Transport security in Amazon IoT Core

TLS (Transport Layer Security) is a cryptographic protocol that is designed for secure communication over a computer network. The Amazon IoT Core Device Gateway requires customers to encrypt all communication while in-transit by using TLS for connections from devices to the Gateway. TLS is used to achieve confidentiality of the application protocols (MQTT, HTTP, and WebSocket) supported by Amazon IoT Core. TLS support is available in a number of programming languages and operating systems. Data within Amazon is encrypted by the specific Amazon service. For more information about data encryption on other Amazon services, see the security documentation for that service.

TLS protocols

Amazon IoT Core supports the following versions of the TLS protocol:

Security policies

A security policy is a combination of TLS protocols and their ciphers that determine which protocols and ciphers are supported during TLS negotiations between a client and a server. You can configure your devices to use predefined security policies based on your needs. Note that Amazon IoT Core doesn't support custom security policies.

You can choose one of the predefined security policies for your devices when connecting them to Amazon IoT Core. The names of the most recent predefined security policies in Amazon IoT Core include version information based on the year and month that they were released. The default predefined security policy is IoTSecurityPolicy_TLS13_1_2_2022_10. To specify a security policy, you can use the Amazon IoT console or the Amazon CLI. For more information, see Configuring TLS settings in domain configurations.

The following table describes the most recent predefined security policies that Amazon IoT Core supports. The IotSecurityPolicy_ has been removed from policy names in the heading row so that they fit.

Important notes for transport security in Amazon IoT Core

For devices that connect to Amazon IoT Core using MQTT, TLS encrypts the connection between the devices and the broker, and Amazon IoT Core uses TLS client authentication to identify devices. For more information, see Client authentication. For devices that connect to Amazon IoT Core using HTTP, TLS encrypts the connection between the devices and the broker, and authentication is delegated to Amazon Signature Version 4. For more information, see Signing requests with Signature Version 4 in the Amazon General Reference.

When you connect devices to Amazon IoT Core, sending the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension is not required but highly recommended. To use features such as multi-account registration, custom domains, and VPC endpoints, you must use the SNI extension and provide the complete endpoint address in the host_name field. The host_name field must contain the endpoint you are calling. That endpoint must be one of the following:

Connections attempted by devices with the incorrect or invalid host_name value will fail. Amazon IoT Core will log failures to CloudWatch for the authentication type of Custom Authentication.

Amazon IoT Core doesn't support the SessionTicket TLS extension.

Transport security for LoRaWAN wireless devices

LoRaWAN devices follow the security practices described in LoRaWAN ™ SECURITY: A White Paper Prepared for the LoRa Alliance™ by Gemalto, Actility, and Semtech.

For more information about transport security with LoRaWAN devices, see Data security with Amazon IoT Core for LoRaWAN.

Connection security

Amazon IoT Core message broker and Device Shadow services rely on communication using encryption and TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. Amazon IoT Core supports the following TLS cipher suites: