWS SDKs, the command line tools, and certain AWS services. CloudTrail also allows you to identify which users and accounts called AWS APIs for services that support CloudTrail, the source IP address that the calls were made from, and when the calls occurred. For more information, see the AWS CloudTrail User Guide. GuardDuty can monitor both CloudTrail management events, and optionally, CloudTrail data events for S3.

When you enable GuardDuty, it immediately starts analyzing your CloudTrail event logs. It consumes CloudTrail management and S3 data events directly from CloudTrail through an independent and duplicated stream of events. There is no additional charge for GuardDuty to access CloudTrail events.

GuardDuty does not manage your CloudTrail events or affect your existing CloudTrail configurations in any way. To manage access and retention of your CloudTrail events directly, you must use the CloudTrail service console or API. For more information, see Viewing events with CloudTrail event history.

How GuardDuty handles AWS CloudTrail global events

Another important detail about the way GuardDuty uses CloudTrail as a data source is the handling and processing of CloudTrail global events. For most services, events are recorded in the Region where the action occurred. For global services such as IAM, AWS Security Token Service, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, and Route 53, events are delivered to any trail that includes global services, and are logged as occurring in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. For more information, see About Global Service Events.

GuardDuty processes all events that come into a Region, including global events that CloudTrail sends to all Regions. This allows GuardDuty to maintain user and role profiles in each Region, and enables it to accurately detect credentials that are being maliciously used across Regions.

We highly recommend that you enable GuardDuty in all supported AWS Regions. This enables GuardDuty to generate findings about unauthorized or unusual activity even in Regions that you are not actively using. This also enables GuardDuty to monitor AWS CloudTrail events for global AWS services. If GuardDuty is not enabled in all supported Regions, its ability to detect activity that involves global services is reduced.

AWS CloudTrail management events

Management events are also known as control plane events. These events provide insight into management operations that are performed on resources in your AWS account.

The following are examples of CloudTrail management events that GuardDuty monitors:

• Configuring security (IAM AttachRolePolicyAPI operations)

• Configuring rules for routing data (Amazon EC2 CreateSubnet API operations)

• Setting up logging (AWS CloudTrail CreateTrail API operations)

VPC Flow Logs

The VPC Flow Logs feature of Amazon VPC captures information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces within your environment.

When you enable GuardDuty, it immediately starts analyzing your VPC flow logs data. It consumes VPC flow log events directly from the VPC Flow Logs feature through an independent and duplicative stream of flow logs. This process does not affect any existing flow log configurations that you might have.

GuardDuty doesn't manage your flow logs or make them accessible in your account. To manage access to and retention of your flow logs, you must configure the VPC Flow Logs feature.

With no additional charge, GuardDuty can access the flow logs. GuardDuty only charges for the amount of flow logs data processed (in GB) to generate a finding. GuardDuty optimizes costs by applying smart filters and analyzing subset of flow logs relevant to threat detection. However, enabling flow logs for retention or use in your account falls under the existing pricing.

DNS logs

If you use AWS DNS resolvers for your Amazon EC2 instances (the default setting), then GuardDuty can access and process your request and response DNS logs through the internal AWS DNS resolvers. If you use another DNS resolver, such as OpenDNS or GoogleDNS, or if you set up your own DNS resolvers, then GuardDuty cannot access and process data from this data source.

When you enable GuardDuty, it immediately starts analyzing your DNS logs from an independent stream of data. This data stream is separate from the data provided through the Route 53 Resolver query logging feature. Configuration of this feature does not effect GuardDuty analysis.