Category: How-To

Update on October 24, 2018: Note that if you do not author the Lambda function correctly, this setup can create an infinite loop (in this case, a rule that is fired repeatedly, which can impact your AWS resources and cause higher than expected charges to your account). The example Lambda function I provide in Step […]

Starting today, you can use AWS CloudTrail to track the activity of your federated users (web identity federation and Security Assertion Markup Language [SAML]). For example, you can now use CloudTrail to identify a SAML federated user who terminated an Amazon EC2 instance in your AWS account, or to identify a mobile application user who […]

The AWS Cryptography team is happy to announce the AWS Encryption SDK. This new SDK makes encryption easier for developers while minimizing errors that could lessen the security of your applications. The new SDK does not require you to be an AWS customer, but it does include ready-to-use examples for AWS customers. Developers using encryption […]

Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) is a common identity provider that many AWS customers use to give federated users access to the AWS Management Console. AD FS uses multiple certificates to ensure secure communication between servers and to act as authentication mechanisms. One such mechanism is called the token-signing certificate. When the token-signing certificate expires, […]

Note from July 3, 2017: The solution in this post has been integrated into AWS WAF Security Automations, and AWS maintains up-to-date solution code in the companion GitHub repository.   Some Internet operations trust that clients are “well behaved.” As an operator of a publicly accessible web application, for example, you have to trust that the clients […]

Back in September, I wrote about How to Help Lock Down a User’s Amazon EC2 Capabilities to a Single VPC. In that blog post, I highlighted what I have found to be an effective approach to the virtual private cloud (VPC) lockdown scenario. Since that time, I have worked on making the related information easier […]

Note from July 3, 2017: The solution in this post has been integrated into AWS WAF Security Automations, and AWS maintains up-to-date solution code in the companion GitHub repository.   Internet-facing web applications are frequently scanned and probed by various sources, sometimes for good and other times to identify weaknesses. It takes some sleuthing to determine the […]

In my previous posts in this series, I explained how to get started with the DevSecOps environment for HIPAA that is depicted in the following architecture diagram. In my second post in this series, I gave you guidance about how to set up AWS Service Catalog (#4 in the following diagram) to allow developers a […]

In my previous post, I walked through the setup of a DevSecOps environment that gives healthcare developers the ability to launch their own healthcare web server. At the heart of the architecture is AWS CloudFormation, a JSON representation of your architecture that allows security administrators to provision AWS resources according to the compliance standards they […]

In my previous blog post, I discussed the idea of using the cloud to protect the cloud and improving healthcare IT by applying DevSecOps methods. In Part 2 today, I will show an architecture composed of AWS services that gives healthcare security administrators necessary controls, allows healthcare developers to interact with the system using familiar […]