AWS Security Blog

Category: AWS Key Management Service

How to verify AWS KMS signatures in decoupled architectures at scale

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. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) makes it easy to create and manage cryptographic keys […]

How to use AWS IAM Access Analyzer API to automate detection of public access to AWS KMS keys

In this blog post, I show you how to use AWS IAM Access Analyzer programmatically to automate the detection of public access to your resources in an AWS account. I also show you how to work with the Access Analyzer API, create an analyzer on your account and call specific API functions from your code. […]

Demystifying AWS KMS key operations, bring your own key (BYOK), custom key store, and ciphertext portability

October 4, 2024: This post has been updated to cover the following changes: FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validation of AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), the addition of the external key store service to AWS KMS, and FIPS 140-3 validation of AWS CloudHSM. As you prepare to build or migrate your workload on Amazon Web […]

How to protect sensitive data for its entire lifecycle in AWS

April 25, 2023: We’ve updated this blog post to include more security learning resources. Many Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer workflows require ingesting sensitive and regulated data such as Payments Card Industry (PCI) data, personally identifiable information (PII), and protected health information (PHI). In this post, I’ll show you a method designed to protect sensitive […]

Round 2 post-quantum TLS is now supported in AWS KMS

January 30, 2024: The API in this blog post has been changed in newer version of the AWS CRT Client. See this page for more info. January 25, 2023: AWS KMS, ACM, Secrets Manager TLS endpoints have been updated to only support NIST’s Round 3 picked KEM, Kyber. s2n-tls and s2n-quic have also been updated […]

Combining encryption and signing with AWS KMS asymmetric keys

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. In this post, I discuss how to use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to combine […]

Architecting for database encryption on AWS

In this post, I review the options you have to protect your customer data when migrating or building new databases in Amazon Web Services (AWS). I focus on how you can support sensitive workloads in ways that help you maintain compliance and regulatory obligations, and meet security objectives. Understanding transparent data encryption I commonly see […]

Improved client-side encryption: Explicit KeyIds and key commitment

November 1, 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. I’m excited to announce the launch of two new features in the AWS Encryption SDK […]

How to use AWS Config to determine compliance of AWS KMS key policies to your specifications

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 […]

Code signing using AWS Certificate Manager Private CA and AWS Key Management Service asymmetric keys

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. In this post, we show you how to combine the asymmetric signing feature of the […]