AWS Security

Custom Rule Development you own this product

This project is part of the liveProject series AWS Security: Compliance and Observability
prerequisites
basic CloudFormation • intermediate Python
skills learned
AWS Config rules • pytest • AWS Lambda Functions • Boto
Eric Kascic
1 week · 6-8 hours per week · INTERMEDIATE
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Enter course descriptionA string of high-profile security breaches has been featured recently on the news, and QryptoTremolo doesn’t want to be the next headline. You’ve been hired by the startup, which is developing a set of next-generation financial services, to lower the risk of breaches and bring security controls to its AWS accounts. Leveraging pytest and Boto, you’ll develop and deploy a custom Config rule to look for peculiar misconfigurations or conditions that aren’t covered by AWS’s off-the-self managed rules.

This project is designed for learning purposes and is not a complete, production-ready application or solution.

book resources

When you start your liveProject, you get full access to the following books for 90 days.

project author

Eric Kascic

Eric Kascic is a software developer with 25 years of professional experience. He has developed software solutions across a variety of business domains including telecommunications, medical imagery, and financial services. He has developed embedded, desktop, and server-side software, and has specialized in creating build, deployment, and test automation systems.

Since 2013, he has primarily focused on the AWS platform. At Stelligent, a boutique consulting firm that traditionally specialized in CI/CD, DevOps, and AWS automation, he developed CI/CD solutions for the AWS platforms of financial services companies. In developing infrastructure-as-code solutions, security was a primary focus. Eric invented the cfn_nag tool in 2016 to perform static analysis on CloudFormation templates to help customers prevent deploying unsecured AWS resources (such as those missing encryption or with overly permissive access).

He is currently a principal security engineer at a financial services company where he develops software to support security processes including automation of AWS IAM role creation, as well as a platform to detect and remediate insecure AWS resources across hundreds of accounts. Eric has published several articles relevant to security automation in AWS, including articles about cfn_nag, IAM, CloudFormation, and CI/CD.

prerequisites

This liveProject is for security engineers with intermediate experience in AWS and infrastructure as code. To begin these liveProjects you’ll need to be familiar with the following:

TOOLS
  • Python 3.7
  • AWS CLI 1.18
  • Bash 3
  • Boto3 1.18
  • pytest 6.2.0
  • Basic knowledge of *nix/bash command shell, including pipes, redirection, command substitution
  • Basic experience with CloudFormation
  • Basic experience with the AWS CLI
  • Intermediate knowledge of AWS accounts and AWS Organizations
  • Intermediate knowledge of Python 3 programming including: lists, dicts, loops, comprehensions, functions, conditionals
TECHNIQUES
  • Basic understanding of cloud computing and the AWS platform
  • Basic understanding of infrastructure as code
  • Basic understanding of security concepts, especially compliance enforcement

Note: These exercises rely upon the AWS platform, which may carry usage costs.

you will learn

In this liveProject, you’ll learn to increase AWS account security by developing a custom organization-wide AWS Config rule.

  • Develop a custom Config Rule that discovers IAM (Identity and Access Management) roles with an overly permissive trust policy via Boto

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