Migrating from the data center to the cloud requires us to rethink much of what we do to secure our applications. The idea of physical security morphs as infrastructure becomes virtualized by AWS APIs. In a new world of ephemeral, auto-scaling infrastructure, you need to adapt your security architecture to meet both compliance and security threats. In the presentation we will cover topics including: - Minimizing attack vectors and surface area - Perimeter assessments of your VPCs - Internal vs. External threats - Monitoring threats - Re-evaluating Intrusion Detection, Activity Monitoring, and Vulnerability Assessment in AWS

1. Aaron Newman, Co-Founder
April 4, 2016
Hackproof Your Cloud
Unified Cost & Security Management

2. Changing Your Perspective
Moving to the Cloud = rethinking your perimeter security
How do I secure my business applications in AWS?
Rethink how you perform most security tasks:
• Network-based IPS/IDS
• Network scanning
• Penetration tests
• Vulnerability assessments
Focus on securing cloud workloads…
…not on securing the cloud

3. In the Traditional Data Center
Setting Up Perimeter Security:
• Setting up your infrastructure
• Setting up access points to the internet
• Configuring firewall, IDS, IPS, etc. at the access points
Auditing Your Perimeter Security:
• Gather set of IP Address blocks to poke at
• Do a port scan (using tools such as Nmap)
• Determine which ports are open on the target
• Try various exploits on the open ports.
• Sniff lots of packets
• Dig around to make sure no back doors into the network
• Wireless access points, secondary T1 lines, DSL connections
• VPN access from some other network

4. AWS: What’s Different?
The idea of physical security morphs as
infrastructure becomes virtualized by AWS APIs.
In a new world of ephemeral, auto-scaling infrastructure,
you need to adapt your security architecture to meet
both compliance and security threats.
 Physical assets secured at the AWS availability zone
 Must guard the AWS API
 IAM Access is your new physical security

5. AWS Foundation Services
Compute Storage Database Networking
AWS Global
Infrastructure
Regions
Availability Zones
Edge Locations
Network
Security
Inventory
& Config
Customer Applications & Content
You get to define
your controls IN
the Cloud
AWS takes care of
the security OF
the Cloud
You
AWS and You Share Responsibility for Security
Data
Security
Access
Control

6. Minimizing Attack Vectors
Principles don’t change
• Reduce your surface area!
• Defense-in-depth
Some attack vectors don’t change
• Application level
• user-privilege escalation, web app vulns, XSS
• Operating system vulnerabilities
• Database vulnerabilities
Some attack vectors change
• Homogeneous environment
• Polymorphic targets/mapping
• Reduced network sniffing
Security
Hardening
Configure and
manage user
privileges
Remove
unused user
accounts
Close unused
open network
ports
Enforce
password
complexity &
policies
Remove
unwanted
services
Patch all
known
vulnerabilities

7. Give me your network block
• Nmap
• Port scans
• Ping sweeps
• Etc…
Perimeter Assessments In the Cloud
How do I assess the perimeter of my cloud?
Let me see your configuration
• List of publicly-accessible
resources
• Security groups (Amazon
EC2-Classic, Amazon EC2-
VPC, Redshift, RDS, etc…)
• Routing tables, Network
ACL
• VPC, subnets
• Amazon S3 buckets and
permissions
• IAM policies
OLD
WORLD
NEW
WORLD

8. Virtual Private Clouds
Default VPC is created in every region
• VPCs are wide open by default
VPC is composed of:
• Internet and VPN gateways – connect to the rest
of the world
• 1+ subnet(s)
• Routing table – how to move traffic around the
VPC
• Network ACLs – a firewall but stateless
• Security groups – host-based firewall stateful
• Resources – Amazon EC2, RDS, Redshift,
ElastiCache

10. Network Security in a VPC
Network ACLs (NACLs)
• Virtual firewalls assigned to VPC/Subnets
• Network ACLs are stateless; responses to allowed inbound
traffic are subject to the rules for outbound traffic (and vice versa).
• Rules evaluated numerical ascending – DENY can be overridden by
ALLOW
• Watch for INEFFECTIVE rules
Security Groups
• Host-based firewalls assigned to instances
• Stateful – responses to allowed inbound traffic are not subjected
to the rules for outbound traffic
• Rules are cumulative – DENY always overrides ALLOW
• Assigning wrong security group to an instance exposes the entire VPC
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_ACLs.html
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-network-
security.html

11. Complex Connections to Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 instance can be
run inside VPCs
•Legacy capability to run
outside VPCs
•Instance ID: i-001bac39
•Friendly name (implemented
as a tag): ISS-V2-API1
Amazon EC2 instance can be
given 1 or more private IP
addresses
•For example: 172.12.6.186
•This generates a DNS name
ip-172-12-6-186.us-west-
2.compute.internal
Amazon EC2 instance can be
given 1 or more public IP
addresses
•For example: 52.24.201.167
•This generates a DNS name
ec2-52-24-201-167.us-west-
2.compute.amazonaws.com
Amazon EC2 instance can be
attached to an Elastic IP
address (EIP)
•For example:
107.20.135.132

12. Running VA in Cloud Environments
How do I run Vulnerability Assessments?
 Gather the list of
public IPs and EIPs of
all resources
 Do I need to scan the
private IP addresses
and instances?
 Scanning an AMI
 Spin up a new
instance, run a scan on
the new instance
 Mark everything based
on this AMI as
“scanned”
 What about when an
instance “drifts” from
original AMI?
 Someone can
reconfigure settings,
install new software
In an elastic, ephemeral, auto scaling environment
clouds can have tens of thousands of instances

13. Patching Strategies for AWS
“No Patch” Strategy
• Stay away from patching live systems
• Focus on patching templates/AMIs
• Deliver patches by redeploying workloads
• Dependent on adopting pure cloud architectures
Look at AWS OS Templates
• Patched by Amazon
Systematic Workload Reprovisioning
• Based on high-assurance repositories
• Effective battling Advanced Persistent Threats

14. What are we missing?
Don’t assume attacks only happen against Amazon EC2
Over 30 different AWS services
• Many have unique access control systems
You will have 100s of AWS accounts
We need a complete inventory
• All publicly-accessible endpoints and resources
Security breaches can happen with a single weak link

15. AWS Relational Database Service
Location
• Within a VPC or not, multi-AZ or not
Security options
• DB security groups (if not in a VPC) or Amazon EC2-VPC security groups
• Select a non-default database port
Only port RDS listens on is the database port
• Shutdown on all other ports (publicly, I’m sure AWS team can access the OS)
Publicly accessible option
• Not a good idea, but if you do this
• Make sure you use security groups to restrict source IP address
• Make sure you have latest patches applied
Secure your database snapshots
• Keys to the kingdom if someone can get a copy
• Brute-force passwords, restore to their own account

16. S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Up to 1000 buckets in an account
• Unlimited number of objects (billions is not uncommon)
Location
• Within a region, across multi-AZs, not housed in a VPC
• Can’t sit between client and storage
Security
• Access control through IAM policies, bucket policies, ACLs, and query string authentication
• Server-side Encryption, HTTPS support
• Server-access logs (does not integrate with CloudTrail)
Don’t grant FULL_CONTROL, WRITE_ACP, WRITE bucket permissions to Everyone EVER!!!
Create an inventory of your sensitive data

17. SQS (Simple Queuing Service)
Where does SQS live?
• Within a region, not within a VPC
• Uses a URL such as:
https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/123456789012/MySQS
Security based on policy documents:
{
"Version": "2008-10-17",
"Id": "arn:aws:sqs:us-east-1:123456789012:MySQS/SQSDefaultPolicy",
"Statement": [
{
"Sid": "Sid1415217272568",
"Effect": "Allow", "Principal": { "AWS": "*" },
"Action": [
"SQS:ReceiveMessage", "SQS:SendMessage"
],
"Resource": "arn:aws:sqs:us-east-1:123456789012:MySQS"
},

18. SNS (Simple Notification Service)
SNS does not live inside your VPC
Permissions based on topic policies:

19. Using AWS CloudTrail
An AWS Service that records each time the AWS API is called
• Currently supports most AWS services
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awscloudtrail/latest/userguide/dochistory.html
Conveniently everything in AWS goes through the API
• Even actions in the Management Console go through the API
CloudTrail writes files into an Amazon S3 bucket
• Near real-time (every five minutes)
• Files are in JSON format
Get started at:
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/

20. Using CloudWatch Logs
Simple method of monitoring operating system logs
• Ship Windows event logs and syslogs to AWS CloudWatch
Types of use-case:
• Account Login Failure, Account Login Success, New local account
creation,
Excessive Login Failure (Configurable)
• Unauthorized Windows Admin Logon, Windows Account Lockout
Attempt,
Windows Computer Account Changes
• Windows Audit Policy Changes, Windows Event Log Cleared
• Non-Windows - Account Locked Out, Non-Windows - Account
Unlocked,
Changes to System or Audit log
Get started at:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuid
e/WhatIsCloudWatchLogs.html

21. Using Amazon VPC Flow Logs
An AWS service that records each time packets enter or leave a VPC
• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/flow-logs.html
Security team comes to you and says:
“We need logs going to instance 1-0123456 from
IP address ranges 52.205.16.0 - 52.205.31.255”
Monitor for DENY connections
• Gives you both security group and NACL denies
Announcement:
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2015/06/aws-launches-
amazon-vpc-flow-logs/

22. Tools For Configuring AWS Securely & Cost Effectively
Generic tools fall short
Purpose-built, not cloud-washed
• Make sure tools don’t fall over in the cloud
• Tools have to understand dynamic, ephemeral IPs
Need a deep understanding of AWS
• What does this means
• Context is important
• Actionable intelligence

23. Unified Cost & Security Management
Visualize deployed inventory in the cloud
What cloud users need… CloudCheckr provides…
Monitoring reports, generated and updated daily, listing all
additions, deletions, or modifications over the past 24 hours.
Comprehensive visibility & control on security, availability, cost and
usage with 350+ out-of-the-box best practice policies.
A detailed report of configured infrastructure, highlighting
and maintaining configuration records.
Detailed inventory reports designed to allow anyone from an to
obtain a complete picture of their AWS cloud deployment.
Multiple reports allowing required staff to dissect cloud costs.
Utilization reports to ensure infrastructure is running smoothly.
Maintain a cloud configuration historical record
Check best practices covering security,
availability, cost, and usage
Monitor changes in a cloud environment
Analyze usage in the cloud
Understand/Audit costs in the cloud
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