Data protection in Amazon Certificate Manager - Amazon Certificate Manager
Security for certificate private keys
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Data protection in Amazon Certificate Manager

The Amazon shared responsibility model applies to data protection in Amazon Certificate Manager. As described in this model, Amazon is responsible for protecting the global infrastructure that runs all of the Amazon Web Services Cloud. You are responsible for maintaining control over your content that is hosted on this infrastructure. You are also responsible for the security configuration and management tasks for the Amazon Web Services services that you use. For more information about data privacy, see the Data Privacy FAQ.

For data protection purposes, we recommend that you protect Amazon Web Services account credentials and set up individual users with Amazon IAM Identity Center or Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM). That way, each user is given only the permissions necessary to fulfill their job duties. We also recommend that you secure your data in the following ways:

  • Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) with each account.

  • Use SSL/TLS to communicate with Amazon resources. We require TLS 1.2 and recommend TLS 1.3.

  • Set up API and user activity logging with Amazon CloudTrail. For information about using CloudTrail trails to capture Amazon activities, see Working with CloudTrail trails in the Amazon CloudTrail User Guide.

  • Use Amazon encryption solutions, along with all default security controls within Amazon Web Services services.

  • Use advanced managed security services such as Amazon Macie, which assists in discovering and securing sensitive data that is stored in Amazon S3.

  • If you require FIPS 140-3 validated cryptographic modules when accessing Amazon through a command line interface or an API, use a FIPS endpoint. For more information about the available FIPS endpoints, see Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3.

We strongly recommend that you never put confidential or sensitive information, such as your customers' email addresses, into tags or free-form text fields such as a Name field. This includes when you work with ACM or other Amazon Web Services services using the console, API, Amazon CLI, or Amazon SDKs. Any data that you enter into tags or free-form text fields used for names may be used for billing or diagnostic logs. If you provide a URL to an external server, we strongly recommend that you do not include credentials information in the URL to validate your request to that server.

Security for certificate private keys

When you request a public certificate, Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) generates a public/private key pair. For imported certificates, you generate the key pair. The public key becomes part of the certificate. ACM stores the certificate and its corresponding private key, and uses Amazon Key Management Service (Amazon KMS) to help protect the private key. The process works like this:

  1. The first time you request or import a certificate in an Amazon Region, ACM creates a managed Amazon KMS key with the alias aws/acm. This KMS key is unique in each Amazon account and each Amazon Region.

  2. ACM uses this KMS key to encrypt the certificate's private key. ACM stores only an encrypted version of the private key; ACM does not store the private key in plaintext form. ACM uses the same KMS key to encrypt the private keys for all certificates in a specific Amazon account and a specific Amazon Region.

  3. When you associate the certificate with a service that is integrated with Amazon Certificate Manager, ACM sends the certificate and the encrypted private key to the service. A grant is also created in Amazon KMS that allows the service to use the KMS key to decrypt the certificate's private key. For more information about grants, see Using Grants in the Amazon Key Management Service Developer Guide. For more information about services supported by ACM, see Services integrated with ACM.

    Note

    You have control over the automatically created Amazon KMS grant. If you delete this grant for any reason, you lose ACM functionality for the integrated service.

  4. Integrated services use the KMS key to decrypt the private key. Then the service uses the certificate and the decrypted (plaintext) private key to establish secure communication channels (SSL/TLS sessions) with its clients.

  5. When the certificate is disassociated from an integrated service, the grant created in step 3 is retired. This means the service can no longer use the KMS key to decrypt the certificate's private key.