View all posts by Jennifer Davis

Authors: Richard Ortenberg, and Aren Sandersen

Hosting your infrastructure in AWS can provide numerous operational benefits, but can also result in weakened security if you’re not careful. AWS uses a shared responsibility model in which Amazon and its customers are jointly responsible for securing their cloud infrastructure. Even with Amazon’s protections, the number of attack vectors in a poorly secured cloud system is practically too high to count: password lists get dumped, private SSH keys get checked in to GitHub, former employees reuse old credentials, current employees fall victim to spear-phishing, and so on. The most critical first steps that an organization can take towards better security in AWS is putting its infrastructure in a VPN or behind a bastion host and improving its user host access system.

The Edge

A bastion host (or jump box) is a specific host that provides the only means of access to the rest of your hosts. A VPN, on the other hand, lets your computer into the remote network, allowing direct access to hosts. Both a VPN and bastion host have their strengths and weaknesses, but the main value they provide is funnelling all access through a single point. Using this point of entry (or “edge”) to gain access to your production systems is an important security measure. If your endpoints are not behind an edge and are directly accessible on the internet, you’ll have multiple systems to patch in case of a zero-day and each server must be individually “hardened” against common attacks. With a VPN or bastion, your main concern is only hardening and securing the edge.

If you prefer to use a bastion host, Amazon provides an example of how to set one up: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-record-ssh-sessions-established-through-a-bastion-host/

If you’d rather run a VPN, here are just a few of the more popular options:

• Run the open-source version of OpenVPN which is available in many Linux distributions.
• Use a prebuilt OpenVPN Access Server (AS) in the AWS Marketplace. This requires a small license fee but set up and configuration are much easier.
• Use the Foxpass VPN in AWS Marketplace.

Two Factor Authentication

One of the most critical security measures you can implement next is to configure two-factor authentication (2FA) on your VPN or bastion host. Two-factor authentication requires that users enter a code or click a button on a device in their possession to verify a login attempt, making unauthorized access difficult.

Many two-factor systems use a smartphone based service like Duo or Google Authenticator. Third party devices like RSA keys and Yubikeys are also quite common. Even if a user’s password or SSH keys are compromised, it is much harder for an attacker to also gain access to a user’s physical device or phone. Additionally, these physical devices are unable to be stolen remotely, decreasing an attack vector by multiple orders of magnitude.

For 2FA, bastion hosts use a PAM plugin which both Duo and Google Authenticator provide. If you’re using a VPN, most have built-in support for two-factor authentication.

User Host Access

Finally, you need to make sure that your servers are correctly secured behind the edge. A newly-instantiated EC2 server is configured with a single user (usually ‘ec2-user’ or ‘ubuntu’) and a single public SSH key. If multiple people need to access the server, however, then you need a better solution than sharing the private key amongst the team. Sharing a private key is akin to sharing a password to the most important parts of your infrastructure.

Instead, each user should generate their own SSH key pair, keeping the private half on their machine and installing the public half on servers which they need access to.

From easy to more complex here are three mechanisms to improve user access:

• Add everyone’s public keys to the /home/ec2-user/.ssh/authorized_keys file. Now each person’s access can be revoked independently of the other users.
• Create several role accounts (e.g. ‘rwuser’, ‘rouser’ that have read/write and read-only permissions, respectively) and install users’ public keys appropriately into each role’s authorized_keys file.
• Create individual user accounts on each host. Now you have the ability to manage permissions separately for each user.

Best-practice is to use either infrastructure automation tools (e.g. Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt) or an LDAP-based system, (e.g. Foxpass), to create and manage the above-mentioned accounts, keys, and permissions.

Summary

There are many benefits to hosting your infrastructure in AWS. Don’t just depend on Amazon or other third parties to protect your infrastructure. Set up a VPN or bastion, patch your vulnerable systems as soon as possible, turn on 2FA, and implement a user access strategy that is more complex than just sharing a password or an SSH key.

About the Authors:

Richard Ortenberg is currently a software developer at Foxpass. He is a former member of the CloudFormation team at AWS.

Aren Sandersen is the founder of Foxpass. Previously he has run engineering, operations and IT teams at Pinterest, Bebo, and Oodle.