I will be talking about server-side vs. client side encryption throughout the post so it might be helpful here to review the differences. CloudTrail contains an ongoing record of every time AWS KMS keys are used to either encrypt or decrypt your resources. View all posts by Kenneth Hui. If you have any comments or feedback on the approach discussed here, or how you’ve used it for your use case, leave a comment on this post. This post provides guidance for how to think about encryption in AWS. Cloud encryption advantages The most important thing to remember about encryption on AWS is that you always own and control your data. AWS CloudHSM Organizations can utilize AWS CloudHSM for those wanting to use HSMs for administering and managing the encryption keys, but not having to worry about managing HSM Hardware in a data center. One third of internet users are estimated to visit website using Amazon Web Services. The encryption workflow is as follows: Using this option, customers are able to encrypt data before it leave their data center and uploaded to S3. AWS believes strongly that these two groups should work together—they want the same things. ( Log Out /  This information is useful for operational purposes and to help you meet your compliance needs. Encryption is a core component of a good data protection strategy, but people sometimes have questions about how to manage encryption in the cloud to meet the growth pace and complexity of today’s enterprises. Amazon Macie is a service that helps you understand the contents of your S3 buckets by analyzing and classifying the data contained within your S3 objects. The final client-side encryption option requires the customer to provide the master key (KEK) that is used to encrypt any Data Keys. Change ). Follow Cloud Architect Musings on WordPress.com, Data-at-rest encryption only since all three providers’ implementation of TLS for encrypting data-in-transit do not differ greatly. Probably due to the newness of the service, Google Cloud Storage has the fewest options for encrypting data and managing keys. The CloudHSM appliance integrates with key management software that users can run on-premises or in AWS. One of the challenges related to certificates is regularly rotating and renewing them so they don’t unexpectedly expire and prevent your users from using your website or application. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! The encryption process is transparent to S3 and the encrypted data is stored as it would be with unencrypted data. With this option, users are offloading all key management responsibilities to AWS. With this option, users have the option of storing and managing their own KEKs or using Azure Key Vault. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. The KEK can be a symmetric or asymmetric key, The encrypted data is uploaded to and stored in Azure Blob Storage, The encrypted data is retrieved from Azure Blob Storage. Without getting into detail, GCM provides authenticated encryption by adding a unique tag to the ciphertext which verifies that the encrypted data has not been tampered with in any way. Amazon S3 supports both server-side and client-side encryption with a number of options for each. This ensures that there is no single point of failure and that KMS maintains high availability. I will probably be covering services such as block storage, file storage and databases in the future. The SOC2 report includes several AWS KMS-specific controls that might be of interest to your audit-minded colleagues. Last year, I wrote a blog about generating secrets in your CloudFormation template and storing them in the Parameter Store. Server-Side Encryption – Request Amazon S3 to encrypt your object before saving it on disks in its data centers and then decrypt it when you download the objects. Fortunately, ACM has a feature that updates the certificate before it expires and automatically deploys the new certificate to the resources associated with it. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. The encryption process is transparent to Google Cloud Storage and the encrypted data is stored as it would be with unencrypted data, which means the client-side encrypted data will actually be encrypted again by the service. ( Log Out /  A cloud service provider’s Key Management Service, such as AWS KMS, is a multi-tenant, encryption key storage service managed by Amazon that provides a subset of encryption key lifecycle management. AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a fully managed service that is essentially provided to users as key management software as a service running on a fleet of hosted HSM appliances. The encrypted chunks of data are then distributed across Google’s storage systems. With the service-managed option, all keys are generated by the Azure Blob Storage Service and managed by Microsoft. Encryption operations occur on the servers that host EC2 instances, ensuring the security of both data-at-rest and data-in-transit between an instance and its attached EBS storage. Due to the length of this blog post (20 pages), I’ve decided to make it available as a downloaded PDF which you can grab here. You can provide access to the console for AWS Config and CloudTrail to your counterparts in audit and risk management roles. The Google Cloud Storage Encryption by Default option leverages Google’s internal Key Management Service (KMS) and should not be confused with GCP’s Cloud KMS offering which is currently NOT supported with Google Cloud Storage. Your blog is very good. As you may expect, the robustness of the service and the diversity of options is strongly correlated with the age of the cloud provider. Customer managed and stored in Key Vault, the Azure key management service offering. The encryption workflow for SSE-S3 is as follows: Before diving into the SSE-KMS option, it is important to note that KMS uses the term Customer Master key (CMK) to describe what would be typically called the Key Encryption Key (KEK). And for more information on encryption in the cloud and on AWS, check out the following resources, in addition to our collection of encryption blog posts. Internally, KMS has multiple layers of abstraction, all designed to secure the encryption keys  and to simplify key management. This lets you have the benefit of the KMS capabilities for encryption and access control to build complex solutions with a variety of AWS services without compromising on using encryption as part of your data protection strategy. If you need to use that key tens of thousands of times per second, the elastic capacity of AWS services can scale to meet your demands. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. The CDK is also a logical key container that holds the actual DEK and other relevant cryptographic materials. There is a broad range of AWS storage and database services that support KMS integration so you can implement robust encryption to protect your data at rest within AWS services. Google Cloud Storage (not the most original name in the world) Is the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) object storage service. Many customers want to secure data in transit for services by using privately trusted TLS certificates instead of publicly trusted TLS certificates. CloudHSM give customers a dedicated hardware appliance that is tamper-proof running in an Amazon Data Center. In this course two of Amazon Web Services’ Solutions Architects will provide you with a foundational understanding of cloud security, compliance and the AWS shared responsibility model. For compliance-related concerns, there are a few capabilities that are worth exploring as options to increase your coverage of security controls. At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we encourage our customers to take advantage of encryption to help secure their data. This includes storing keys, rotating keys and also managing the lifecycle of older historical keys which are needed for decryption of older data. AWS Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and helps you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. You don’t have to handle the private key material or figure out complicated tooling to deploy the certificates to your resources. Amazon S3 still handles the encryption and decryption process but the customer provides the encryption keys which must be a AES-256 symmetric key. User can also choose to leverage KMS for key management through SSE-KMS or Client-Side Encryption with KMS-managed customer keys. AWS doesn’t store the actual keys but performs a salted Hash-based Message Authentication (HMAC) operation against the keys and stores the resultant hash. By default, the log files delivered by CloudTrail to your bucket are encrypted by Amazon server-side encryption with Amazon S3-managed encryption keys (SSE-S3). It would take a supercomputer years to crack the 256-bit encryption… In Azure, server-side encryption is called Storage Service Encryption when it pertains to blob storage. AWS services can also be configured to perform automated remediation to correct any deviations from your desired configuration state. She is passionate about helping customers learn best practices to secure their AWS cloud environment so they can innovate faster on behalf of their business. How each provider implements their cryptographic system, including encryption methods, ciphers and key management. Encryption in the cloud is easier than encryption on-premises, powerful, and can help you meet the highest standards for controls and compliance. For additional monitoring capabilities, consider Amazon Macie and AWS Security Hub. 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