We constantly hear about huge hacks in the media, with companies losing millions of dollars in an instant. While this problem is large for the enterprise side of the world, it is even more detrimental when it comes to the fedspace. CloudCheckr Co-Founder & CEO Aaron Newman will highlight effective strategies and tools that AWS users can employ to improve their security posture. Often times the biggest threat to security is the human, Aaron will go through ways to work around this and how you can shore up security to avoid these errors. Specific emphasis will be placed upon leveraging native AWS services and the talk will include concrete steps that users can begin employing immediately. Learn More: https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/

1. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Aaron Newman, Co-founder & CEO, CloudCheckr
June 14, 2017
Hackproof Your Gov Cloud
Mitigating Risks for 2017 and Beyond

2. What to Expect from the Session
• Re-evaluate:
• Your perspective as you move to the cloud/scale up
• Intrusion detection, activity monitoring and vulnerability
Assessment in AWS
• Gain a better understanding of:
• How to better leverage native AWS services
• Perimeter assessments of your VPCs
• Internal vs. external threats
• Monitoring threats
What to Expect from this Session:

3. Changing Your Perspective
Moving to the cloud = rethinking your perimeter security
How do I secure my business applications on 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

4. In the 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

5. 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 ~

6. AWS Foundation Services
Compute Storage Database Networking
AWS Global Infrastructure
Availability Zones
Regions
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
AWS

7. 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
• 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
vulnerabil
-ities

8. 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
• Routing tables, Network ACL
• VPC, subnets
• Amazon S3 buckets and
permissions
• IAM policies
OLD
WORLD
NEW
WORLD

9. Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs)
Default VPC is created in every region
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, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache

11. Network Security in a VPC
Network ACLs (NACLs)
• 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
• Stateful – responses to allowed inbound traffic are not subjected
to the rules for outbound traffic
• Rules are cumulative – traffic is denied except with explicit 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

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

13. Running VA in Cloud Environments
How do I run Vulnerability Assessments (VA)?
Stage 1:
Gather the list of
public IPs and EIPs
of all resources
Do I need to scan the
private IP addresses
and instances?
Stage 2:
Scanning an AMI
Spin up a new
instance, run a scan
on the new instance
Mark everything
based on this AMI as
“scanned”
Stage 3:
What about when an
instance “drifts” from
original AMI?
Someone can
reconfigure settings,
install new software
In an elastic, ephemeral, automatic scaling environment,
clouds can have tens of thousands of instances

14. Patching Strategies for Operating Systems
“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
Systematic Workload Reprovisioning
• Based on high-assurance repositories
• Effective battling advanced persistent threats

15. What are we missing?
Don’t assume attacks only happen against Amazon EC2
Over 80 different AWS services
• IAM authentication is centralized
• But services have unique authorization/access controls
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

16. Amazon Relational Database Service
Only port RDS listens on is the database port
• AWS limits access to database ports only
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
• Encrypt your snapshots with KMS keys
• Brute-force passwords, restore to their own account

17. Amazon Simple Storage Service
Up to 1000 S3 buckets in an account
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

18. Amazon Simple Queuing Service
Where does Amazon SQS live?
• Within a region, not within a VPC
• Uses a URL such as:
https://sqs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/123456789012/MySQS

19. Amazon Simple Notification Service
Amazon SNS does not live inside your VPC
Permissions based on topic policies:

20. Using AWS CloudTrail
An AWS service that records each time an AWS API action 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 AWS Management Console go through the API
AWS 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/

21. Using AWS CloudWatch Logs
Simple method of monitoring operating system logs
• Ship Windows event logs and syslogs to AWS CloudWatch
Integration from CloudTrail into CloudWatch Logs system logs
• With alerting capabilities
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
• Account Locked Out, Changes to System or Audit log
Get started at:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/
DeveloperGuide/WhatIsCloudWatchLogs.html

22. 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/

23. Tools For Configuring AWS Security & Cost
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

24. Leveraging AWS data – AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, VPC
Flow logs, AWS CloudWatch Logs, DBR, and more metrics
Providing complete transparency – into 1 or across 1000s
of AWS accounts
Automating security, configuration, and activity monitoring
and alerting
Continuous monitoring of configurations, resources and
permissions
Active optimization, sophisticated allocation, and simplified
invoicing for enterprise cloud cost management
Monitoring, Reporting, & Optimization
Enterprise Security & Cost Management from CloudCheckr

25. Questions?

26. Thank you!
For this slide deck, please reach out to
marketing@cloudcheckr.com