Data protection in Amazon IoT Core - Amazon IoT Core
Data encryption in Amazon IoT
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 IoT Core

The Amazon shared responsibility model applies to data protection in Amazon IoT Core. 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 IoT 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.

For more information about data protection, see the Amazon Shared Responsibility Model and GDPR blog post on the Amazon Security Blog.

Amazon IoT devices gather data, perform some manipulation on that data, and then send that data to another web service. You might choose to store some data on your device for a short period of time. You're responsible for providing any data protection on that data at rest. When your device sends data to Amazon IoT, it does so over a TLS connection as discussed later in this section. Amazon IoT devices can send data to any Amazon service. For more information about each service's data security, see the documentation for that service. Amazon IoT can be configured to write logs to CloudWatch Logs and log Amazon IoT API calls to Amazon CloudTrail. For more information about data security for these services, see Authentication and Access Control for Amazon CloudWatch and Encrypting CloudTrail Log Files with Amazon KMS-Managed Keys.

Data encryption in Amazon IoT

By default, all Amazon IoT data in transit and at rest is encrypted. Data in transit is encrypted using TLS, and data at rest is encrypted using Amazon owned keys. Amazon IoT does not currently support customer-managed Amazon KMS keys (KMS keys) from Amazon Key Management Service (Amazon KMS); however, Device Advisor and Amazon IoT Wireless use only an Amazon owned key to encrypt customer data.