Data protection in Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling - Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
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Data protection in Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

The Amazon shared responsibility model applies to data protection in Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. 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 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.

  • Use Amazon encryption solutions, along with all default security controls within Amazon Web 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 140-2 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) 140-2.

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 Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling or other Amazon Web 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.

When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance, you have the option of passing user data to the instance to do additional configuration when the instance boots. We also recommend that you never put confidential or sensitive information in the user data that will get passed to an instance.

Use Amazon KMS keys to encrypt Amazon EBS volumes

You can configure your Auto Scaling group to encrypt Amazon EBS volume data stored in the cloud with Amazon KMS keys. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling supports Amazon managed and customer managed keys to encrypt your data. Note that the KmsKeyId option to specify a customer managed key is not available when you use a launch configuration. To specify your customer managed key, use a launch template instead. For more information, see Create a launch template for an Auto Scaling group. For information about how to create, store, and manage your Amazon KMS encryption keys, see the Amazon Key Management Service Developer Guide.

You can also configure a customer managed key in your EBS-backed AMI before setting up the launch template or launch configuration, or use encryption by default to enforce the encryption of the new EBS volumes and snapshot copies that you create. For more information, see Use encryption with EBS-backed AMIs in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances and Encryption by default in the Amazon EBS User Guide.

Note

For information about how to set up the key policy that you need to launch Auto Scaling instances when you use a customer managed key for encryption, see Required Amazon KMS key policy for use with encrypted volumes.

For the data protection guidelines provided by Amazon EBS, see Data protection in Amazon Elastic Block Store in the Amazon EBS User Guide.