A Consulting Company Was Hired to Assess Security Vulnerabilities Within

question 434

Multiple Choice

A consulting company was hired to assess security vulnerabilities within a client company's application and propose a plan to remediate all identified issues. The architecture is identified as follows: Amazon S3 storage for content, an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer with attached Amazon EBS storage, and an Amazon RDS MySQL database. There are also several AWS Lambda functions that communicate directly with the RDS database using connection string statements in the code. The consultants identified the top security threat as follows: the application is not meeting its requirement to have encryption at rest. What solution will address this issue with the LEAST operational overhead and will provide monitoring for potential future violations?

• A) Enable SSE encryption on the S3 buckets and RDS database. Enable OS-based encryption of data on EBS volumes. Configure Amazon Inspector agents on EC2 instances to report on insecure encryption ciphers. Set up AWS Config rules to periodically check for non-encrypted S3 objects.
• B) Configure the application to encrypt each file prior to storing on Amazon S3. Enable OS-based encryption of data on EBS volumes. Encrypt data on write to RDS. Run cron jobs on each instance to check for unencrypted data and notify via Amazon SNS. Use S3 Events to call an AWS Lambda function and verify if the file is encrypted.
• C) Enable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) on the load balancer, ensure that AWS Lambda is using SSL to communicate to the RDS database, and enable S3 encryption. Configure the application to force SSL for incoming connections and configure RDS to only grant access if the session is encrypted. Configure Amazon Inspector agents on EC2 instances to report on insecure encryption ciphers.
• D) Enable SSE encryption on the S3 buckets, EBS volumes, and the RDS database. Store RDS credentials in EC2 Parameter Store. Enable a policy on the S3 bucket to deny unencrypted puts. Set up AWS Config rules to periodically check for non-encrypted S3 objects and EBS volumes, and to ensure that RDS storage is encrypted.

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Definitions:

Comparable

Similar or equivalent in some respects, though not identical, typically used for assessment or comparison.

Control

In experimental design, control refers to an experimental group that does not receive any experimental treatment in order to provide a baseline for measuring changes that might occur in other groups. As a goal of research, control refers to gaining information about human behavior in order to be able to predict and control it.

Experimental Design

A research method involving the manipulation of one or more independent variables to determine their effect on dependent variables, allowing for control of confounding factors to establish causality.