Data protection in AWS IoT Core - AWS IoT Core
Data encryption in AWS IoT

Data protection in AWS IoT Core

The AWS shared responsibility model applies to data protection in AWS IoT Core. 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 AWS IoT 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.

For more information about data protection, see the AWS Shared Responsibility Model and GDPR blog post on the AWS Security Blog.

AWS IoT devices gather data, perform some manipulation on that data, and then send that data to another web service. You might choose to store some data on your device for a short period of time. You're responsible for providing any data protection on that data at rest. When your device sends data to AWS IoT, it does so over a TLS connection as discussed later in this section. AWS IoT devices can send data to any AWS service. For more information about each service's data security, see the documentation for that service. AWS IoT can be configured to write logs to CloudWatch Logs and log AWS IoT API calls to AWS CloudTrail. For more information about data security for these services, see Authentication and Access Control for Amazon CloudWatch and Encrypting CloudTrail Log Files with AWS KMS-Managed Keys.

Data encryption in AWS IoT

By default, all AWS IoT data in transit and at rest is encrypted. Data in transit is encrypted using TLS, and data at rest is encrypted using AWS owned keys. AWS IoT does not currently support customer-managed AWS KMS keys (KMS keys) from AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS); however, Device Advisor and AWS IoT Wireless use only an AWS owned key to encrypt customer data.