Data Protection in Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose - Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
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Data Protection in Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Kinesis Data Firehose encrypts all data in transit using TLS protocol. Furthermore, for data stored in interim storage during processing, Kinesis Data Firehose encrypts data using Amazon Key Management Service and verifies data integrity using checksum verification.

If you have sensitive data, you can enable server-side data encryption when you use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. How you do this depends on the source of your data.

Note

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.

Server-Side Encryption with Kinesis Data Streams as the Data Source

When you configure a Kinesis data stream as the data source of a Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream, Kinesis Data Firehose no longer stores the data at rest. Instead, the data is stored in the data stream.

When you send data from your data producers to your data stream, Kinesis Data Streams encrypts your data using an Amazon Key Management Service (Amazon KMS) key before storing the data at rest. When your Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream reads the data from your data stream, Kinesis Data Streams first decrypts the data and then sends it to Kinesis Data Firehose. Kinesis Data Firehose buffers the data in memory based on the buffering hints that you specify. It then delivers it to your destinations without storing the unencrypted data at rest.

For information about how to enable server-side encryption for Kinesis Data Streams, see Using Server-Side Encryption in the Amazon Kinesis Data Streams Developer Guide.

Server-Side Encryption with Direct PUT or Other Data Sources

If you send data to your delivery stream using PutRecord or PutRecordBatch, or if you send the data using Amazon IoT, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, or CloudWatch Events, you can turn on server-side encryption by using the StartDeliveryStreamEncryption operation.

To stop server-side-encryption, use the StopDeliveryStreamEncryption operation.

You can also enable SSE when you create the delivery stream. To do that, specify DeliveryStreamEncryptionConfigurationInput when you invoke CreateDeliveryStream.

When the CMK is of type CUSTOMER_MANAGED_CMK, if the Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose service is unable to decrypt records because of a KMSNotFoundException, a KMSInvalidStateException, a KMSDisabledException, or a KMSAccessDeniedException, the service waits up to 24 hours (the retention period) for you to resolve the problem. If the problem persists beyond the retention period, the service skips those records that have passed the retention period and couldn't be decrypted, and then discards the data. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose provides the following four CloudWatch metrics that you can use to track the four Amazon KMS exceptions:

  • KMSKeyAccessDenied

  • KMSKeyDisabled

  • KMSKeyInvalidState

  • KMSKeyNotFound

For more information about these four metrics, see Monitoring Kinesis Data Firehose Using CloudWatch Metrics.

Important

To encrypt your delivery stream, use symmetric CMKs. Kinesis Data Firehose doesn't support asymmetric CMKs. For information about symmetric and asymmetric CMKs, see About Symmetric and Asymmetric CMKs in the Amazon Key Management Service developer guide.