Introduction to

Auditing the Use of AWS

October 2015
Amazon Web Services Introduction to Auditing the Use of AWS October 2015

2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Notices
This document is provided for informational purposes only. It represents AWSs
current product offerings and practices as of the date of issue of this document,
which are subject to change without notice. Customers are responsible for
making their own independent assessment of the information in this document
and any use of AWSs products or services, each of which is provided as is
without warranty of any kind, whether express or implied. This document does
not create any warranties, representations, contractual commitments, conditions
or assurances from AWS, its affiliates, suppliers or licensors. The responsibilities
and liabilities of AWS to its customers are controlled by AWS agreements, and
this document is not part of, nor does it modify, any agreement between AWS
and its customers.

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Contents
Abstract 4
Introduction 5
Approaches for using AWS Audit Guides 6
Examiners 6
AWS Provided Evidence 6
Auditing Use of AWS Concepts 8
Identifying assets in AWS 9
AWS Account Identifiers 9
1. Governance 10
2. Network Configuration and Management 14
3. Asset Configuration and Management 15
4. Logical Access Control 17
5. Data Encryption 19
6. Security Logging and Monitoring 20
7. Security Incident Response 21
8. Disaster Recovery 22
9. Inherited Controls 23
Appendix A: References and Further Reading 25
Appendix B: Glossary of Terms 26
Appendix C: API Calls 27

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Amazon Web Services Introduction to Auditing the Use of AWS October 2015

Abstract
Security at AWS is job zero. All AWS customers benefit from a data center and
network architecture built to satisfy the needs of the most security-sensitive
organizations. In order to satisfy these needs, AWS compliance enables
customers to understand the robust controls in place at AWS to maintain security
and data protection in the cloud.

As systems are built on top of AWS cloud infrastructure, compliance

responsibilities will be shared. By tying together governance-focused, audit-
friendly service features with applicable compliance or audit standards, AWS
Compliance enablers build on traditional programs, helping customers to
establish and operate in an AWS security control environment

AWS manages the underlying infrastructure, and you manage the security of
anything you deploy in AWS. AWS as a modern platform allows you to formalize
the design of security, as well as audit controls, through reliable, automated and
verifiable technical and operational processes built into every AWS customer
account. The cloud simplifies system use for administrators and those running
IT, and makes your AWS environment much simpler to audit sample testing, as
AWS can shift audits towards a 100% verification verses traditional sample
testing.

Additionally, AWS purpose-built tools can be tailored to customer requirements

and scaling and audit objectives, in addition to supporting real-time verification
and reporting through the use of internal tools such as AWS CloudTrail, Config
and CloudWatch. These tools are built to help you maximize the protection of
your services, data and applications. This means AWS customers can spend less
time on routine security and audit tasks, and are able to focus more on proactive
measures which can continue to enhance security and audit capabilities of the
AWS customer environment.

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Amazon Web Services Introduction to Auditing the Use of AWS October 2015

Introduction
As more and more customers deploy workloads into the cloud, auditors
increasingly need not only to understand how the cloud works, but additionally
how to leverage the power of cloud computing to their advantage when conducting
audits. The AWS cloud enables auditors to shift from percentage-based sample
testing toward a comprehensive real-time audit view, which enables 100%
auditability of the customer environment, as well as real-time risk management.

The AWS management console, along with the Command Line Interface (CLI),
can produce powerful results for auditors across multiple regulatory, standards
and industry authorities. This is due to AWS supporting a multitude of security
configurations to establish security, compliance by design, and real-time audit
capabilities through the use of:

Automation - Scriptable infrastructure (e.g. Infrastructure as Code)

allows you to create repeatable, reliable and secure deployment systems by
leveraging programmable (API-driven) deployments of services.

Scriptable Architectures Golden environments and Amazon

Machine Images (AMIs) can be deployed for reliable and auditable
services, and they can be constrained to ensure real-time risk
management.

Distribution - Capabilities provided by AWS CloudFormation give

systems administrators an easy way to create a collection of related AWS
resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion.

Verifiable- Using AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS

OpsWorks and AWS CloudHSM enables evidence gathering capability.

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Approaches for using AWS Audit Guides

Examiners
When assessing organizations that use AWS services, it is critical to understand
the Shared Responsibility model between AWS and the customer. The audit
guide organizes the requirements into common security program controls and
control areas. Each control references the applicable audit requirements.

In general, AWS services should be treated similarly to on-premise infrastructure

services that have been traditionally used by customers for operating services and
applications. Policies and processes that apply to devices and servers should also
apply when those functions are supplied by AWS. Controls pertaining solely to
policy or procedure are generally entirely the responsibility of the customer.
Similarly, AWS management, either via the AWS Console or Command Line API,
should be treated like other privileged administrator access. See the appendix
and referenced points for more information.

AWS Provided Evidence

Amazon Web Services Cloud Compliance enables customers to understand the
robust controls in place at AWS to maintain security and data protection in the
cloud. As systems are built on top of AWS cloud infrastructure, compliance
responsibilities will be shared. Each certification means that an auditor has
verified that specific security controls are in place and operating as intended. You
can view the applicable compliance reports by contacting your AWS account
representative. For more information about the security regulations and
standards with which AWS complies visit the AWS Compliance webpage. To help
you meet specific government, industry, and company security standards and
regulations, AWS provides certification reports that describe how the AWS Cloud
infrastructure meets the requirements of an extensive list of global security
standards, including: ISO 27001, SOC, the PCI Data Security Standard,
FedRAMP, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) Information Security
Manual, and the Singapore Multi-Tier Cloud Security Standard (MTCS SS 584).

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For more information about the security regulations and standards with which
AWS complies, see the AWS Compliance webpage.

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Auditing Use of AWS Concepts
The following concepts should be considered during a security audit of an
organizations systems and data on AWS:

Security measures that the cloud service provider (AWS) implements and
operates "security of the cloud"

Security measures that the customer implements and operates, related to

the security of customer content and applications that make use of AWS
services "security in the cloud"

While AWS manages security of the cloud, security in the cloud is the
responsibility of the customer. Customers retain control of what security they
choose to implement to protect their own content, platform, applications,
systems and networks, no differently than they would for applications in an on-
site datacenter.

Additional detail can be found at the AWS Security Center, at AWS Compliance,
and in the publically available AWS whitepapers found at: AWS Whitepapers
Identifying assets in AWS
A customers AWS assets can be instances, data stores, applications, and the
data itself. Auditing the use of AWS generally starts with asset identification.
Assets on a public cloud infrastructure are not categorically different than in-
house environments, and in some situations can be less complex to inventory
because AWS provides visibility into the assets under management.

AWS Account Identifiers

AWS assigns two unique IDs to each AWS account: an AWS account ID and a
canonical user ID. The AWS account ID is a 12-digit number, such as
123456789012, that you use to construct Amazon Resource Names (ARNs).
When you refer to resources, like an IAM user or an Amazon Glacier vault, the
account ID distinguishes your resources from resources in other AWS accounts.

Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) and AWS Service Namespaces

Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) uniquely identify AWS resources. We require
an ARN when you need to specify a resource unambiguously across all of AWS,
such as in IAM policies, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
tags, and API calls.

ARN Format example:

In addition to Account Identifiers, Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) and AWS

Service Namespaces, each AWS service creates a unique service identifier (e.g.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance ID: i-3d68c5cb or
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Volume ID vol-ecd8c122) which can
be used to create an environmental asset inventory and used within work papers
for scope of audit and inventory.

Each certification means that an auditor has verified that specific security
controls are in place and operating as intended.
Amazon Web Services OCIE Cybersecurity Audit Guide September 2015

1. Governance
Definition: Governance provides assurance that customer direction and intent
are reflected in the security posture of the customer. This is achieved by utilizing
a structured approach to implementing an information security program. For the
purposes of this audit plan, it means understanding which AWS services have
been purchased, what kinds of systems and information you plan to use with the
AWS service, and what policies, procedures, and plans apply to these services.

Major audit focus: Understand what AWS services and resources are being
used and ensure your security or risk management program has taken into
account the use of the public cloud environment.

Audit approach: As part of this audit, determine who within your organization
is an AWS account and resource owner, as well as the AWS services and
resources they are using. Verify policies, plans, and procedures include cloud
concepts, and that cloud is included in the scope of the customers audit program.

Governance Checklist
Checklist Item
Understand use of AWS within your organization. Approaches might include:

Polling or interviewing your IT and development teams.

Performing network scans, or a more in-depth penetration test.

Review expense reports and/or Purchase Orders (POs) payments related to

Amazon.com or AWS to understand what services are being used. Credit card
charges appear as AMAZON WEB SERVICES AWS.AMAZON.CO WA or
similar.

Note: Some individuals within your organization may have signed up for an AWS account
under their personal accounts, as such, consider asking if this is the case when polling or
interviewing your IT and development teams.

Identify assets. Each AWS account has a contact email address associated with it and
can be used to identify account owners. It is important to understand that this e-mail
address may be from a public e-mail service provider, depending on what the user
specified when registering.

A formal meeting can be conducted with each AWS account or asset owner to

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Checklist Item
understand what is being deployed on AWS, how it is managed, and how it has been
integrated with your organizations security policies, procedures, and standards.

Note: The AWS Account owner may be someone in the finance or procurement
department, but the individual who implements the organizations use of the AWS
resources may reside in the IT department. You may need to interview both.

Define your AWS boundaries for review. The review should have a defined scope.
Understand your organizations core business processes and their alignment with IT, in
its non-cloud form as well as current or future cloud implementations.

Obtain a description of the AWS services being used and/or being considered for use.

After identifying the types of AWS services in use or under consideration, determine
the services and business solutions to be included in the review.

Obtain and review any previous audit reports with remediation plans.

Identify open issues in previous audit reports and assess updates to the documents
with respect to these issues.

Assess policies. Assess and review your organizations security, privacy, and data
classification policies to determine which policies apply to the AWS service environment.

Verify if a formal policy and/or process exists around the acquisition of AWS services
to determine how purchase of AWS services is authorized.

Verify if your organizations change management processes and policies include

consideration of AWS services

Identify risks. Determine whether a risk assessment for the applicable assets has been
performed.

Review risks. Obtain a copy of any risk assessment reports and determine if they reflect
the current environment and accurately describe the residual risk environment.

Review risks documentation. After each element of your review, review risk
treatment plans and timelines/milestones against your risk management policies and

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Checklist Item
procedures.

Documentation and Inventory. Verify your AWS network is fully documented and
all AWS critical systems are included in their inventory documentation, with limited
access to this documentation.

Review AWS Config for AWS resource inventory and configuration history of
resources (Example API Call, 1).

Ensure that resources are appropriately tagged and associated with application data.

Review application architecture to identify data flows, planned connectivity between

application components and resources that contain data.

Review all connectivity between your network and the AWS Platform by reviewing
the following:

VPN connections where the customers on-premise Public IPs are mapped to
customer gateways in any VPCs owned by the Customer.
(Example API Call, 2 & 3). Direct Connect Private Connections, which may be
mapped to 1 or more VPCs owned by the customer. (Example API Call, 4)

Evaluate risks. Evaluate the significance of the AWS-deployed data to the

organizations overall risk profile and risk tolerance. Ensure that these AWS assets are
integrated into the organizations formal risk assessment program.

AWS assets should be identified and have protection objectives associated with them,
depending on their risk profiles.

Incorporate use of AWS into risk assessment. Conduct and/or incorporate AWS
service elements into your organizational risk assessment processes. Key risks could
include:

Identify the business risk associated with your use of AWS and identify business
owners and key stakeholders.
Verify that the business risks are aligned, rated, or classified within your use of AWS
services and your organizational security criteria for protecting confidentiality,

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Checklist Item
integrity, and availability.
Review previous audits related to AWS services (SOC, PCI, NIST 800-53 related
audits, etc.).
Determine if the risks identified previously have been appropriately addressed.
Evaluate the overall risk factor for performing your AWS review.
Based on the risk assessment, identify changes to your audit scope.
Discuss the risks with IT management, and adjust the risk assessment.
IT Security Program and Policy. Verify that the customer includes AWS services in
its security policies and procedures, including AWS account level best practices as
highlighted within the AWS service Trusted Advisor which provides best practice and
guidance across 4 topics Security, Cost, Performance and Fault Tolerance.

Review your information security policies and ensure that it includes AWS services.

Confirm you have has assigned an employee(s) as authority for the use and security
of AWS services and there are defined roles for those noted key roles, including a
Chief Information Security Officer.

Note: any published cybersecurity risk management process standards you have used to
model information security architecture and processes.

Ensure you maintain documentation to support the audits conducted for AWS
services, including its review of AWS third-party certifications.

Verify internal training records include AWS security, such as Amazon IAM usage,
Amazon EC2 Security Groups, and remote access to Amazon EC2 instances.

Confirm a cybersecurity response policy and training for AWS services is

maintained.

Note: any insurance specifically related to the customers use of AWS services and any
claims related to losses and expenses attributed to cybersecurity events as a result.

Service Provider Oversight. Verify the contract with AWS includes a requirement to
implement and maintain privacy and security safeguards for cybersecurity requirements.

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2. Network Configuration and Management

Definition: Network management in AWS is very similar to network
management on-premises, except that network components such as firewalls and
routers are virtual. Customers must ensure network architecture follows the
security requirements of their organization, including the use of DMZs to
separate public and private (untrusted and trusted) resources, the segregation of
resources using subnets and routing tables, the secure configuration of DNS,
whether additional transmission protection is needed in the form of a VPN, and
whether to limit inbound and outbound traffic. Customers who must perform
monitoring of their network can do so using host-based intrusion detection and
monitoring systems.

Major audit focus: Missing or inappropriately configured security controls

related to external access/network security that could result in a security
exposure.

Audit approach: Understand the network architecture of the customers AWS

resources, and how the resources are configured to allow external access from the
public Internet and the customers private networks. Note: AWS Trusted Advisor
can be leveraged to validate and verify AWS configurations settings.

Network Configuration and Management Checklist

Checklist Item

Network Controls. Identify how network segmentation is applied within the AWS
environment.
Review AWS Security Group implementation, AWS Direct Connect and Amazon
VPN configuration for proper implementation of network segmentation and ACL
and firewall setting or AWS services (Example API Call, 5 - 8).

Verify you have a procedure for granting remote, Internet or VPN access to
employees for AWS Console access and remote access to Amazon EC2 networks and
systems.

Review the following to maintain an environment for testing and development of

software and applications that is separate from its business environment:
VPC isolation is in place between business environment and environments
used for test and development.
By reviewing VPC peering connectivity between VPCs to ensure network

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Checklist Item
isolation is in place between VPCs
Subnet isolation is in place between business environment and
environments used for test and development.
By reviewing NACLs associated to Subnets in which Business and
Test/Development environments are located to ensure network isolation is
in place.
Amazon EC2 instance isolation is in place between business environment
and environments used for test and development.
By reviewing Security Groups associated to 1 or more Instances which are
associated with Business, Test or Development environments to ensure
network isolation is in place between Amazon EC2 instances
Review DDoS layered defense solution running which operates directly on AWS
reviewing components which are leveraged as part of a DDoS solution such as:
Amazon CloudFront configuration
Amazon S3 configuration
Amazon Route 53
ELB configuration
Note: The above services do not use Customer owned Public IP
addresses and offer DoS AWS inherited DoS mitigation features.
Usage of Amazon EC2 for Proxy or WAF
Further guidance can be found within the AWS Best Practices for DDoS
Resiliency Whitepaper

Malicious Code Controls. Assess the implementation and management of anti-

malware for Amazon EC2 instances in a similar manner as with physical systems.

3. Asset Configuration and Management

Definition: AWS customers are responsible for maintaining the security of
anything installed on AWS resources or connect to AWS resources. Secure
management of the customers AWS resources means knowing what resources
you are using (asset inventory), securely configuring the guest OS and
applications on your resources (secure configuration settings, patching, and anti-
malware), and controlling changes to the resources (change management).

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Major audit focus: Manage your operating system and application security
vulnerabilities to protect the security, stability, and integrity of the asset.

Audit approach: Validate the OS and applications are designed, configured,

patched and hardened in accordance with your policies, procedures, and
standards. All OS and application management practices can be common
between on-premise and AWS systems and services.

Asset Configuration and Management Checklist

Checklist Item

Assess configuration management. Verify the use of your configuration

management practices for all AWS system components and validate that these standards
meet baseline configurations.

Review the procedure for conducting a specialized wipe procedure prior to

deleting the volume for compliance with established requirements.

Review your Identity Access Management system (which may be used to allow
authenticated access to the applications hosted on top of AWS services).

Confirm penetration testing has been completed.

Change Management Controls. Ensure use of AWS services follows the same change
control processes as internal series.
Verify AWS services are included within an internal patch management process.
Review documented process for configuration and patching of Amazon EC2
instances:
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) (Example API Call, 9 - 10)
Operating systems
Applications

Review API calls for in-scope services for delete calls to ensure IT assets have been
properly disposed of.

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4. Logical Access Control

Definition: Logical access controls determine not only who or what can have
access to a specific system resource, but also the type of actions that can be
performed on the resource (read, write, etc.). As part of controlling access to
AWS resources, users and processes must present credentials to confirm that
they are authorized to perform specific functions or have access to specific
resources. The credentials required by AWS vary depending on the type of service
and the access method, and include passwords, cryptographic keys, and
certificates. Access to AWS resources can be enabled through the AWS account,
individual AWS Identify and Access Management (IAM) user accounts created
under the AWS account, or identity federation with the customers corporate
directory (single sign-on). AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables
users to securely control access to AWS services and resources. Using IAM you
can create and manage AWS users and groups and use permissions to allow and
deny permissions to AWS resources.

Major audit focus: This portion of the audit focuses on identifying how users
and permissions are set up for the services in AWS. It is also important to ensure
you are securely managing the credentials associated with all AWS accounts.

Audit approach: Validate permissions for AWS assets are being managed in
accordance with organizational policies, procedures, and processes. Note: AWS
Trusted Advisor can be leveraged to validate and verify IAM Users, Groups, and
Role configurations.

Logical Access Control Checklist

Checklist Item

Access Management, Authentication and Authorization. Ensure there are internal

policies and procedures for managing access to AWS services and Amazon EC2 instances.
Ensure documentation of use and configuration of AWS access controls, examples
and options outlined below:
Description of how Amazon IAM is used for access management.
List of controls that Amazon IAM is used to manage Resource
management, Security Groups, VPN, object permissions, etc.
Use of native AWS access controls, or if access is managed through

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Checklist Item
federated authentication, which leverages the open standard Security
Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2.0.

List of AWS Accounts, Roles, Groups and Users, Policies and policy
attachments to users, groups, and roles (Example API Call, 11).

A description of Amazon IAM accounts and roles, and monitoring methods.

A description and configuration of systems within EC2.

Remote Access. Ensure there is an approval process, logging process, or controls to

prevent unauthorized remote access. Note: All access to AWS and Amazon EC2 instances is
remote access by definition unless Direct Connect has been configured.

Review process for preventing unauthorized access, which may include:

AWS CloudTrail for logging of Service level API calls.

AWS CloudWatch logs to meet logging objectives.

IAM Policies, S3 Bucket Policies, Security Groups for controls to prevent

unauthorized access.

Review connectivity between firm network and AWS:

VPN Connection between VPC and firms network.

Direct Connect (cross connect and private interfaces) between firm and
AWS.

Defined Security Groups, Network Access Control Lists and Routing tables
in order to control access between AWS and the network.

Personnel Control. Ensure restriction of users to those AWS services strictly for their
business function (Example API Call, 12).
Review the type of access control in place as it relates to AWS services.
AWS access control at an AWS level using IAM with Tagging to control
management of Amazon EC2 instances (start/stop/terminate) within
networks
Customer Access Control using IAM (LDAP solution) to manage access
to resources which exist in networks at the Operating System / Application
layers

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Checklist Item
Network Access control using AWS Security Groups (SGs) , Network
Access Control Lists (NACLs), Routing Tables, VPN Connections, VPC
Peering to control network access to resources within customer owned
VPCs.

5. Data Encryption
Definition: Data stored in AWS is secure by default; only AWS owners have
access to the AWS resources they create. However, customers who have sensitive
data may require additional protection by encrypting the data when it is stored
on AWS. Only the Amazon S3 service currently provides an automated, server-
side encryption function in addition to allowing customers to encrypt on the
customer side before the data is stored. For other AWS data storage options, the
customer must perform encryption of the data.

Major audit focus: Data at rest should be encrypted in the same way as on-
premise data is protected. Also, many security policies consider the Internet an
insecure communications medium and would require the encryption of data in
transit. Improper protection of data could create a security exposure.

Audit approach: Understand where the data resides, and validate the methods
used to protect the data at rest and in transit (also referred to as data in flight).
Note: AWS Trusted Advisor can be leveraged to validate and verify permissions
and access to data assets.

Data Encryption Checklist

Checklist Item

Encryption Controls. Ensure there are appropriate controls in place to protect

confidential information in transport while using AWS services.
Review methods for connection to AWS Console, management API, S3, RDS
and Amazon EC2 VPN for enforcement of encryption.
Review internal policies and procedures for key management including AWS
services and Amazon EC2 instances.
Review encryption methods used, if any, to protect PINs at rest AWS offers a
number of key management services such as KMS, CloudHSM and Server Side

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Checklist Item
Encryption for S3 which could be used to assist with data at rest encryption
(Example API Call, 13-15).

6. Security Logging and Monitoring

Definition: Audit logs record a variety of events occurring within your
information systems and networks. Audit logs are used to identify activity that
may impact the security of those systems, whether in real-time or after the fact,
so the proper configuration and protection of the logs is important.

Major audit focus: Systems must be logged and monitored, just as they are for
on-premise systems. If AWS systems are not included in the overall company
security plan, critical systems may be omitted from scope for monitoring efforts.

Audit approach: Validate that audit logging is being performed on the guest
OS and critical applications installed on Amazon EC2 instances and that
implementation is in alignment with your policies and procedures, especially as it
relates to the storage, protection, and analysis of the logs.

Security Logging and Monitoring Checklist:

Checklist Item

Logging Assessment Trails and Monitoring. Review logging and monitoring

policies and procedures for adequacy, retention, defined thresholds and secure
maintenance, specifically for detecting unauthorized activity for AWS services.
Review logging and monitoring policies and procedures and ensure the
inclusion of AWS services, including Amazon EC2 instances for security related
events.
Verify that logging mechanisms are configured to send logs to a centralized
server, and ensure that for Amazon EC2 instances the proper type and format of
logs are retained in a similar manner as with physical systems.
For customers using AWS CloudWatch, review the process and record of the use
of network monitoring.
Ensure analytics of events are utilized to improve defensive measures and
policies.
Review AWS IAM Credential report for unauthorized users, AWS Config and
resource tagging for unauthorized devices (Example API Call, 16).

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Checklist Item
Confirm aggregation and correlation of event data from multiple sources using
AWS services such as:
VPC Flow logs to identify accepted/rejected network packets entering
VPC.
AWS CloudTrail to identify authenticated and unauthenticated API
calls to AWS services
ELB Logging Load balancer logging.
AWS CloudFront Logging Logging of CDN distributions.

Intrusion Detection and Response. Review host-based IDS on Amazon EC2

instances in a similar manner as with physical systems.
Review AWS provided evidence on where information on intrusion detection
processes can be reviewed.

7. Security Incident Response

Definition: Under a Shared Responsibility Model, security events may by
monitored by the interaction of both AWS and the AWS customer. AWS detects
and responds to events impacting the hypervisor and the underlying
infrastructure. Customers manage events from the guest operating system up
through the application. You should understand incident response
responsibilities and adapt existing security monitoring/alerting/audit tools and
processes for their AWS resources.

Major audit focus: Security events should be monitored regardless of where

the assets reside. The auditor can assess consistency of deploying incident
management controls across all environments, and validate full coverage through
testing.

Audit approach: Assess existence and operational effectiveness of the incident

management controls for systems in the AWS environment.

Security Incident Response Checklist:

Checklist Item
Incident Reporting. Ensure the incident response plan and policy for cybersecurity
incidents includes AWS services and addresses controls that mitigate cybersecurity

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incidents and aid recovery.

Ensure leveraging of existing incident monitoring tools, as well as AWS available
tools to monitor the use of AWS services.
Verify that the Incident Response Plan undergoes a periodic review and changes
related to AWS are made as needed.
Note if the Incident Response Plan has notification procedures and how the
customer addresses responsibility for losses associated with attacks or impacting
instructions.

8. Disaster Recovery
Definition: AWS provides a highly available infrastructure that allows
customers to architect resilient applications and quickly respond to major
incidents or disaster scenarios. However, customers must ensure that they
configure systems that require high availability or quick recovery times to take
advantage of the multiple Regions and Availability Zones that AWS offers.

Major audit focus: An unidentified single point of failure and/or inadequate

planning to address disaster recovery scenarios could result in a significant
impact. While AWS provides service level agreements (SLAs) at the individual
instance/service level, these should not be confused with a customers business
continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) objectives, such as Recovery Time
Objective (RTO) Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The BC/DR parameters are
associated with solution design. A more resilient design often utilizes multiple
components in different AWS availability zones and involve data replication.

Audit approach: Understand the DR and determine the fault-tolerant

architecture employed for critical assets. Note: AWS Trusted Advisor can be
leveraged to validate and verify some aspects of the customers resiliency
capabilities.

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Disaster Recovery Checklist:

Checklist Item

Business Continuity Plan (BCP). Ensure there is a comprehensive BCP, for AWS
services utilized, that addresses mitigation of the effects of a cybersecurity incident
and/or recover from such an incident.
Within the Plan, ensure that AWS is included in the emergency preparedness and
crisis management elements, senior manager oversight responsibilities, and the
testing plan.

Backup and Storage Controls. Review the customers periodic test of their backup
system for AWS services (Example API Call, 17-18).
1. Review inventory of data backed up to AWS services as off-site backup.

9. Inherited Controls
Definition: Amazon has many years of experience in designing, constructing,
and operating large-scale datacenters. This experience has been applied to the
AWS platform and infrastructure. AWS datacenters are housed in nondescript
facilities. Physical access is strictly controlled both at the perimeter and at
building ingress points by professional security staff utilizing video surveillance,
intrusion detection systems, and other electronic means. Authorized staff must
pass two-factor authentication a minimum of two times to access datacenter
floors. All visitors and contractors are required to present identification and are
signed in and continually escorted by authorized staff.

AWS only provides datacenter access and information to employees and

contractors who have a legitimate business need for such privileges. When an
employee no longer has a business need for these privileges, his or her access is
immediately revoked, even if he or she continues to be an employee of Amazon or
Amazon Web Services. All physical access to datacenters by AWS employees is
logged and audited routinely.

Major audit focus: The purpose of this audit section is to demonstrate

appropriate due diligence in selecting service providers.

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Audit approach: Understand how you can request and evaluate third-party
attestations and certifications in order to gain reasonable assurance of the design
and operating effectiveness of control objectives and controls.

Inherited Controls Checklist

Checklist Item

Physical Security & Environmental Controls. Review the AWS provided evidence
for details on where information on intrusion detection processes can be reviewed that
are managed by AWS for physical security controls.

Conclusion
There are many third-party tools that can assist you with your assessment. Since
AWS customers have full control of their operating systems, network settings,
and traffic routing, a majority of tools used in-house can be used to assess and
audit the assets in AWS.

A useful tool provided by AWS is the AWS Trusted Advisor tool. AWS Trusted
Advisor draws upon best practices learned from AWS aggregated operational
history of serving hundreds of thousands of AWS customers. The AWS Trusted
Advisor performs several fundamental checks of your AWS environment and
makes recommendations when opportunities exist to save money, improve
system performance, or close security gaps.

This tool may be leveraged to perform some of the audit checklist items to
enhance and support your organizations auditing and assessment processes.

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Appendix A: References and Further

Reading
1. Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Processes -
https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/Security/AWS%20Security%20Whitepape
r.pdf
2. Amazon Web Services Risk and Compliance Whitepaper
https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/compliance/AWS_Risk_and_Compliance_
Whitepaper.pdf
3. AWS OCIE Cybersecurity Workbook -
https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/compliance/AWS_SEC_Workbook.pdf
4. Using Amazon Web Services for Disaster Recovery -
http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Disaster_Recovery.pdf
5. Identity federation sample application for an Active Directory use case -
http://aws.amazon.com/code/1288653099190193
6. Single Sign-on with Windows ADFS to Amazon EC2 .NET Applications -
http://aws.amazon.com/articles/3698?_encoding=UTF8&queryArg=searchQuery
&x=20&y=25&fromSearch=1&searchPath=all&searchQuery=identity%20federati
on
7. Authenticating Users of AWS Mobile Applications with a Token Vending Machine
http://aws.amazon.com/articles/4611615499399490?_encoding=UTF8&queryAr
g=searchQuery&fromSearch=1&searchQuery=Token%20Vending%20machine
8. Client-Side Data Encryption with the AWS SDK for Java and Amazon S3 -
http://aws.amazon.com/articles/2850096021478074
9. AWS Command Line Interface
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-welcome.html
10. Amazon Web Services Acceptable Use Policy - http://aws.amazon.com/aup/

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Appendix B: Glossary of Terms

Authentication: Authentication is the process of determining whether someone
or something is, in fact, who or what it is declared to be.

Availability Zone: Amazon EC2 locations are composed of regions and

Availability Zones. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to
be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive,
low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same region.

EC2: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that
provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-
scale cloud computing easier for developers.

Hypervisor: A hypervisor, also called Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), is

software/hardware platform virtualization software that allows multiple
operating systems to run on a host computer concurrently.

IAM: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enables a customer to create
multiple Users and manage the permissions for each of these Users within their
AWS Account.

Object: The fundamental entities stored in Amazon S3. Objects consist of object
data and metadata. The data portion is opaque to Amazon S3. The metadata is a
set of name-value pairs that describe the object. These include some default
metadata such as the date last modified and standard HTTP metadata such as
Content-Type. The developer can also specify custom metadata at the time the
Object is stored.

Service: Software or computing ability provided across a network (e.g., EC2, S3,
VPC, etc.).

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Appendix C: API Calls

The AWS Command Line Interface is a unified tool to manage your AWS
services. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/index.html#cli-aws

1. List all resources with tags

- aws ec2 describe-tags
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/describe-tags.html
2. List all Customer Gateways on the customers AWS account:
- aws ec2 describe-customer-gateways output table
3. List all VPN connections on the customers AWS account
- aws ec2 describe-vpn-connections
4. List all Customer Direct Connect connections
- aws directconnect describe-connections
- aws directconnect describe-interconnects
- aws directconnect describe-connections-on-interconnect
- aws directconnect describe-virtual-interfaces
5. List all Customer Gateways on the customers AWS account:
- aws ec2 describe-customer-gateways output table
6. List all VPN connections on the customers AWS account
- aws ec2 describe-vpn-connections
7. List all Customer Direct Connect connections
- aws directconnect describe-connections
- aws directconnect describe-interconnects
- aws directconnect describe-connections-on-interconnect
- aws directconnect describe-virtual-interfaces
8. Alternatively use Security Group focused CLI:
- aws ec2 describe-security-groups
9. List AMI currently owned/registered by the customer
- aws ec2 describe-images owners self
10. List all Instances launched with a specific AMI
- aws ec2-describe-instances --filters Name=image-id,Values=XXXXX (where XXXX
= image-id value e.g. ami-12345a12

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11. List IAM Roles/Groups/Users

- aws iam list-roles
- aws iam list-groups
- aws iam list-users
12. List Policies assigned to Groups/Roles/Users:
- aws iam list-attached-role-policies --role-name XXXX
- aws iam list-attached-group-policies --group-name XXXX
- aws iam list-attached-user-policies --user-name XXXX
where XXXX is a resource name within the Customers AWS Account
13. List KMS Keys
- aws kms list-aliases
14. List Key Rotation Policy
- aws kms get-key-rotation-status key-id XXX (where XXX = key-id In AWS account
15. List EBS Volumes encrypted with KMS Keys
- aws ec2 describe-volumes "Name=encrypted,Values=true"
- targeted e.g. us-east-1)
16. Credential Report
- aws iam generate-credential-report
- aws iam get-credential-report
17. Create Snapshot/Backup of EBS volume
- aws ec2 create-snapshot --volume-id XXXXXXX
- (where XXXXXX = ID of volume within the AWS Account)
18. Confirm Snapshot/Backup completed
- aws ec2 describe-snapshots --filters Name=volume-id,Values=XXXXXX)

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