We look at what data can be unencrypted in Amazon Web Services, specifically which cloud services have resources that can be unencrypted. While most services offer encryption by default, certain resources can be unencrypted by default or also offer unencrypted options. This post covers observations, those AWS services, and recommendations to improve data security.
Introduction of a new open-source tool, Finders Keypers that helps determine usage of KMS encryption keys to encrypt resources in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This tool helps with data perimeters, security and audit, determining blast radius, and helping understand usage and relationships of KMS keys.
AWS recently released resource control policies as a new type of Organizational policies. These policies can control maximum permissions to resources within an organization. We look at the security impact and how to use these RCPs to craft data perimeters as well as when to use them compared to service control policies.
A guide to IAM actions, nuances, and categorization of how to manage and update encryption for AWS resources with KMS. This helps with encryption management such as encryption key rotation, updating, and preventing against cloud data ransomware attacks where data is held hostage by removing access to encryption keys.
Access to KMS and data access in Amazon Web Services can be complex. We look at a potential hidden access source and all the combinations of access that can be granted via KMS Key Grants. We take a different approach to look at evaluation with resource-based policies, IAM, and KMS Key Grants to see effective privilege and best practices for least privilege, encryption management, and data access
This research focuses on an aspect of security by default by looking at AWS Resources and their encryption state by default when created. We look into encryption types including AWS Owned and AWS Managed default encryption by KMS, history of encryption by default settings, and additional settings and guardrails to help with cloud data security.
Deep Dive on AWS Support for AWS Managed Keys. We found 39 AWS Services that Support AWS Managed Keys and created documentation around service support, details and interesting details about AWS Managed Keys and their key policies, and created a tool to help you check support and access for AWS Managed Keys.
A look at Amazon Web Services's Block Public Access feature across AWS services such as EC2, S3, EMR, DynamoDB and how secure by default principles apply to account configuration to add additional layers of security as well as best practices for configuration.
A scenario with Amazon S3 where S3's Block Public Access Check can be circumvented to make a S3 Bucket public.
Research on AWS's Quantum Ledger Database and the misleading reporting of at-rest data encryption. Misleading reporting from encryption status may result in false positives for security and compliance of the QLDB and cause issues for security and application teams.
