Operational Best Practices for Germany Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalog (C5)
Conformance packs provide a general-purpose compliance framework designed to enable you to create security, operational or cost-optimization governance checks using managed or custom AWS Config rules and AWS Config remediation actions. Conformance Packs, as sample templates, are not designed to fully ensure compliance with a specific governance or compliance standard. You are responsible for making your own assessment of whether your use of the Services meets applicable legal and regulatory requirements.
The following provides a sample mapping between the Germany Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalog (C5) and AWS managed Config rules. Each Config rule applies to a specific AWS resource, and relates to one or more Germany C5 controls. A Germany C5 control can be related to multiple Config rules. Refer to the table below for more detail and guidance related to these mappings.
| Control ID | AWS Config Rule | Guidance |
|---|---|---|
| COS-01 | Ensure AWS WAF is enabled on Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) to help protect web applications. A WAF helps to protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits. These web exploits may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources within your environment. | |
| COS-01 | AWS WAF enables you to configure a set of rules (called a web access control list (web ACL)) that allow, block, or count web requests based on customizable web security rules and conditions that you define. Ensure your Amazon API Gateway stage is associated with a WAF Web ACL to protect it from malicious attacks | |
| COS-01 | Ensure your AWS WAF has a rule that is not empty. A rule with no conditions could result in unintended behavior. | |
| COS-01 | Ensure your AWS WAF has a rule group that is not empty. A rule group that is empty could result in unintended behavior. | |
| COS-01 | A Web ACL attached to an AWS WAF can contain a collection of rules and rule groups to inspect and control web requests. If a Web ACL is empty, the web traffic passes without being detected or acted upon by the WAF. | |
| COS-01 | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| COS-03 | Ensure AWS WAF is enabled on Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) to help protect web applications. A WAF helps to protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits. These web exploits may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources within your environment. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring DMS replication instances cannot be publicly accessed. DMS replication instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring EBS snapshots are not publicly restorable. EBS volume snapshots can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EC2 instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| COS-03 | Deploy Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to enable secure communication between an instance and other services within the amazon VPC, without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. All traffic remains securely within the AWS Cloud. Because of their logical isolation, domains that reside within an Amazon VPC have an extra layer of security when compared to domains that use public endpoints. Assign Amazon EC2 instances to an Amazon VPC to properly manage access. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon OpenSearch Service (OpenSearch Service) Domains are within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). An OpenSearch Service domain within an Amazon VPC enables secure communication between OpenSearch Service and other services within the Amazon VPC without the need for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon OpenSearch Service domains are within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). An Amazon OpenSearch Service domain within an Amazon VPC enables secure communication between Amazon OpenSearch Service and other services within the Amazon VPC without the need for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon EMR cluster master nodes cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EMR cluster master nodes can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that internet gateways are only attached to authorized Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Internet gateways allow bi-directional internet access to and from the Amazon VPC that can potentially lead to unauthorized access to Amazon VPC resources. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring AWS Lambda functions cannot be publicly accessed. Public access can potentially lead to degradation of availability of resources. | |
| COS-03 | Deploy AWS Lambda functions within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for a secure communication between a function and other services within the Amazon VPC. With this configuration, there is no requirement for an internet gateway, NAT device, or VPN connection. All the traffic remains securely within the AWS Cloud. Because of their logical isolation, domains that reside within an Amazon VPC have an extra layer of security when compared to domains that use public endpoints. To properly manage access, AWS Lambda functions should be assigned to a VPC. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information, and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Redshift clusters are not public. Amazon Redshift clusters can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups. Not restricting access to ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. This rule allows you to optionally set blockedPort1 - blockedPort5 parameters (Config Defaults: 20,21,3389,3306,4333). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| COS-03 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups can help manage network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Not allowing ingress (or remote) traffic from 0.0.0.0/0 to port 22 on your resources help you restricting remote access. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets cannot be publicly accessed. This rule helps keeping sensitive data safe from unauthorized remote users by preventing public access. This rule allows you to optionally set the ignorePublicAcls (Config Default: True), blockPublicPolicy (Config Default: True), blockPublicAcls (Config Default: True), and restrictPublicBuckets parameters (Config Default: True). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon SageMaker notebooks do not allow direct internet access. By preventing direct internet access, you can keep sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. | |
| COS-03 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups can help in the management of network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Restricting all the traffic on the default security group helps in restricting remote access to your AWS resources. | |
| COS-03 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups. Not restricting access on ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. By restricting access to resources within a security group from the internet (0.0.0.0/0) remote access can be controlled to internal systems. | |
| COS-03 | Ensure that your Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) are configured to drop http headers. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| COS-05 | Enable this rule to restrict access to resources in the AWS Cloud. This rule ensures multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled for all users. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. Reduce the incidents of compromised accounts by requiring MFA for users. | |
| COS-05 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that MFA is enabled for all AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users that have a console password. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for users, you can reduce incidents of compromised accounts and keep sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. | |
| COS-05 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring hardware MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| COS-05 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| COS-05 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EC2 instances can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| COS-05 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring Amazon EMR cluster master nodes cannot be publicly accessed. Amazon EMR cluster master nodes can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| COS-05 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information, and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| COS-05 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are not public. Amazon RDS database instances can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| COS-05 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that Amazon Redshift clusters are not public. Amazon Redshift clusters can contain sensitive information and principles and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| COS-05 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups. Not restricting access to ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. This rule allows you to optionally set blockedPort1 - blockedPort5 parameters (Config Defaults: 20,21,3389,3306,4333). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| COS-05 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups can help manage network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Not allowing ingress (or remote) traffic from 0.0.0.0/0 to port 22 on your resources help you restricting remote access. | |
| COS-05 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups can help in the management of network access by providing stateful filtering of ingress and egress network traffic to AWS resources. Restricting all the traffic on the default security group helps in restricting remote access to your AWS resources. | |
| COS-05 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring common ports are restricted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Security Groups. Not restricting access on ports to trusted sources can lead to attacks against the availability, integrity and confidentiality of systems. By restricting access to resources within a security group from the internet (0.0.0.0/0) remote access can be controlled to internal systems. | |
| CRY-02 | To help protect data in transit, ensure that your Application Load Balancer automatically redirects unencrypted HTTP requests to HTTPS. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-02 | Ensure Amazon API Gateway REST API stages are configured with SSL certificates to allow backend systems to authenticate that requests originate from API Gateway. | |
| CRY-02 | To help protect data in transit, ensure that your Classic Elastic Load Balancing SSL listeners are using a predefined security policy. Elastic Load Balancing provides predefined SSL negotiation configurations that are used for SSL negotiation when a connection is established between a client and your load balancer. The SSL negotiation configurations provide compatibility with a broad range of clients and use high-strength cryptographic algorithms. This rule requires that you set a predefined security policy for your SSL listeners. The default security policy is: ELBSecurityPolicy-TLS-1-2-2017-0. The actual value should reflect your organization's policies | |
| CRY-02 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data in transit, ensure HTTPS is enabled for connections to your Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. | |
| CRY-02 | Ensure node-to-node encryption for Amazon OpenSearch Service is enabled. Node-to-node encryption enables TLS 1.2 encryption for all communications within the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-02 | Ensure that your Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) are configured with SSL or HTTPS listeners. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-02 | Ensure that your Amazon Redshift clusters require TLS/SSL encryption to connect to SQL clients. Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-02 | To help protect data in transit, ensure that your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets require requests to use Secure Socket Layer (SSL). Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-02 | Ensure node-to-node encryption for Amazon OpenSearch Service is enabled. Node-to-node encryption enables TLS 1.2 encryption for all communications within the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Because sensitive data can exist, enable encryption in transit to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-03 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your API Gateway stage's cache. Because sensitive data can be captured for the API method, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-03 | Because sensitive data may exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your AWS CloudTrail trails. | |
| CRY-03 | To help protect sensitive data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon CloudWatch Log Groups. | |
| CRY-03 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Kinesis Streams. | |
| CRY-03 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is enabled for AWS Secrets Manager secrets. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in Secrets Manager secrets, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-03 | Ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon DynamoDB tables. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in these tables, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. By default, DynamoDB tables are encrypted with an AWS owned customer master key (CMK). | |
| CRY-03 | Manage access to the AWS Cloud by ensuring EBS snapshots are not publicly restorable. EBS volume snapshots can contain sensitive information and access control is required for such accounts. | |
| CRY-03 | To help protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in these volumes, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-03 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). | |
| CRY-03 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon OpenSearch Service (OpenSearch Service) domains. | |
| CRY-03 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. | |
| CRY-03 | Because sensitive data can exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. | |
| CRY-03 | Ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) snapshots. Because sensitive data can exist at rest, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-03 | To help protect sensitive data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your AWS CodeBuild artifacts. | |
| CRY-03 | To help protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in Amazon RDS instances, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-03 | To protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Redshift clusters. You must also ensure that required configurations are deployed on Amazon Redshift clusters. The audit logging should be enabled to provide information about connections and user activities in the database. This rule requires that a value is set for clusterDbEncrypted (Config Default : TRUE), and loggingEnabled (Config Default: TRUE). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CRY-03 | Ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in an Amazon S3 bucket, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-03 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is enabled for your SageMaker endpoint. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in SageMaker endpoint, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-03 | To help protect data at rest, ensure encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is enabled for your SageMaker notebook. Because sensitive data can exist at rest in SageMaker notebook, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-03 | To help protect data at rest, ensure that your Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics require encryption using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Because sensitive data can exist at rest in published messages, enable encryption at rest to help protect that data. | |
| CRY-04 | Enable key rotation to ensure that keys are rotated after they have reached the end of their crypto period. | |
| DEV-07 | Use Amazon CloudWatch to centrally collect and manage log event activity. Inclusion of AWS CloudTrail data provides details of API call activity within your AWS account. | |
| DEV-07 | Ensure AWS CodeBuild project logging is enabled so that your build output logs are sent to either Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Build output logs provide detailed information about your build project. | |
| DEV-07 | Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) server access logging provides a method to monitor the network for potential cybersecurity events. The events are monitored by capturing detailed records for the requests that are made to an Amazon S3 bucket. Each access log record provides details about a single access request. The details include the requester, bucket name, request time, request action, response status, and an error code, if relevant. | |
| DEV-07 | AWS CloudTrail can help in non-repudiation by recording AWS Management Console actions and API calls. You can identify the users and AWS accounts that called an AWS service, the source IP address where the calls generated, and the timings of the calls. Details of captured data are seen within AWS CloudTrail Record Contents. | |
| DEV-07 | The collection of Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data events helps in detecting any anomalous activity. The details include AWS account information that accessed an Amazon S3 bucket, IP address, and time of event. | |
| DEV-07 | AWS CloudTrail records AWS Management Console actions and API calls. You can identify which users and accounts called AWS, the source IP address from where the calls were made, and when the calls occurred. CloudTrail will deliver log files from all AWS Regions to your S3 bucket if MULTI_REGION_CLOUD_TRAIL_ENABLED is enabled. Additionally, when AWS launches a new Region, CloudTrail will create the same trail in the new Region. As a result, you will receive log files containing API activity for the new Region without taking any action. | |
| IDM-01 | The credentials are audited for authorized devices, users, and processes by ensuring IAM access keys are rotated as specified by the organizational policy. Changing the access keys on a regular schedule is a security best practice. It shortens the period an access key is active and reduces the business impact if the keys are compromised. This rule requires an access key rotation value (Config Default: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| IDM-01 | The access permissions and authorizations can be managed and incorporated with the principles of least privilege and separation of duties, by enabling Kerberos for Amazon EMR clusters. In Kerberos, the services and the users that need to authenticate are known as principals. The principals exist within a Kerberos realm. Within the realm, a Kerberos server is known as the key distribution center (KDC). It provides a means for the principals to authenticate. The KDC authenticates by issuing tickets for authentication. The KDC maintains a database of the principals within its realm, their passwords, and other administrative information about each principal. | |
| IDM-01 | The identities and the credentials are issued, managed, and verified based on an organizational IAM password policy. They meet or exceed requirements as stated by NIST SP 800-63 and the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard for password strength. This rule allows you to optionally set RequireUppercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireLowercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireSymbols (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireNumbers (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), MinimumPasswordLength (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 14), PasswordReusePrevention (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 24), and MaxPasswordAge (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 90) for your IAM Password Policy. The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| IDM-01 | Access to systems and assets can be controlled by checking that the root user does not have access keys attached to their AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role. Ensure that the root access keys are deleted. Instead, create and use role-based AWS accounts to help to incorporate the principle of least functionality. | |
| IDM-01 | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you restrict access permissions and authorizations, by ensuring users are members of at least one group. Allowing users more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| IDM-01 | Enable this rule to restrict access to resources in the AWS Cloud. This rule ensures multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled for all users. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. Reduce the incidents of compromised accounts by requiring MFA for users. | |
| IDM-01 | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you with access permissions and authorizations by checking for IAM passwords and access keys that are not used for a specified time period. If these unused credentials are identified, you should disable and/or remove the credentials, as this may violate the principle of least privilege. This rule requires you to set a value to the maxCredentialUsageAge (Config Default: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| IDM-01 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that MFA is enabled for all AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users that have a console password. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for users, you can reduce incidents of compromised accounts and keep sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. | |
| IDM-01 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring hardware MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| IDM-01 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| IDM-01 | This rule ensures AWS Secrets Manager secrets have rotation enabled. Rotating secrets on a regular schedule can shorten the period a secret is active, and potentially reduce the business impact if the secret is compromised. | |
| IDM-01 | This rule ensures that AWS Secrets Manager secrets have rotated successfully according to the rotation schedule. Rotating secrets on a regular schedule can shorten the period that a secret is active, and potentially reduce the business impact if it is compromised. | |
| IDM-01 | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you incorporate the principles of least privilege and separation of duties with access permissions and authorizations, by ensuring that IAM groups have at least one user. Placing users in groups based on their associated permissions or job function is one way to incorporate least privilege. | |
| IDM-01 | This rule ensures AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies are attached only to groups or roles to control access to systems and assets. Assigning privileges at the group or the role level helps to reduce opportunity for an identity to receive or retain excessive privileges. | |
| IDM-01 | Ensure authentication credentials AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY do not exist within AWS Codebuild project environments. Do not store these variables in clear text. Storing these variables in clear text leads to unintended data exposure and unauthorized access. | |
| IDM-01 | To assist with implementing the principle of least privilege, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) task definitions should not have elevated privilege enabled. When this parameter is true, the container is given elevated privileges on the host container instance (similar to the root user). | |
| IDM-01 | Enabling read only access to Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) containers can assist in adhering to the principal of least privilege. This option can reduces attack vectors as the container instance’s filesystem cannot be modified unless it has explicit read-write permissions. | |
| IDM-01 | If a task definition has elevated privileges it is because the customer has specifically opted-in to those configurations. This control checks for unexpected privilege escalation when a task definition has host networking enabled but the customer has not opted-in to elevated privileges. | |
| IDM-01 | Enforcing a root directory for an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) access point helps restrict data access by ensuring that users of the access point can only reach files of the specified subdirectory. | |
| IDM-01 | To assist with implementing the principle of least privilege, ensure user enforcement is enabled for your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) .When enabled, Amazon EFS replaces the NFS client's user and group IDs with the identity configured on the access point for all file system operations and only grants access to this enforced user identity. | |
| IDM-01 | Ensure IAM Actions are restricted to only those actions that are needed. Allowing users to have more privileges than needed to complete a task may violate the principle of least privilege and separation of duties. | |
| IDM-01 | Ensure fine-grained access control is enabled on your Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. Fine-grained access control provides enhanced authorization mechanisms to achieve least-privileged access to Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. It allows for role-based access control to the domain, as well as index, document, and field-level security, support for OpenSearch Service dashboards multi-tenancy, and HTTP basic authentication for OpenSearch Service and Kibana. | |
| IDM-01 | Ensure an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication is enabled on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances to control access to systems and assets. This enforces network traffic to and from the database to be encrypted using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). You are not required to store user credentials in the database, as authentication is managed externally. | |
| IDM-01 | This rule checks to see if Access Control Lists (ACLs) are used to for access control on Amazon S3 Buckets. ACLs are legacy access control mechanisms for Amazon S3 buckets that predate AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Instead of ACLs, it is a best practice to use IAM policies or S3 bucket policies to more easily manage access to your S3 buckets. | |
| IDM-03 | AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) can help you with access permissions and authorizations by checking for IAM passwords and access keys that are not used for a specified time period. If these unused credentials are identified, you should disable and/or remove the credentials, as this may violate the principle of least privilege. This rule requires you to set a value to the maxCredentialUsageAge (Config Default: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| IDM-03 | If unused credentials exist in AWS Secrets Manager, you should disable and/or remove the credentials, as this may violate the principle of least privilege. This rule allows you to set a value to the unusedForDays (Config Default: 90). The actual value should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| IDM-08 | The identities and the credentials are issued, managed, and verified based on an organizational IAM password policy. They meet or exceed requirements as stated by NIST SP 800-63 and the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard for password strength. This rule allows you to optionally set RequireUppercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireLowercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireSymbols (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireNumbers (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), MinimumPasswordLength (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 14), PasswordReusePrevention (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 24), and MaxPasswordAge (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 90) for your IAM Password Policy. The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| CRY-01 | The identities and the credentials are issued, managed, and verified based on an organizational IAM password policy. They meet or exceed requirements as stated by NIST SP 800-63 and the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard for password strength. This rule allows you to optionally set RequireUppercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireLowercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireSymbols (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireNumbers (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), MinimumPasswordLength (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 14), PasswordReusePrevention (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 24), and MaxPasswordAge (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 90) for your IAM Password Policy. The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| IDM-09 | Enable this rule to restrict access to resources in the AWS Cloud. This rule ensures multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled for all users. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. Reduce the incidents of compromised accounts by requiring MFA for users. | |
| IDM-09 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that MFA is enabled for all AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users that have a console password. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for users, you can reduce incidents of compromised accounts and keep sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. | |
| IDM-09 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring hardware MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| IDM-09 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| OPS-01 | Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes your incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in an availability zone. To ensure high availability, ensure your ELB has registered instances from multiple Availability Zones. | |
| OPS-01 | Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes your incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in an availability zone. To ensure high availability, ensure your ELB has registered instances from multiple Availability Zones. | |
| OPS-01 | If your AWS Lambda function is configured to connect to a virtual private cloud (VPC) in your account, deploy the AWS Lambda function in at least two different Availability Zones to ensure that it is your function is available to process events in case of a service interruption in a single zone. | |
| OPS-01 | Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) clusters should have Multi-AZ replication enabled to assist in the availability of the data that is stored. Each Availability Zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. In case of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby so that you can resume database operations as soon as the failover is complete. | |
| OPS-01 | Multi-AZ support in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) provides enhanced availability and durability for database instances. When you provision a Multi-AZ database instance, Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary database instance, and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone. Each Availability Zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. In case of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby so that you can resume database operations as soon as the failover is complete. | |
| OPS-01 | Amazon DynamoDB auto scaling uses the AWS Application Auto Scaling service to adjust provisioned throughput capacity that automatically responds to actual traffic patterns. This enables a table or a global secondary index to increase its provisioned read/write capacity to handle sudden increases in traffic, without throttling. | |
| OPS-01 | Enable cross-zone load balancing for your Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) to help maintain adequate capacity and availability. The cross-zone load balancing reduces the need to maintain equivalent numbers of instances in each enabled availability zone. It also improves your application's ability to handle the loss of one or more instances. | |
| OPS-01 | Enable this rule to ensure that provisioned throughput capacity is checked on your Amazon DynamoDB tables. This is the amount of read/write activity that each table can support. DynamoDB uses this information to reserve sufficient system resources to meet your throughput requirements. This rule generates an alert when the throughput approaches the maximum limit for a customer's account. This rule allows you to optionally set accountRCUThresholdPercentage (Config Default: 80) and accountWCUThresholdPercentage (Config Default: 80) parameters. The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| OPS-02 | Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes your incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in an availability zone. To ensure high availability, ensure your ELB has registered instances from multiple Availability Zones. | |
| OPS-02 | The Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) health checks for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling groups support maintenance of adequate capacity and availability. The load balancer periodically sends pings, attempts connections, or sends requests to test Amazon EC2 instances health in an auto-scaling group. If an instance is not reporting back, traffic is sent to a new Amazon EC2 instance. | |
| OPS-02 | AWS Elastic Beanstalk enhanced health reporting enables a more rapid response to changes in the health of the underlying infrastructure. These changes could result in a lack of availability of the application. Elastic Beanstalk enhanced health reporting provides a status descriptor to gauge the severity of the identified issues and identify possible causes to investigate. | |
| OPS-02 | Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes your incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in an availability zone. To ensure high availability, ensure your ELB has registered instances from multiple Availability Zones. | |
| OPS-02 | If your AWS Lambda function is configured to connect to a virtual private cloud (VPC) in your account, deploy the AWS Lambda function in at least two different Availability Zones to ensure that it is your function is available to process events in case of a service interruption in a single zone. | |
| OPS-02 | Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) clusters should have Multi-AZ replication enabled to assist in the availability of the data that is stored. Each Availability Zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. In case of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby so that you can resume database operations as soon as the failover is complete. | |
| OPS-02 | Multi-AZ support in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) provides enhanced availability and durability for database instances. When you provision a Multi-AZ database instance, Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary database instance, and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone. Each Availability Zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. In case of an infrastructure failure, Amazon RDS performs an automatic failover to the standby so that you can resume database operations as soon as the failover is complete. | |
| OPS-02 | Amazon DynamoDB auto scaling uses the AWS Application Auto Scaling service to adjust provisioned throughput capacity that automatically responds to actual traffic patterns. This enables a table or a global secondary index to increase its provisioned read/write capacity to handle sudden increases in traffic, without throttling. | |
| OPS-02 | Enable cross-zone load balancing for your Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) to help maintain adequate capacity and availability. The cross-zone load balancing reduces the need to maintain equivalent numbers of instances in each enabled availability zone. It also improves your application's ability to handle the loss of one or more instances. | |
| OPS-02 | Enable this rule to ensure that provisioned throughput capacity is checked on your Amazon DynamoDB tables. This is the amount of read/write activity that each table can support. DynamoDB uses this information to reserve sufficient system resources to meet your throughput requirements. This rule generates an alert when the throughput approaches the maximum limit for a customer's account. This rule allows you to optionally set accountRCUThresholdPercentage (Config Default: 80) and accountWCUThresholdPercentage (Config Default: 80) parameters. The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| OPS-07 | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Aurora resources are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| OPS-07 | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your AWS Backup plan is set for a minimum frequency and retention. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. This rule allows you to set the requiredFrequencyValue (Config default: 1), requiredRetentionDays (Config default: 35) and requiredFrequencyUnit (Config default: days) parameters. The actual value should reflect your organizations requirements. | |
| OPS-07 | Ensure that your AWS Backup recovery points have an attached resource-based policy which prevents deletion of recovery points. Using a resource-based policy to prevent deletion of recovery points can assist in preventing accidental or intentional deletion. | |
| OPS-07 | Enable this rule to check that information has been backed up. It also maintains the backups by ensuring that point-in-time recovery is enabled in Amazon DynamoDB. The recovery maintains continuous backups of your table for the last 35 days. | |
| OPS-07 | Amazon OpenSearch Service (OpenSearch Service) requires at least three data nodes for high availability and fault-tolerance. Deploying an OpenSearch Service domain with at least three data nodes ensures cluster operations if a node fails. | |
| OPS-07 | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your AWS Backup recovery points have a minimum retention period set. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. This rule allows you to set the requiredRetentionDays (config default: 35) parameter. The actual value should reflect your organizations requirements. | |
| OPS-07 | The backup feature of Amazon RDS creates backups of your databases and transaction logs. Amazon RDS automatically creates a storage volume snapshot of your DB instance, backing up the entire DB instance. The system allows you to set specific retention periods to meet your resilience requirements. | |
| OPS-07 | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon DynamoDB tables are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| OPS-07 | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| OPS-07 | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) resources are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| OPS-07 | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| OPS-07 | When automatic backups are enabled, Amazon ElastiCache creates a backup of the cluster on a daily basis. The backup can be retained for a number of days as specified by your organization. Automatic backups can help guard against data loss. If a failure occurs, you can create a new cluster, which restores your data from the most recent backup. | |
| OPS-07 | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon FSx file systems are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| OPS-07 | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances are a part of an AWS Backup plan. AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service with a policy-based backup solution. This solution simplifies your backup management and enables you to meet your business and regulatory backup compliance requirements. | |
| OPS-07 | To help with data back-up processes, ensure your Amazon Redshift clusters have automated snapshots. When automated snapshots are enabled for a cluster, Redshift periodically takes snapshots of that cluster. By default, Redshift takes a snapshot every eight hours or every 5 GB for each node of data changes, or whichever comes first. | |
| OPS-12 | Ensure a minimum duration of event log data is retained for your log groups to help with troubleshooting and forensics investigations. The lack of available past event log data makes it difficult to reconstruct and identify potentially malicious events. | |
| OPS-12 | Ensure Amazon S3 lifecycle policies are configured to help define actions that you want Amazon S3 to take during an object's lifetime (for example, transition objects to another storage class, archive them, or delete them after a specified period of time). | |
| OPS-13 | Amazon GuardDuty can help to monitor and detect potential cybersecurity events by using threat intelligence feeds. These include lists of malicious IPs and machine learning to identify unexpected, unauthorized, and malicious activity within your AWS Cloud environment. | |
| OPS-13 | To protect data at rest, ensure that encryption is enabled for your Amazon Redshift clusters. You must also ensure that required configurations are deployed on Amazon Redshift clusters. The audit logging should be enabled to provide information about connections and user activities in the database. This rule requires that a value is set for clusterDbEncrypted (Config Default : TRUE), and loggingEnabled (Config Default: TRUE). The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. | |
| OPS-13 | AWS Security Hub helps to monitor unauthorized personnel, connections, devices, and software. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the security alerts, or findings, from multiple AWS services. Some such services are Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, Amazon Macie, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, and AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Partner solutions. | |
| OPS-14 | Utilize AWS CloudTrail log file validation to check the integrity of CloudTrail logs. Log file validation helps determine if a log file was modified or deleted or unchanged after CloudTrail delivered it. 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. | |
| OPS-14 | Because sensitive data may exist and to help protect data at rest, ensure encryption is enabled for your AWS CloudTrail trails. | |
| OPS-14 | Ensure a minimum duration of event log data is retained for your log groups to help with troubleshooting and forensics investigations. The lack of available past event log data makes it difficult to reconstruct and identify potentially malicious events. | |
| OPS-14 | Ensure Amazon S3 lifecycle policies are configured to help define actions that you want Amazon S3 to take during an object's lifetime (for example, transition objects to another storage class, archive them, or delete them after a specified period of time). | |
| OPS-15 | API Gateway logging displays detailed views of users who accessed the API and the way they accessed the API. This insight enables visibility of user activities. | |
| OPS-15 | Use Amazon CloudWatch to centrally collect and manage log event activity. Inclusion of AWS CloudTrail data provides details of API call activity within your AWS account. | |
| OPS-15 | Ensure AWS CodeBuild project logging is enabled so that your build output logs are sent to either Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Build output logs provide detailed information about your build project. | |
| OPS-15 | Ensure Amazon OpenSearch Service domains have error logs enabled and streamed to Amazon CloudWatch Logs for retention and response. Domain error logs can assist with security and access audits, and can help to diagnose availability issues. | |
| OPS-15 | Elastic Load Balancing activity is a central point of communication within an environment. Ensure ELB logging is enabled. The collected data provides detailed information about requests sent to the ELB. Each log contains information such as the time the request was received, the client's IP address, latencies, request paths, and server responses. | |
| OPS-15 | Ensure audit logging is enabled on your Amazon OpenSearch Service domains. Audit logging allows you to track user activity on your OpenSearch domains, including authentication successes and failures, requests to OpenSearch, index changes, and incoming search queries. | |
| OPS-15 | Ensure Amazon OpenSearch Service domains have error logs enabled and streamed to Amazon CloudWatch Logs for retention and response. OpenSearch Service error logs can assist with security and access audits, and can help to diagnose availability issues. | |
| OPS-15 | To help with logging and monitoring within your environment, ensure Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) logging is enabled. With Amazon RDS logging, you can capture events such as connections, disconnections, queries, or tables queried. | |
| OPS-15 | To capture information about connections and user activities on your Amazon Redshift cluster, ensure audit logging is enabled. | |
| OPS-15 | Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) server access logging provides a method to monitor the network for potential cybersecurity events. The events are monitored by capturing detailed records for the requests that are made to an Amazon S3 bucket. Each access log record provides details about a single access request. The details include the requester, bucket name, request time, request action, response status, and an error code, if relevant. | |
| OPS-15 | The VPC flow logs provide detailed records for information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). By default, the flow log record includes values for the different components of the IP flow, including the source, destination, and protocol. | |
| OPS-15 | To help with logging and monitoring within your environment, enable AWS WAF (V2) logging on regional and global web ACLs. AWS WAF logging provides detailed information about the traffic that is analyzed by your web ACL. The logs record the time that AWS WAF received the request from your AWS resource, information about the request, and an action for the rule that each request matched. | |
| OPS-15 | AWS CloudTrail can help in non-repudiation by recording AWS Management Console actions and API calls. You can identify the users and AWS accounts that called an AWS service, the source IP address where the calls generated, and the timings of the calls. Details of captured data are seen within AWS CloudTrail Record Contents. | |
| OPS-15 | The collection of Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data events helps in detecting any anomalous activity. The details include AWS account information that accessed an Amazon S3 bucket, IP address, and time of event. | |
| OPS-15 | This rule helps ensure the use of AWS recommended security best practices for AWS CloudTrail, by checking for the enablement of multiple settings. These include the use of log encryption, log validation, and enabling AWS CloudTrail in multiple regions. | |
| OPS-15 | AWS CloudTrail records AWS Management Console actions and API calls. You can identify which users and accounts called AWS, the source IP address from where the calls were made, and when the calls occurred. CloudTrail will deliver log files from all AWS Regions to your S3 bucket if MULTI_REGION_CLOUD_TRAIL_ENABLED is enabled. Additionally, when AWS launches a new Region, CloudTrail will create the same trail in the new Region. As a result, you will receive log files containing API activity for the new Region without taking any action. | |
| OPS-22 | Amazon Elastic Container Repository (ECR) image scanning assists in identifying software vulnerabilities in your container images. Enabling image scanning on ECR repositories adds a layer of verification for the integrity and safety of the images being stored. | |
| PSS-05 | Enable this rule to restrict access to resources in the AWS Cloud. This rule ensures multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled for all users. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. Reduce the incidents of compromised accounts by requiring MFA for users. | |
| PSS-05 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring that MFA is enabled for all AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users that have a console password. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for users, you can reduce incidents of compromised accounts and keep sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users. | |
| PSS-05 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring hardware MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| PSS-05 | Manage access to resources in the AWS Cloud by ensuring MFA is enabled for the root user. The root user is the most privileged user in an AWS account. The MFA adds an extra layer of protection for sign-in credentials. By requiring MFA for the root user, you can reduce the incidents of compromised AWS accounts. | |
| PSS-07 | The identities and the credentials are issued, managed, and verified based on an organizational IAM password policy. They meet or exceed requirements as stated by NIST SP 800-63 and the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard for password strength. This rule allows you to optionally set RequireUppercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireLowercaseCharacters (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireSymbols (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), RequireNumbers (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: true), MinimumPasswordLength (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 14), PasswordReusePrevention (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 24), and MaxPasswordAge (AWS Foundational Security Best Practices value: 90) for your IAM Password Policy. The actual values should reflect your organization's policies. |
Template
The template is available on GitHub: Germany Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalog (C5)
