Give EC2 instance access to a specific S3 bucket using IAM

Here’s the policy you need to attach to your instance’s IAM: { “Version”: “2012-10-17”, “Statement”: [ { “Effect”: “Allow”, “Action”: “s3:*”, “Resource”: [ “arn:aws:s3:::bucket-name”, “arn:aws:s3:::bucket-name/*” ] } ] } You can replace the ‘*’ above with more restrictive permissions (e.g. read only) where necessary. This approach means you don’t need […]

Puppet – Using AWS web console as Puppet’s external node classifier (ENC)

This is a script I wrote that queries the ec2 tags of an aws console, in order to figure out what environment a node belongs to, and what class to assign to it. #!/bin/bash # https://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/external_nodes.html # http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-started.html export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=xxxxxxx instanceid=`echo $1 | awk -F”_” ‘{print […]

AWS – SSL termination on the ELB

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/classic/using-elb-listenerconfig-quickref.html https://blog.qruizelabs.com/2014/06/06/ssl-aws-elb/ In my case I replaced: !/elbcheck.html with: ^(.*)$

AWS – Avoid using User-Data/Cloud-init by utilizing Autoscaling + Cloudwatch Events + Lambda + Ansible

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/python-programming-model-handler-types.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/EventTypes.html#auto_scaling_event_types https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/scheduling-ssh-jobs-using-aws-lambda/ https://github.com/fugue/emulambda https://github.com/nficano/python-lambda

AWS – Cloudwatch related security features

Cloudwatch related API requests are signed with HMAC-SHA1signature from the request and the the user’s private key Cloudwatch’s (sdk) API is only accessible via https, not http, i.e. it is encrypted with ssl An IAM user can only access cloudwatch if they are given access via IAM You can configure […]

AWS – CloudHSM

CloudHSM (Hardware Security Module): This is essentially the name of a dedicated physical machine that is seperate from all the other AWS hardware, and it is used to store encryption keys. If an outside party gains access to these keys, then your AWS infrastructure is compromised. Hence even AWS employees […]

AWS – Security Considerations

This is placeholder to give an overview of AWS security

AWS – Shared (Security) Responsibility Model

Ensuring that your aws infrastructure is secure is a responsibility that’s shared between you and Amazon. Amazon is responsible for mainly: Ensuring physical hardware that your resources (e.g. EC2 instances are running on). E.g. limit access to who is allowed to walk into AWS’s AZs (data centres) Ensuring that internal […]

AWS – Natively available AWS features for enhancing security

AWS offers a bunch of natively security features that we can use to enhance security: AWS API access security – via api keys buitin vpc firewalls – private and public subnets. Encourages us to use private subnets whenever possible IAM – only authenticated users and apps are granted access privileges […]

AWS – Minimizing impact of DDOS attacks

We can limit DDOS attacks in the following ways: identify ip range of ddos attacks and block it at the Network ACL level. Alternatively could do this at the Security Group Level, but it’s quicker at the Network ACL level. Install DDOS prevention software on our EC2 instances that will […]