Data protection in Amazon CloudTrail - Amazon CloudTrail
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Data protection in Amazon CloudTrail

The Amazon shared responsibility model applies to data protection in Amazon CloudTrail. 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 CloudTrail 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.

By default, CloudTrail event log files are encrypted using Amazon S3 server-side encryption (SSE). You can also choose to encrypt your log files with an Amazon Key Management Service (Amazon KMS) key. You can store your log files in your bucket for as long as you want. You can also define Amazon S3 lifecycle rules to archive or delete log files automatically. If you want notifications about log file delivery and validation, you can set up Amazon SNS notifications.

The following security best practices also address data protection in CloudTrail:

Because CloudTrail logs files are stored in a bucket or buckets in Amazon S3, you should also review the data protection information in the Amazon Simple Storage Service User Guide. For more information, see Data protection in Amazon S3.