AWS Security Blog

Tag: EC2

Get the full benefits of IMDSv2 and disable IMDSv1 across your AWS infrastructure

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) helps customers build secure and scalable applications. IMDS solves a security challenge for cloud users by providing access to temporary and frequently-rotated credentials, and by removing the need to hardcode or distribute sensitive credentials to instances manually or programmatically. The Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) […]

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How to scan EC2 AMIs using Amazon Inspector

Amazon Inspector is an automated vulnerability management service that continually scans Amazon Web Services (AWS) workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. Amazon Inspector supports vulnerability reporting and deep inspection of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, container images stored in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and AWS Lambda functions. Operating system […]

How to use policies to restrict where EC2 instance credentials can be used from

April 5, 2023: A fix has been added to the Service Control Policy examples to allow EC2 instances to mount encrypted EBS volumes. March 7, 2023: We’ve added language clarifying the requirement around using VPC Endpoints, and we’ve corrected a typo in the S3 bucket policy example. Today AWS launched two new global condition context […]

Use EC2 Instance Connect to provide secure SSH access to EC2 instances with private IP addresses

In this post, I show you how to use Amazon EC2 Instance Connect to use Secure Shell (SSH) to securely access your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running on private subnets within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). EC2 Instance Connect provides a simple and secure way to connect to your EC2 […]

How to share encrypted AMIs across accounts to launch encrypted EC2 instances

May 18, 2023:We’ve updated the syntax in the JSON policy document in the Create the policy setting for the source account section. 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 […]

How to quickly launch encrypted EBS-backed EC2 instances from unencrypted AMIs

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. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides the information that you need to launch an instance […]

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Creating an opportunistic IPSec mesh between EC2 instances

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. IPSec (IP Security) is a protocol for in-transit data protection between hosts. Configuration of site-to-site […]

Recovering from a rough Monday morning: An Amazon GuardDuty threat detection and remediation scenario

Amazon GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behavior to help you protect your AWS accounts and workloads. Given the many log types that Amazon GuardDuty analyzes (Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail, and DNS logs), you never know what it might discover in your […]

Now You Can Create Encrypted Amazon EBS Volumes by Using Your Custom Encryption Keys When You Launch an Amazon EC2 Instance

October 29, 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. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) offers an encryption solution for your Amazon EBS volumes so […]

Adhere to IAM Best Practices in 2016

As another new year begins, we encourage you to review our recommended AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices. Following these best practices can help you maintain the security of your AWS resources. You can learn more by watching the IAM Best Practices to Live By presentation that Anders Samuelsson gave at AWS re:Invent […]