How to Secure AWS RDS?

Everyone who works with Cloud, especially with AWS knows about RDS. I don't want to explain RDS and which specifications can provide us. Today, in this article I want to explain more about Security in RDS. Are RDS secure enough to protect our data or not?

So first of all let's clarify a detail about Security in the Cloud:

• Security of the cloud: AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs AWS services in the AWS Cloud. AWS also provides you with services that you can use securely. Third-party auditors regularly test and verify the effectiveness of our security as part of the?AWS compliance programs.
• Security in the cloud: Your responsibility is determined by the AWS service that you use. You are also responsible for other factors including the sensitivity of your data, your organization's requirements, and applicable laws and regulations.

So for securing AWS RDS in our organization, what are the best practices for RDS Security:

Amazon RDS provides best practice suggestions by assessing your database instance configuration and usage characteristics. Recommendations include security, encryption, IAM, and VPC. You can review the available options and do a recommended action right now, schedule it for their next maintenance window, or disregard it completely.

Encryption of Data in Transit

Use SSL/TLS to encrypt communications between your application and the database instance. When an Amazon RDS database instance is provisioned, an SSL certificate is generated and installed on the instance. To encrypt connections in MySQL, begin the MySQL client with the --ssl_ca parameter, which references the public key. Download the public key for SQL Server and import the certificate into the Windows operating system. RDS for Oracle combines Oracle native network encryption with a database instance. Simply add the native network encryption option to an option group and associate it with the database instance. Once an encrypted connection has been created, all data exchanged between the DB Instance and your application will be encrypted.

Access Control

Amazon RDS is linked with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), allowing you to govern the actions that your AWS IAM users and groups can perform on specified resources (such as DB Instances, DB Snapshots, DB Parameter Groups, DB Event Subscriptions, and DB Options Groups). Furthermore, you can tag your resources and limit the actions that your IAM users and groups can do on groups of resources with the same tag (and tag value). For additional details on IAM integration, consult the IAM Database Authentication documentation.

Network Isolation and Database Firewall

Using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), you may isolate your DB Instances in your virtual network and connect to your existing IT infrastructure via industry-standard secured IPSec VPN. Amazon VPC allows you to isolate your database instances by defining an IP range and connecting to your existing IT infrastructure via an industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN. Running Amazon RDS in a VPC allows you to host a database instance within a private subnet. You can also create a virtual private gateway that connects your business network to your VPC and provides access to the Amazon RDS DB instance within that VPC. DB Instances deployed within an Amazon VPC can be accessed from the Internet or Amazon EC2 Instances outside the VPC via VPN or bastion hosts that you can launch in your public subnet.

Database Activity Streams

In addition to external security concerns, managed databases must guard against insider dangers posed by database managers. Database Activity Streams, which Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS presently support for Oracle, send a real-time data stream of database activity to your relational database. When coupled with third-party database activity monitoring technologies, you may monitor and audit database activity to protect your database while also meeting compliance and regulatory needs.

Database Activity Streams safeguard your database against internal risks by creating a security paradigm that restricts DBA access to the database activity stream. As a result, the DBAs who operate the database do not have access to collect, transmit, store, or process the database activity stream.

VPC Security Group

Each VPC security group rule allows a specific source to access a database instance in a VPC connected with that security group. The source could be a set of addresses (for example, 172.31.0.0/16), or another VPC security group. By designating a VPC security group as the source, you enable inbound traffic from any instances (usually application servers) that use the source VPC security group. VPC security groups can include rules that govern both inbound and outgoing traffic.

We can set up various VPC security groups to give access to different ports for different instances within your VPC. For example, you can set up a VPC security group to allow web servers in your VPC to connect to TCP port 80. You may then build a new VPC security group that grants access to TCP port 3306 for RDS for MySQL DB instances in your VPC.

Use SSL or TLS

Connect to DB instances powered by Db2, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS). For additional details on using SSL/TLS with a database instance.

Data Protection in Amazon RDS

For data protection purposes, AWS recommends that you protect your account credentials and set up individual users with AWS IAM Identity Center or AWS 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 AWS resources. We require TLS 1.2 and recommend TLS 1.3.
• Set up API and user activity logging with AWS CloudTrail.
• Use AWS encryption solutions, along with all default security controls within AWS 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 AWS through a command line interface or an API, use a FIPS endpoint.

Integrated services to Secure Amazon RDS

We can additionally protect our AWS RDS services by integrating them with solutions that offer extra security features. Here are a few examples:

• Integrating with CloudWatch for monitoring: CloudWatch provides customers with visibility into their Amazon RDS infrastructure and the ability to monitor a variety of metrics within their databases. Continuous monitoring enables them to spot any odd events in their RDS environment.
• Integrating with AWS CloudTrail for Auditing: Customers can utilize CloudTrail for audit logging by configuring it to log all activities performed by a user, role, or Amazon Web Services service.

Key Takeaways

Nowadays, Amazon RDS has made administering relational database systems in the cloud considerably simpler. Amazon RDS, with its extensive feature set and long-term benefits, has ushered in a new era of cloud Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) to assist organizations in gaining operational efficiency, improving data workloads, data reliability and integrity, and ultimately decreasing time-to-insight. As I mentioned above, AWS has a shared responsibility model for providing security for AWS services and Infrastructure. But Cloud users to provide more security of RDS have to be careful about security perspectives by using all of the features mentioned above.

References

1. Amazon RDS Security
2. Security best practices for Amazon RDS
3. Amazon RDS Monitoring tools
4. Data protection in Amazon RDS
5. Database Activity Stream