The Triad Goals of AWS Cyber Security

July 17, 2020 / Nirav Shah

Have you thought about what following points mean in AWS and cybersecurity in general?

• CIA
• AAA
• Non-repudiation

If you are working as a security consultant that you must be aware of topics like these, but if not, don’t worry we will explain to you in details.

What is the CIA?

It is Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Sometimes these three points can be referred to as “The Triad”.

Good examples of confidentiality are things like using data encryption. So encrypting our data at rest, encrypting our data in transit, things like user IDs and passwords. Things like two-factor authentication, which we use in Identity Access Management on AWS. So confidentiality. Think of these as basic level privacy.

Integrity involves maintaining consistency, accuracy and trustworthiness of data over its entire life cycle.

Example

Checksum, when you download a piece of software, there will always be a Checksum next to it, and then you can essentially once you’ve downloaded it, you can check the hash of that software to the Checksum and if they match then you know that the data is correct.

And then Availability

Suppose you set up infrastructure on the cloud, what points are to be you kept in mind?

Example: You want redundancy over everything. So you want your disk to be rated,
you want high availability clusters, you want multiple availability zones, multiple regions,
and you want to design for failure as well so that you basically will have very high availability.

So now let’s see how AWS can help to the above model.

In confidentiality obviously you wanna keep your data confidential, so we would use things like Identity Access Management, and Multi-Factor Authentication. It might also use things like Bucket Policies, we might use things like security groups, or access control lists within our VPC. That is all about Confidentiality.

In Availability simple and short.

• Auto-scaling
• Multiple Availability Zones
• And we can use Route 53 with health checks, to help us detect the failure and automatic failover.

Integrity

AWS has their own SSL service now, so they’ve got Certificate Managers. So keeping your data with good integrity. And also things like inside S3. So things like Version Control, Multi-Factor Authentication when you’re trying to delete things inside S3, you can require that somebody provides an MFA token before that object is deleted.

You must read this blog “AWS shared responsibility” For more information visit Here.