Infrastructure security in Amazon RDS - Amazon Relational Database Service
Security groupsPublic accessibility
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Infrastructure security in Amazon RDS

As a managed service, Amazon Relational Database Service is protected by Amazon global network security. For information about Amazon security services and how Amazon protects infrastructure, see Amazon Cloud Security. To design your Amazon environment using the best practices for infrastructure security, see Infrastructure Protection in Security Pillar Amazon Well‐Architected Framework.

You use Amazon published API calls to access Amazon RDS through the network. Clients must support the following:

  • Transport Layer Security (TLS). We require TLS 1.2 and recommend TLS 1.3.

  • Cipher suites with perfect forward secrecy (PFS) such as DHE (Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman) or ECDHE (Elliptic Curve Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman). Most modern systems such as Java 7 and later support these modes.

Additionally, requests must be signed by using an access key ID and a secret access key that is associated with an IAM principal. Or you can use the Amazon Security Token Service (Amazon STS) to generate temporary security credentials to sign requests.

In addition, Amazon RDS offers features to help support infrastructure security.

Security groups

Security groups control the access that traffic has in and out of a DB instance. By default, network access is turned off to a DB instance. You can specify rules in a security group that allow access from an IP address range, port, or security group. After ingress rules are configured, the same rules apply to all DB instances that are associated with that security group.

For more information, see Controlling access with security groups.

Public accessibility

When you launch a DB instance inside a virtual private cloud (VPC) based on the Amazon VPC service, you can turn on or off public accessibility for that DB instance. To designate whether the DB instance that you create has a DNS name that resolves to a public IP address, you use the Public accessibility parameter. By using this parameter, you can designate whether there is public access to the DB instance. You can modify a DB instance to turn on or off public accessibility by modifying the Public accessibility parameter.

For more information, see Hiding a DB instance in a VPC from the internet.

Note

If your DB instance is in a VPC but isn't publicly accessible, you can also use an Amazon Site-to-Site VPN connection or an Amazon Direct Connect connection to access it from a private network. For more information, see Internetwork traffic privacy.