Category: Management Tools

August 31, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. One of the top security methodologies is the principle of least privilege, which is the […]

Last month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced the ability to automate issuing and validating public and private certificates using AWS CloudFormation. To make this easier, AWS has introduced three new features that let you: Automate the steps to validate your domain with DNS validation and issue your public certificate. Use AWS CloudFormation templates to issue […]

How quickly you respond to security incidents is key to minimizing their impacts. Automating incident response helps you scale your capabilities, rapidly reduce the scope of compromised resources, and reduce repetitive work by security teams. But when you use automation, you also must manage exceptions to standard response procedures. In this post, I provide a […]

May 10, 2023:Read more updated information about creating SAML providers with AWS CloudFormation here. August 10, 2022: This blog post has been updated to reflect the new name of AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) – AWS IAM Identity Center. Read more about the name change here. June 24, 2020: We updated the first 3 paragraphs of […]

On April 20th, AWS Config announced support for AWS Secrets Manager, making it easier to track configuration changes to the secrets you manage in AWS Secrets Manager. You can now use AWS Config to track changes to secrets’ metadata — such as secret description and rotation configuration, relationship to other AWS sources such as the […]

In this blog post, I will show you how to use AWS Config, with its auto-remediation functionality, to ensure that all web ACLs have logging enabled. The AWS CloudFormation template included in this blog post will facilitate this solution, and will get you started being able to manage web ACL logging at scale. AWS Firewall […]

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) publishes API usage metrics to Amazon CloudWatch and Service Quotas allowing you to both monitor and manage your AWS KMS API request rate quotas. This functionality helps you understand trends in your usage of AWS KMS and can help prevent API request throttling as you grow your use of AWS […]

August 10, 2022: The content in this blog post is no longer up-to-date. AWS Security Hub now automatically receives AWS Config managed and custom rule evaluation results as security findings. Please see the feature announcement and the documentation for more details. You no longer need the custom solution described in this blog post to import […]

February 19, 2024: You can now use IAM Access Analyzer to easily identify unused roles. Read this blog post to learn more. January 6, 2021: We updated this post to fix a bug related to allow listing noncompliant roles. January 6, 2020: We updated this post to reflect a valid STS session duration if configured […]

AWS Config enables continuous monitoring of your AWS resources, making it simple to assess, audit, and record resource configurations and changes. AWS Config does this through the use of rules that define the desired configuration state of your AWS resources. AWS Config provides a number of AWS managed rules that address a wide range of […]