#AWSKeyManagementService

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What Is AWS CloudTrail? And To Explain Features, Benefits

AWS CloudTrail

Monitor user behavior and API utilization on AWS, as well as in hybrid and multicloud settings.

What is AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail logs every AWS account activity, including resource access, changes, and timing. It monitors activity from the CLI, SDKs, APIs, and AWS Management Console.

CloudTrail can be used to:

Track Activity: Find out who was responsible for what in your AWS environment.

Boost security by identifying odd or unwanted activity.

Audit and Compliance: Maintain a record for regulatory requirements and audits.

Troubleshoot Issues: Examine logs to look into issues.

The logs are easily reviewed or analyzed later because CloudTrail saves them to an Amazon S3 bucket.

Why AWS CloudTrail?

Governance, compliance, operational audits, and auditing of your AWS account are all made possible by the service AWS CloudTrail.

Benefits

Aggregate and consolidate multisource events

You may use CloudTrail Lake to ingest activity events from AWS as well as sources outside of AWS, such as other cloud providers, in-house apps, and SaaS apps that are either on-premises or in the cloud.

Immutably store audit-worthy events

Audit-worthy events can be permanently stored in AWS CloudTrail Lake. Produce audit reports that are needed by external regulations and internal policies with ease.

Derive insights and analyze unusual activity

Use Amazon Athena or SQL-based searches to identify unwanted access and examine activity logs. For individuals who are not as skilled in creating SQL queries, natural language query generation enabled by generative AI makes this process much simpler. React with automated workflows and rules-based Event Bridge alerts.

Use cases

Compliance & auditing

Use CloudTrail logs to demonstrate compliance with SOC, PCI, and HIPAA rules and shield your company from fines.

Security

By logging user and API activity in your AWS accounts, you can strengthen your security posture. Network activity events for VPC endpoints are another way to improve your data perimeter.

Operations

Use Amazon Athena, natural language query generation, or SQL-based queries to address operational questions, aid with debugging, and look into problems. To further streamline your studies, use the AI-powered query result summarizing tool (in preview) to summarize query results. Use CloudTrail Lake dashboards to see trends.

Features of AWS CloudTrail

Auditing, security monitoring, and operational troubleshooting are made possible via AWS CloudTrail. CloudTrail logs API calls and user activity across AWS services as events. “Who did what, where, and when?” can be answered with the aid of CloudTrail events.

Four types of events are recorded by CloudTrail:

Control plane activities on resources, like adding or removing Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets, are captured by management events.

Data plane operations within a resource, like reading or writing an Amazon S3 object, are captured by data events.

Network activity events that record activities from a private VPC to the AWS service utilizing VPC endpoints, including AWS API calls to which access was refused (in preview).

Through ongoing analysis of CloudTrail management events, insights events assist AWS users in recognizing and reacting to anomalous activity related to API calls and API error rates.

Trails of AWS CloudTrail

Overview

AWS account actions are recorded by Trails, which then distribute and store the events in Amazon S3. Delivery to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon EventBridge is an optional feature. You can feed these occurrences into your security monitoring programs. You can search and examine the logs that CloudTrail has collected using your own third-party software or programs like Amazon Athena. AWS Organizations can be used to build trails for a single AWS account or for several AWS accounts.

Storage and monitoring

By establishing trails, you can send your AWS CloudTrail events to S3 and, if desired, to CloudWatch Logs. You can export and save events as you desire after doing this, which gives you access to all event details.

Encrypted activity logs

You may check the integrity of the CloudTrail log files that are kept in your S3 bucket and determine if they have been altered, removed, or left unaltered since CloudTrail sent them there. Log file integrity validation is a useful tool for IT security and auditing procedures. By default, AWS CloudTrail uses S3 server-side encryption (SSE) to encrypt all log files sent to the S3 bucket you specify. If required, you can optionally encrypt your CloudTrail log files using your AWS Key Management Service (KMS) key to further strengthen their security. Your log files are automatically decrypted by S3 if you have the decrypt permissions.

Multi-Region

AWS CloudTrail may be set up to record and store events from several AWS Regions in one place. This setup ensures that all settings are applied uniformly to both freshly launched and existing Regions.

Multi-account

CloudTrail may be set up to record and store events from several AWS accounts in one place. This setup ensures that all settings are applied uniformly to both newly generated and existing accounts.

AWS CloudTrail pricing

AWS CloudTrail: Why Use It?

By tracing your user behavior and API calls, AWS CloudTrail Pricing makes audits, security monitoring, and operational troubleshooting possible .

AWS CloudTrail Insights

Through ongoing analysis of CloudTrail management events, AWS CloudTrail Insights events assist AWS users in recognizing and reacting to anomalous activity related to API calls and API error rates. Known as the baseline, CloudTrail Insights examines your typical patterns of API call volume and error rates and creates Insights events when either of these deviates from the usual. To identify odd activity and anomalous behavior, you can activate CloudTrail Insights in your event data stores or trails.

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AWS Key Management Service Best Practices For Encryption

AWS Key Management Service

Create and manage cryptographic keys to safeguard your data with AWS KMS. Most AWS data-encrypting services are connected with AWS Key Management Service. To record the usage of your KMS keys for auditing, regulatory, and compliance purposes, AWS KMS also connects with AWS CloudTrail.

AWS KMS keys, which are logical representations of cryptographic keys, are the main resource in AWS Key Management Service. KMS keys come in three main varieties:

KMS keys that you create are known as customer managed keys.

KMS keys created in your account by AWS services on your behalf are known as AWS managed keys.

KMS keys that are owned and managed by an AWS service and can be used across several AWS accounts are known as AWS owned keys.

Policies are used in the AWS Cloud to manage who has access to resources and services. For instance, resource-based policies link to a resource, like an S3 bucket, and specify which principals are permitted access, supported actions, and any other requirements that must be fulfilled. In AWS Identity and Access Management, identity-based policies determine user, group, and role permissions. Like IAM policies, AWS Key Management Service policies restrict key access. There must be a key policy for every KMS key, and each key may only have one key policy. When creating policies that grant or prohibit access to KMS keys, keep the following in mind:

For customer-controlled keys, you have direct control over the key policy; however, this is not the case for AWS-owned or managed keys.

Within an AWS account, key policies enable granular access to AWS Key Management Service API calls. You cannot use IAM policies to grant access to a KMS key unless specifically permitted by the key policy. IAM policies that provide permissions are ineffective without the main policy’s consent.

Without the key policy’s matching consent, you can use an IAM policy to prevent access to a customer-managed key.

Take into account the following while creating key policies and IAM policies for multi-region keys:

Key policies are neither duplicated or synced among related multi-Region keys, nor are they shared attributes of multi-Region keys.

Unless a key policy is given in the request, the default key policy is used when a multi-Region key is produced using the CreateKey and ReplicateKey actions.

To restrict permissions to a specific AWS Region, you can use condition keys like aws: RequestedRegion.

Permissions to a multi-Region main key or replica key can be granted via grants. Even though they are related multi-Region keys, a single grant cannot be utilized to provide permissions to more than one KMS key.

The following encryption best practices and other security best practices should be taken into account while utilizing AWS Key Management Service and developing key policies:

Follow the advice in the AWS Key Management Service best practices materials listed below:

AWS Key Management Service grant best practices (AWS KMS documentation)

IAM policy best practices (AWS KMS docs)

Keep the identities of individuals who administer keys and those who use them distinct in compliance with the best practice for separation of duties:

The key shouldn’t be usable by administrator roles that create and remove keys.

Some services might just need to encrypt data; they shouldn’t be allowed to use the key to decode it.

The least privilege principle should always be applied to important policy. Because it grants the principal authority to administer and use the key, kms: should not be used for actions in IAM or key policies.

Use the kms: ViaService condition key in the key policy to restrict the use of customer-managed keys to particular AWS services.

Customer managed keys are recommended if you have a choice between key types since they offer the most detailed control choices, such as the following:

Overseeing access control and authentication

Keys that enable and disable

Changing the AWS KMS keys

Keys for tagging

Making aliases

Getting rid of AWS KMS keys

Unauthorized principals must be specifically excluded from AWS Key Management Service administrative and modification permissions, and no unauthorized principal should have AWS KMS modification permissions listed in an allow statement.

Use the iam-customer-policy-blocked-kms-actions and iam-inline-policy-blocked-kms-actions rules in AWS Config to identify instances of unlawful use of KMS keys. Principals are unable to use the AWS Key Management Service decryption actions on any resource as a result.

To stop unauthorized users or roles from deleting KMS keys directly through a command or the terminal, implement service control policies (SCPs) in AWS Organizations.

Record calls to the AWS Key Management Service API in a CloudTrail log. This logs the pertinent event properties, including the requests made, the originating IP address making the request, and the requester.

Sensitive information shouldn’t be included if encryption is being used. Anyone with access to the S3 bucket holding the data can examine the plaintext JSON files that CloudTrail uses to store the encryption context.

When keeping an eye on how customer managed keys are being used, set up events to alert you when certain actions like creating a key, updating customer managed key policies, or importing key material are noticed. Automated responses, like an AWS Lambda function that disables the key or carries out any other incident response activities specified by your business policy, are also advised.

For certain situations, such compliance, disaster recovery, or backups, multi-region keys are advised. Compared to single-region keys, multi-region keys have substantially different security characteristics. When approving the creation, administration, and use of multi-Region keys, the following guidelines should be followed:

Principals should only be permitted to duplicate a multi-region key into AWS regions that need it.

Permit multi-region keys only for jobs that require them and only for principals who need them.

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What Is AWS Secrets Manager? And Its Benefits, Features

Manage the secrets lifecycle centrally using AWS Secrets Manager.

What is AWS Secrets Manager?

OAuth tokens, API keys, database credentials, application credentials, and other secrets may all be managed, retrieved, and rotated with the aid of AWS Secrets Manager. Many AWS services store and use secrets using Secrets Manager.

Secrets Manager improves your security posture by removing the requirement for hard-coded credentials in application source code. If you save your credentials in Secrets Manager, anyone who can look at your program or its components could potentially compromise it. A runtime call to the Secrets Manager service lets you dynamically retrieve credentials when needed, replacing hard-coded credentials.

Secrets Manager allows you to create an automatic secret rotation schedule. This greatly lowers the chance of compromise by allowing you to swap out long-term secrets for short-term ones. Rotating credentials no longer necessitates upgrading your apps and sending modifications to application clients because the credentials are no longer kept with the application.

Advantages

Centrally audit and securely encrypt secrets.

Control who has access to secrets.

Rotate secrets on their own.

To help with catastrophe recovery plans, replicate secrets.

Use cases

Keep secrets safe

Manage and keep credentials, API keys, and other secrets in one place.

Use fine-grained policies to control access

To control who may access your secrets, use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions policies.

Rotate secrets automatically

Without redeploying or interfering with running applications, rotate secrets on demand or according to a schedule.

Audit and track the use of secrets

Connect secrets to AWS’s notification, logging, and monitoring services.

Features of AWS Secrets Manager

Safekeeping of secrets

Using encryption keys that you hold and keep in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Secrets Manager encrypts secrets while they are at rest.

Secrets Manager decrypts the secret when you retrieve it and sends it safely over TLS to your local environment.

Using resource-based and fine-grained IAM policies, Secrets Manager connects with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to manage access to the secret.

Rotating secrets automatically without interfering with applications

Using the Secrets Manager console, AWS SDK, or AWS CLI, you may use AWS Secrets Manager to rotate secrets on a schedule or as needed.

Rotating credentials for databases housed on Amazon RDS and Amazon DocumentDB as well as clusters hosted on Amazon Redshift are natively supported by Secrets Manager.

By altering sample Lambda functions, you can expand Secrets Manager to rotate secrets used with other AWS or 3P services.

Secrets are automatically replicated to several AWS regions

To satisfy your specific disaster recovery and cross-regional redundancy needs, you can use AWS Secrets Manager to automatically replicate your secrets to many AWS Regions. There is no need to maintain a complicated solution for this capability; simply specify which AWS regions a secret needs to be replicated to, and Secrets Manager will safely generate regional read replicas. You can trust Secrets Manager to maintain the replicas in sync with the primary secret while granting your multi-Region apps access to replicated secrets in the necessary Regions.

Secret retrieval via programming

When developing your applications, keep hidden security in mind.

Code samples for calling Secrets Manager APIs from popular programming languages are provided by Secrets Manager. Two categories of APIs are available for retrieving secrets:

By name or ARN, retrieve a single secret.

Provide a list of names or ARNs, or filter criteria like tags, to retrieve a collection of secrets.

Set up Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints so that communications between Secrets Manager and your VPC remain inside the AWS network.

Additionally, Secrets Manager client-side caching libraries can be used to decrease latency and increase availability while retrieving secrets.

Audit and track the use of secrets

By integrating with AWS logging, monitoring, and notification services, AWS Secrets Manager lets you audit and keep an eye on secrets. For instance, you can inspect AWS CloudTrail logs to audit when a secret is produced or rotated once AWS CloudTrail has been enabled for an AWS Region. Likewise, you can set up Amazon CloudWatch Events to get push alerts when Secrets Manager rotates your secrets, or you can set up Amazon CloudWatch to get email notifications using Amazon Simple Notification Service when secrets aren’t utilized for a while.

Compliance

AWS Secrets Manager can be used to satisfy compliance standards.

Use AWS Config Rules to guarantee your secrets meet enterprise security and compliance standards.

The Department of Defense Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (DoD CC SRG IL2, IL4, and IL5), FedRAMP, HIPAA, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27017, ISO/IEC 27018, ISO 9001, and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard

Integration of Secrets Manager

Secrets Manager integrates with AWS services to safely handle your login credentials. You can safely swap login credentials with different AWS services thanks to these integrations. Either customer-managed or AWS-managed KMS keys are used to encrypt the credentials kept in Secrets Manager. To maintain a high level of security, Secrets Manager rotates secrets on a regular basis. You will be able to supply an AWS service with the ARN of a secret rather than a plain text credential once your secrets are stored with Secrets Manager.

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