Security features on edge services (for example, AWS WAF, load balancers, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Shield)

Can you describe how AWS WAF integrates with Amazon CloudFront for enhanced security?

AWS WAF is directly integrated with Amazon CloudFront, allowing rules to be applied to HTTP and HTTPS requests that CloudFront forwards to your application. This integration makes it possible to filter traffic based on conditions such as IP addresses, HTTP headers, and body content, providing a frontline defense against common web exploits and bots.

What are the security benefits of using Amazon Route 53 as your DNS service?

Amazon Route 53 has built-in security features like DNSSEC, which secures the DNS query and response process to prevent spoofing and cache poisoning attacks. Moreover, Route 53’s global network of DNS servers enhances availability and resilience against DDoS attacks.

How does AWS Shield protect against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks?

AWS Shield provides automatic inline mitigation techniques that can minimize application downtime and latency. There are two tiers of AWS Shield – Standard and Advanced. Shield Standard defends against most common, frequently occurring network and transport layer DDoS attacks, while Shield Advanced offers more comprehensive protection with detailed attack diagnostics and the support of the AWS DDoS Response Team (DRT).

What purpose does AWS Certificate Manager serve in enhancing security on AWS edge services?

AWS Certificate Manager handles the complexity of creating, storing, and renewing SSL/TLS certificates used by AWS services, such as AWS CloudFront and Elastic Load Balancing. It automates certificate management, helping enable secure communications for users without expiration-related outages.

When should you consider using AWS PrivateLink in conjunction with your AWS edge services?

AWS PrivateLink should be considered when you’re aiming to expose your services privately to another VPC and want to minimize exposure to the public internet. It ensures that traffic between your VPC and AWS services stays on the Amazon network, enhancing security and reducing the risk of data exfiltration.

Explain how you can use AWS Firewall Manager with edge services to enhance your security posture.

AWS Firewall Manager simplifies the administration of firewall rules across your AWS Organization. With it, you can centrally configure and manage WAF rules, AWS Shield Advanced protections, and VPC security groups across multiple AWS accounts and applications. This is particularly critical for edge services like Amazon CloudFront, where you might deploy the same set of WAF rules across various distributions.

How do security groups and network ACLs differ in the context of AWS Elastic Load Balancing?

Security groups in AWS are stateful and operate at the instance level, allowing control over inbound and outbound traffic. With Elastic Load Balancers, security groups define the allowed traffic to and from load balancers. Network ACLs, in contrast, are stateless, operate at the subnet level, and provide a layer of security by allowing or denying traffic entering or leaving a VPC subnet.

Can AWS CloudFront be used to mitigate SQL injection and XSS attacks? How?

Yes, AWS CloudFront can mitigate SQL injection and XSS attacks by integrating with AWS WAF, which deploys web ACLs (Access Control Lists) containing rules that specifically identify and block such threats. This prevents malicious requests from reaching the application servers.

What is the role of Origin Shield in AWS CloudFront, and how does it affect security?

Origin Shield is an additional caching layer that sits between CloudFront edge locations and your origin servers. It helps protect against origin overload by serving as an origin cache, reducing the load on the origin and mitigating the risk of DDoS attacks by aggregating and collapsing requests across multiple edge locations.

Describe how AWS KMS can enhance the security of edge services such as Amazon CloudFront.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is used to create and manage cryptographic keys securely. When integrated with edge services like Amazon CloudFront, KMS can encrypt sensitive data at the edge, ensuring that data is protected both at rest and in transit. KMS also handles key rotation and management, which is essential for maintaining a robust security posture.

What are some measures one can take to secure data transfers between AWS CloudFront and the origin servers?

To secure data transfers, one can use HTTPS for all communications between CloudFront and origin servers, implement Origin Access Identity (OAI) to restrict direct access to content on S3 buckets, and use Field-Level Encryption to protect specific data throughout the system by encrypting them at the edge locations.

How does geofencing with Amazon Route 53 help improve security on your AWS infrastructure?

Geofencing with Amazon Route 53 can be used to restrict application delivery to specific geographic regions, thereby limiting the attack surface by blocking requests from regions that are not relevant to your user base. This can help mitigate the risk of region-specific attacks and unwanted traffic.