KEYNOTE: BSides Knoxville - Why We Break Things… The Neuroscience Of Hackers!
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A highlight of my career, I was able to combine the my research in Neuroscience with my experience on the Getting Into Infosec Podcast and present my findings and reflections.
Pacific Hackers: Applying Pareto’s Principle To Securing AWS Organizations
DEF CON 27 Cloud Village
Ayman Elsawah - Using Paretos Principle for Securing AWS with SCPs - DEF CON 27 Cloud Village
Abstract
In this talk I will walk through the use of pareto’s 80/20 rule to add significant security to your AWS accounts at scale with little effort (but lots of testing). We will be leveraging the power of AWS Organizations and Service Control Policies (SCPs) to accomplish our goals. This will be a technical talk and guide on taking advantage of AWS Organizations and SCP from scratch and lessons learned from using it in the wild. If you have not yet utilized AWS Organizations and have (or plan to have) multiple AWS accounts, this talk is for you.
This talk assumes you have secured your individual AWS accounts at the basic level by locking down your root accounts with 2FA, and etc.
Introduction
Pareto's Principle
Explanations of Pareto’s principle
Common Cloud Security Issues
IAM permissions
IAM is the new perimeter
Examples from recent history
S3 Bucket leaks
Examples from recent history
AWS Organizations & SCP
Why Organizations and SCP?
Minimal configuration, large impact
Guardrails for your environment
Scales well
Part of AWS Well Architected Framework
Overview of ideal AWS Organization
AWS Org and SCP Steps list4
Organize your Organization
Go through steps to begin getting your accounts in order
Master Account
Must not have any resources
Policies applied here can lock you out
Mention life experience, challenges, and tips with migrating Master account
Logging Account
Separate account with limited access for logs, preserving integrity
OU Structure
Prod, QA, Dev, etc
Centralized Logging
CloudTrail configuration at Master account
This will automatically enable CloudTrail for all accounts, and all new accounts.
Bucket destination must be in logging account
SCPs to
Protect CloudTrals
Protect VPC Flow Logs
Limit Region usage
Limit root account usage
Require S3 encryption
Other SCPs
Resources
Q & A
Federating AWS IAM Authentication using STS and Shibboleth
At Pinterest I created an SSO helper tool (in Python) using STS, Shibboleth (yeah I know), that would provide temporary access to engineers.
No one had anything like this available out there it was beyond it’s time.
I discovered a bug in their metadata system that made calling STS a problem
Ayman Elsawah is a keynote speaker, podcast host, author, and practitioner. He’s worked with some brand name companies and takes a HUMAN approach towards security.