Data protection in Amazon Cognito - Amazon Cognito
Data encryption
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Data protection in Amazon Cognito

The Amazon shared responsibility model applies to data protection in Amazon Cognito (Amazon Cognito). As described in this model, Amazon is responsible for protecting the global infrastructure that runs all of the Amazon Cloud. You are responsible for maintaining control over your content that is hosted on this infrastructure. This content includes the security configuration and management tasks for the Amazon 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 account credentials and set up individual user accounts with 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.

  • Set up API and user activity logging with Amazon CloudTrail.

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

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

We strongly recommend that you never put sensitive identifying information, such as your customers' account numbers, into free-form fields such as a Name field. This includes when you work with Amazon Cognito or other Amazon services using the console, API, Amazon CLI, or Amazon SDKs. Any data that you enter into Amazon Cognito or other services might get picked up for inclusion in diagnostic logs. When you provide a URL to an external server, don't include credentials information in the URL to validate your request to that server.

Data encryption

Data encryption typically falls into two categories: encryption at rest and encryption in transit.

Encryption at rest

Data within Amazon Cognito is encrypted at rest in accordance with industry standards.

Encryption in transit

As a managed service, Amazon Cognito 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 Cognito 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.

Amazon Cognito user pools and identity pools have IAM-authenticated, unauthenticated, and token-authorized API operations. Unauthenticated and token-authorized API operations are intended for use by your customers, the end users of your app. Unauthenticated and token-authorized API operations are encrypted at rest and in transit. For more information, see Amazon Cognito user pools authenticated and unauthenticated API operations.

Note

Amazon Cognito encrypts your content internally and doesn't support customer-provided keys.