Amazon Web Services SCS-C02 - AWS Certified Security - Specialty

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The GuardDuty finding “IAMUser/InstanceCredentialExfiltration” indicates that temporary credentials from the instance metadata service have been stolen and used from an unusual location. The immediate priority is to revoke all existing IAM sessions for that instance profile to block the compromised credentials.

This is considered a critical containment action. IAM allows active session revocation, which invalidates credentials associated with a compromised instance profile.

This is explicitly covered under the Incident Response domain in the AWS Security Specialty study material, which emphasizes session revocation and credential rotation in response to exfiltration events.

The combination of the following actions should the Engineer take to enable users to be authenticated into the web application and call APIs are:

B. Configure a SAML identity provider in Amazon Cognito to map attributes to the Amazon Cognito user pool attributes.This is a necessary step to federate the existing users from the SAML identity provider to the Amazon Cognito user pool, which will be used for authentication and authorization1.

C. Configure the SAML identity provider to add the Amazon Cognito user pool as a relying party.This is a necessary step to establish a trust relationship between the SAML identity provider and the Amazon Cognito user pool, which will allow the users to sign in using their existing credentials2.

F. Update API Gateway to use a COGNITO_USER_POOLS authorizer.This is a necessary step to enable API Gateway to use the Amazon Cognito user pool as an authorizer for the RESTful services, which will validate the identity or access tokens that are issued by AmazonCognito when a user signs in successfully3.

The other options are incorrect because:

A.Creating a custom authorization service using AWS Lambda is not a necessary step, because Amazon Cognito user pools can provide built-in authorization features, such as scopes and groups, that can be used to control access toAPI resources4.

D.Configuring an Amazon Cognitoidentity pool to integrate with social login providers is not a necessary step, because the users already exist in a directory that is exposed through a SAML identity provider, and there is no requirement to support social login providers5.

E.Updating DynamoDB to store the user email addresses and passwords is not a necessary step, because the user credentials are already stored in the SAML identity provider, and there is no need to duplicate them in DynamoDB6.

The correct answer is D. Change the existing CloudTrail trail so that it applies to all Regions.

According to the AWS documentation1, you can configure CloudTrail to deliver log files from multiple Regions to a single S3 bucket for a single account.To change an existing single-Region trail to log in all Regions, you must use the AWS CLI and add the --is-multi-region-trail option to the update-trail command2. This will ensure that you log global service events and capture all management event activity in your account.

Option A is incorrect because creating a new CloudTrail trail for each Region will incur additional costs and increase operational overhead. Option B is incorrect because changing the S3 bucket to receive notifications will not affect the delivery of log files from other Regions. Option C is incorrect because creating a new CloudTrail trail that applies to all Regions will result in duplicate log files for the original Region and also incur additional costs.

The IAM Documentation mentions the following

To determine whether a log file was modified, deleted, or unchanged after CloudTrail delivered it you can use CloudTrail log file integrity validation. This feature is built using industry standard algorithms: SHA-256 for hashing and SHA-256 with RSA for digital signing. This makes it computationally infeasible to modify, delete or forge CloudTrail log files without detection. You can use the IAM CLI to validate the files in the location where CloudTrail delivered them

Validated log files are invaluable in security and forensic investigations. For example, a validated log file enables you to assert positively that the log file itself has not changed, or that particular user credentials performed specific API activity. The CloudTrail log file integrity validation process also lets you know if a log file has been deleted or changed, or assert positively that no log files were delivered to your account during a given period of time.

Options B.C and D is invalid because you need to check for log File Integrity Validation for cloudtrail logs

For more information on Cloudtrail log file validation, please visit the below URL:

http://docs.IAM.amazon.com/IAMcloudtrail/latest/userguide/cloudtrail-log-file-validation-intro.html

The correct answer is: Use CloudTrail Log File Integrity Validation.

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To meet the requirements of storing scanned copies of customer receipts on Amazon S3, where files will be between 100 KB and 5 MB in PDF format, each retail store must have a unique encryption key, and each object must be encrypted with a unique key, the most appropriate solution would be to create a dedicated AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) customer managed key for each retail store. Then, use the S3 Put operation to upload the objects to Amazon S3, specifying server-side encryption with AWS KMS keys (SSE-KMS) and the key ID of the store’s key.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The most scalable and lowest-latency solution for end-to-end TLS is to configure a Network Load Balancer (NLB) with a TCP listener. This configuration allows TLS traffic to be passed through directly to the containerized applications running on ECS, preserving full encryption between the client and the container without TLS termination at the load balancer.

NLBs are optimized for handling sudden spikes in traffic (volatile traffic patterns), and passing through TLS traffic ensures the encryption is maintained from source to container.

This is a key practice under Infrastructure Security as highlighted in the AWS Certified Security – Specialty content where preserving encryption and handling scale is crucial.