Encrypting data in transit - Amazon Elastic File System
How encrypting in transit works

Encrypting data in transit

Enabling encryption of data in transit for your Amazon EFS file system is done by enabling Transport Layer Security (TLS) when you mount your file system using the Amazon EFS mount helper. For more information, see Mounting EFS file systems using the EFS mount helper.

When encryption of data in transit is declared as a mount option for your Amazon EFS file system, the mount helper initializes a client stunnel process. Stunnel is an open source multipurpose network relay. The client stunnel process listens on a local port for inbound traffic, and the mount helper redirects Network File System (NFS) client traffic to this local port. The mount helper uses TLS version 1.2 to communicate with your file system.

How encrypting in transit works

To enable encryption of data in transit, you connect to Amazon EFS using TLS. We recommend using the EFS mount helper to mount your file system because it simplifies the mounting process as compared to mounting with NFS mount. The EFS mount helper manages the process using stunnel for TLS. If you're not using the mount helper, you can still enable encryption of data in transit. At a high level, the following are the steps to do so.

To enable encryption of data in transit without using the EFS mount helper

  1. Download and install stunnel, and note the port that the application is listening on. For instructions to do so, see Upgrading stunnel.

  2. Run stunnel to connect to your Amazon EFS file system on port 2049 using TLS.

  3. Using the NFS client, mount localhost:port, where port is the port that you noted in the first step.

Because encryption of data in transit is configured on a per-connection basis, each configured mount has a dedicated stunnel process running on the instance. By default, the stunnel process used by the EFS mount helper listens on a local port ranging from 20049 to 21049, and it connects to Amazon EFS on port 2049.

Note

By default, when using the Amazon EFS mount helper with TLS, the mount helper enforces certificate hostname checking. The Amazon EFS mount helper uses the stunnel program for its TLS functionality. Some versions of Linux don't include a version of stunnel that supports these TLS features by default. When using one of those Linux versions, mounting an Amazon EFS file system using TLS fails.

After you've installed the amazon-efs-utils package, to upgrade your system's version of stunnel see Upgrading stunnel.

For issues with encryption, see Troubleshooting encryption.

When using encryption of data in transit, your NFS client setup is changed. When you inspect your actively mounted file systems, you see one mounted to 127.0.0.1, or localhost, as in the following example.

$ mount | column -t
127.0.0.1:/  on  /home/ec2-user/efs        type  nfs4         (rw,relatime,vers=4.1,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,port=20127,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,clientaddr=127.0.0.1,local_lock=none,addr=127.0.0.1)

When mounting with TLS and the Amazon EFS mount helper, you are reconfiguring your NFS client to mount to a local port. The EFS mount helper starts a client stunnel process that is listening on this local port, and stunnel is opening an encrypted connection to the EFS file system using TLS. The EFS mount helper is responsible for setting up and maintaining this encrypted connection and the associated configuration.

To determine which Amazon EFS file system ID corresponds to which local mount point, you can use the following command. Replace efs-mount-point with the local path where you mounted your file system.

grep -E "Successfully mounted.*efs-mount-point" /var/log/amazon/efs/mount.log | tail -1

When you use the mount helper for encryption of data in transit, it also creates a process called amazon-efs-mount-watchdog. This process ensures that each mount's stunnel process is running, and stops the stunnel when the Amazon EFS file system is unmounted. If for some reason a stunnel process is terminated unexpectedly, the watchdog process restarts it.