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## AWS Security Fundamentals

### Week 1 - Basic concepts, AWS compliance programs, securing AWS accounts using AWS IAM

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**Shared Responsibility Model**

* AWS is responsible for security of the cloud & securing infrastructure of the regions
* Meanwhile customer is responsible for security “in” the cloud. Whatever we build must be secured by ourselves. Kinda like a home alarm system. They give us the system but we still have to turn it off and on.

**Compliance**

* Our environment needs to be PCI compliant
* Need an environment that is compliant with FedRAMP
* Need to maintain adequate governance over the entire IT controlled environment

Best compliance practices:
* Understand compliances objectives & requirements
* Establish controlled environment that meets those objs and reqs
* Understand validation required based on our organizations risk tolerance
* Verification of operating effectiveness of our controlled environment

**Best practices for AWS accounts:**

* Principle of Least Privilege Access – Provision the minimum needed access policies
* MFA should be used for AWS root account along with every account you are trying to protect
* Strong passwords
* Use roles and groups to assign permissions
* Monitoring using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail

**AWS Organisations**

AWS Organisations can:

* Automate account creation and management
* Create groups of accounts
* Govern access to AWS services resources region by policies
* Set up single payment method for all AWS accounts with consolidated billing
* Share resources across accounts

How to make an AWS Organisation:
* Choose an account as a master account
* Make the org in this master account
* Either creat an organization unit (OU) or member account
* Create service control policies to the OU or member account

Best practices for creating new organisations:
* Plan ahead for the structure of your organization
* Keep Master account free of any operational AWS resources
* Use AWS CloudTrail
* Apply Least Privilege Practice
* Assign policies to OUs rather than accounts, will allow you to maintain a better mapping between your organizational structure and the level of AWS access needed
* Test new and modified policies on a single account before scaling up
* Use the APIs and AWS CloudFormation

**Identity and Access Services**

3 use cases of when you need to provide access to a user:
* User accesses an AWS account and resources (ex. single sign on for a dev to log into an AWS account using credentials to run an AWS lambda function)
* Allowing resources to access other resources
    * Need to be able to validate the identity and permissions of your applications resources
    * Use short term credentials called IAM roles
* Allow end users to access the application

AWS Organizations:
* Service that helps you create and manage multiple AWS accounts
* Consolidated billing - roll up billings from multiple accounts to a central master account

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM):
* Enables you manage access to AWS services and respurces securely
* Manage IAM users and their access
* Manage IAM roles and their permissions
* Manage federated users and their permissions
* AWS managed policy - Standalone policy that is created and administrated by AWS
* Customer managed policy - Standalone policy that you create and administer in your AWS account
* Inline policy - Policy that is embedded in a priciple entity such as a user, a group, or a role

AWS Single Sign On (SSO):
* Cloud service that makes it easy to centrally manage SSO access to multiple AWS accounts

Amazon Cloud Directory:
* Enables you to build flexible cloud  native directories for organizing hierarchies of data among multiple dimensions

**Directory Services**

Amazon Cognito:
* Cognito User Pools - an identity store
* Stores all your users

### Week 2 - Network isolation and endpoint security

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**Network Isolation**

