Zero Trust Security in AWS is a new paradigm. In a sense, that moves away from the traditional concept of “trust” being a given to a model. Further, consider all requests to be malicious and any traffic or data must be authorized by an administrator. It essentially means they divide a network into isolated, independent segments.
Hence, they can only communicate with other segments if explicitly allowed by the network administrator. Each segment has a unique set of rules (called “policies”). Further, that describes which traffic is safe and what the segment owner can do about it. This will enable organizations to implement granular controls over access to AWS resources.
Why is Zero Trust Security important?
Because it helps mitigate common and costly threats in AWS environments, such as:
Compromised credentials
With zero trust security, administrators will be able to use API keys. Especially, for specific AWS services as opposed to using global credentials. API keys are much more secure because only one person will have access to them in the organization. By restricting access to specific services, you can ensure that there are no privileges that could lead to an attack. In addition, if there is an incident where someone’s credentials have been compromised. Then, you can quickly revoke access without impacting other users or services.
Malware
By using network controls via VPC Flow Logs, you can detect and analyze traffic patterns in your environment. Further, to detect malware before it causes damage. In addition, when combined with Amazon GuardDuty, you can use machine learning algorithms. To identify behavior on your Amazon VPCs that could be malicious. This can significantly reduce the number of false positives and improve detection rates while reducing costs associated with manual investigations.
Data exfiltration: Zero Trust Security in AWS
With zero-trust security, organizations can limit user access to production data via staging environments. Or application proxies that are restricted by IP address or resource tags (for example, “production-only”). This reduces the risk of users accidentally or intentionally accessing production data. And exfiltrating it to a location outside of your environment.
Additionally, suppose your organization owns its infrastructure (such as a data center). In that case, you can restrict access between your on-premises infrastructure and your cloud infrastructure. So that even if an attacker gains access on-premises they cannot move laterally into your AWS resources.
What are AWS services?
Amazon VPC
Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is a secure, private, isolated section of the AWS Cloud. Hence, you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment and can use both IPv4 and IPv6 addressing.
Amazon VPC enables you to carve out a section of the AWS Cloud and use it for your own purpose. This allows you to create an isolated network for your application. Further, with its own IP address range, subnets, security policies, and access control lists (ACLs). You can then define how your instances within the Amazon VPC communicate with each other. Also, using either the Internet or an Amazon Virtual Private Gateway.
With Amazon VPC, you can create a virtual network that simulates a traditional network topology. Hence, allows you to easily move applications and services between your on-premises networks. And Amazon EC2 without modifying your existing applications. You can also connect multiple Amazon VPCs using VPN connections to extend your on-premises data center into the cloud.
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is storage for the internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. With Amazon S3, developers can store and serve any amount of data from any location. They can retrieve any amount of data within milliseconds from any device anywhere in the world. Developers can also set up their own buckets giving them full control over permissions (e.g., public-read or private).