Review AWS Trusted Advisor security checks.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Trusted Advisor is an online tool that provides real-time guidance to help you provision your resources following AWS best practices. The Trusted Advisor checks your environment in various categories, including cost optimization, performance, fault tolerance, and, crucially, security. For the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam, understanding how Trusted Advisor performs security checks and how to interpret its recommendations is critical.

Trusted Advisor Security Checks Overview

Trusted Advisor’s security checks are designed to help you follow AWS best practices for securing your resources. They cover a range of areas including:

• IAM use and permissions
• MFA on root accounts
• Security groups and their rules
• Exposed access keys

With these checks, Trusted Advisor scans through your account configurations and compares them against predefined security standards. When discrepancies or potential vulnerabilities are detected, it flags these items and offers actionable steps to resolve the issues.

Key Security Checks

IAM Roles, Users, and Policies

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is crucial for managing access to your AWS resources. Trusted Advisor’s security checks ensure that IAM roles, users, and policies are set up correctly. For example, it will check if policies are overly permissive, which can increase security risks.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) on Root Account

Trusted Advisor checks that MFA is enabled on the root account, which is the account with full access to all AWS services and resources. It is a critical security measure to prevent unauthorized access to your AWS environment.

Security Groups – Specific Ports Unrestricted

One common misconfiguration is leaving specific ports open to the internet, such as SSH (port 22) or RDP (port 3389). Trusted Advisor examines your security groups for open ports that might expose your environment to security breaches.

IAM Access Key Rotation

AWS recommends regularly rotating IAM access keys to reduce the risk of old keys being compromised. Trusted Advisor checks the age of access keys and notifies you if keys are due for rotation.

Bucket Permissions

Misconfigured Amazon S3 bucket permissions can lead to unintended public exposure of data. Trusted Advisor checks your S3 buckets for any permissions that allow public read or write access.

Example: Security Groups Check

Consider you have a security group with the following inbound rules:

[
{
“IpProtocol”: “tcp”,
“FromPort”: 22,
“ToPort”: 22,
“IpRanges”: [{“CidrIp”: “0.0.0.0/0”}]
}
]

This snippet indicates that the security group allows incoming SSH connections from any IP address, which is generally not recommended. Trusted Advisor would flag this and recommend limiting the IP range or restricting access to known IP addresses.

Interpreting Trusted Advisor Security Alerts

When Trusted Advisor raises an alert, it categorizes the severity into levels such as “Green” (No problem detected), “Yellow” (Investigation recommended), or “Red” (Action recommended).

Here’s a simplified example of what a section of the Trusted Advisor dashboard might look like for security checks:

In this table, each check has a corresponding status indicating the action required. For each ‘Red’ or ‘Yellow’ status, administrators should review the recommendations provided and take the necessary steps to rectify the issues.

Best Practices Using Trusted Advisor Security Checks

For the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam, you should be aware of best practices when using Trusted Advisor security checks:

• Regularly review and action the recommendations provided by Trusted Advisor.
• Implement the least privilege principle for IAM permissions.
• Always enable MFA on your root account.
• Routinely rotate access keys according to AWS best practices.
• Verify security group rules to ensure they are not overly permissive.
• Continuously monitor and correct any public exposure of S3 buckets.

In conclusion, AWS Trusted Advisor’s security checks are an integral part of a SysOps Administrator’s toolset to enhance the security of your AWS environment. Familiarity with these checks will not only aid you in their day-to-day security management tasks but is also necessary for the effective preparation for the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam.