Data protection in Amazon Verified Permissions

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

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

• We recommend that you secure your data in the following ways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Your action names should not include any sensitive information.

• We also strongly recommend that you always use unique, non-mutable, and non-reusable identifiers for your entities (resources and principals). In a test environment, you might choose to use simple entity identifiers, such as jane or bob for the name of an entity of type User. However, in a production system, it’s critical for security reasons that you use unique values that can’t be reused. We recommend that you use values like universally unique identifiers (UUIDs). For example, consider the user jane who leaves the company. Later, you let someone else use the name jane. That new user gets access automatically to everything granted by policies that still reference User::"jane". Verified Permissions and Cedar can’t distinguish between the new user and the previous user.

  This guidance applies to both principal and resource identifiers. Always use identifiers that are guaranteed unique and never reused to ensure that you don’t grant access unintentionally because of the presence of an old identifier in a policy.

• Ensure that the strings that you provide to define Long and Decimal values are within the valid range of each type. Also, ensure that your use of any arithmetic operators don't result in a value outside of the valid range. If the range is exceeded, the operation results in an overflow exception. A policy that results in an error is ignored, meaning that a Permit policy might unexpectedly fail to allow access, or a Forbid policy might unexpectedly fail to block access.

Data encryption

Amazon Verified Permissions automatically encrypts all customer data such as policies with an AWS managed key, so the use of a customer managed key is neither necessary nor supported.