AWS Security Blog

Tag: AWS KMS

How to protect HMACs inside AWS KMS

April 20, 2022: In the section “Use the HMAC key to encode a signed JWT,” we fixed an error in the code sample. Today AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is introducing new APIs to generate and verify hash-based message authentication codes (HMACs) using the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 validated hardware security modules […]

Best practices: Securing your Amazon Location Service resources

Location data is subjected to heavy scrutiny by security experts. Knowing the current position of a person, vehicle, or asset can provide industries with many benefits, whether to understand where a current delivery is, how many people are inside a venue, or to optimize routing for a fleet of vehicles. This blog post explains how […]

Top 2021 AWS Security service launches security professionals should review – Part 1

Given the speed of Amazon Web Services (AWS) innovation, it can sometimes be challenging to keep up with AWS Security service and feature launches. To help you stay current, here’s an overview of some of the most important 2021 AWS Security launches that security professionals should be aware of. This is the first of two […]

How to use tokenization to improve data security and reduce audit scope

April 25, 2023: We’ve updated this blog post to include more security learning resources. Tokenization of sensitive data elements is a hot topic, but you may not know what to tokenize, or even how to determine if tokenization is right for your organization’s business needs. Industries subject to financial, data security, regulatory, or privacy compliance […]

Managing permissions with grants in AWS Key Management Service

August 9, 2022: This post has been updated to correct the references on RDS documentation. February 22, 2022: This post has been updated to clarify details of the example KMS grants provided in this blog. AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) helps customers to use encryption to secure their data. When creating a new encrypted […]

How US federal agencies can use AWS to encrypt data at rest and in transit

This post is part of a series about how Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help your US federal agency meet the requirements of the President’s Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity. You will learn how you can use AWS information security practices to meet the requirement to encrypt your data at rest and in […]

Encrypt global data client-side with AWS KMS multi-Region keys

Today, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is introducing multi-Region keys, a new capability that lets you replicate keys from one Amazon Web Services (AWS) Region into another. Multi-Region keys are designed to simplify management of client-side encryption when your encrypted data has to be copied into other Regions for disaster recovery or is replicated […]

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 […]

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 […]