Data protection in Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling - Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Use AWS KMS keys to encrypt Amazon EBS volumesRelated resources

Data protection in Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

The AWS shared responsibility model applies to data protection in Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. As described in this model, AWS is responsible for protecting the global infrastructure that runs all of the AWS Cloud. You are responsible for maintaining control over your content that is hosted on this infrastructure. You are also responsible for the security configuration and management tasks for the AWS services that you use. For more information about data privacy, see the Data Privacy FAQ. For information about data protection in Europe, see the AWS Shared Responsibility Model and GDPR blog post on the AWS Security Blog.

For data protection purposes, we recommend that you protect AWS 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. For information about using CloudTrail trails to capture AWS activities, see Working with CloudTrail trails in the AWS CloudTrail User Guide.

  • 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 140-3 validated cryptographic modules when accessing AWS through a command line interface or an API, use a FIPS endpoint. For more information about the available FIPS endpoints, see Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3.

We strongly recommend that you never put confidential or sensitive information, such as your customers' email addresses, into tags or free-form text fields such as a Name field. This includes when you work with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling or other AWS services using the console, API, AWS CLI, or AWS SDKs. Any data that you enter into tags or free-form text fields used for names may be used for billing or diagnostic logs. If you provide a URL to an external server, we strongly recommend that you do not include credentials information in the URL to validate your request to that server.

When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance, you have the option of passing user data to the instance to do additional configuration when the instance boots. We also recommend that you never put confidential or sensitive information in the user data that will get passed to an instance.

Use AWS KMS keys to encrypt Amazon EBS volumes

You can configure your Auto Scaling group to encrypt Amazon EBS volume data stored in the cloud with AWS KMS keys. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling supports AWS managed and customer managed keys to encrypt your data. Note that the KmsKeyId option to specify a customer managed key is not available when you use a launch configuration. To specify your customer managed key, use a launch template instead. For more information, see Create a launch template for an Auto Scaling group. For information about how to create, store, and manage your AWS KMS encryption keys, see the AWS Key Management Service Developer Guide.

You can also configure a customer managed key in your EBS-backed AMI before setting up the launch template or launch configuration, or use encryption by default to enforce the encryption of the new EBS volumes and snapshot copies that you create. For more information, see Use encryption with EBS-backed AMIs in the Amazon EC2 User Guide and Encryption by default in the Amazon EBS User Guide.

Note

For information about how to set up the key policy that you need to launch Auto Scaling instances when you use a customer managed key for encryption, see Required AWS KMS key policy for use with encrypted volumes.

For the data protection guidelines provided by Amazon EBS, see Data protection in Amazon Elastic Block Store in the Amazon EBS User Guide.